PicoBlog

Myles here. With Showtime’s Yellowjackets emerging one of 2021/22’s breakout hits, and rife for speculation and discussion, it’s likely that many of us will be catching up on or revisiting Season 1 ahead of its return in late March. Accordingly, as its debut just preceded Episodic Medium’s arrival, Ben Rosenstock (who covered The White Lotus for us in the fall) will be covering the 10-episode season in the months leading up to Season 2. As always, the first review is free, but additional reviews and commenting privileges will be available exclusively to paid subscribers.

Note: The reviews will be written with no spoilers for upcoming episodes, but I’ve given Ben a “Spoiler Observations” space at review’s end if there’s something he wants to discuss, and if there’s something you want to get into in the comments just use spoiler warnings carefully and take it to the Substack App chat if you want to discuss S2.

A girl runs barefoot through the snowy forest, past trees marked with strange symbols. We don’t see her face, but we watch as she stumbles right into a trap, impaled by stakes and left to be collected. When we later see the people who were chasing her—who are now hanging her and bleeding her out before roasting her to be eaten by other girls around her same age—we don’t see most of their faces, either. We see the animal skins with which they drape themselves, signs of how long they’ve been living out here in the wilderness. We know there are at least seven of them. And we know there’s a queen: one young woman presiding over the feast, a pair of antlers sitting on her head. There’s always a queen.

That’s part of the premise of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s buzzy cannibalism drama that premiered in 2021. Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson envisioned the series as a “metaphor for teenage hierarchy,” and that’s all there from the first episode. From the title, even; “Yellowjackets” refers most obviously to the team at the center of the story, but it also has the (almost as obvious) significance of wasps in a hive, working in service to one queen.

The theme of power crops up in all three timelines, each of which the pilot establishes efficiently and compellingly. The meat of the story takes place in 1996, when an undefeated high school varsity soccer team gets stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash on their way to nationals. But there are almost as many scenes set in 2021, 25 years later, following (so far) four of the women who survived their time in the woods. Then, of course, there are the brief glimpses of a third timeline between the two, an indeterminate point at which the stranded Yellowjackets seem to be eating each other to survive.

Based on this first episode, the most obvious TV reference point for me is Lost, which perfected the chaos and terror of a plane crash in its first episode while also weaving in flashbacks and establishing a number of fascinating mysteries on both a plot and character level. This one accomplishes much of the same, though the key difference is that we don’t see the plane crash until the very end. By that point, we’ve already spent time with many of these people in both main timelines. We know what they were like in the immediate leadup to the crash, and we’ve learned about the women they would become after they were finally rescued.

That ominous middle window is the hook, the main reason to keep watching this early on. What happened that forced those girls into cannibalism? Are we seeing the first time they ever did it, or have the girls gone through this hunting routine already? Who is the Antler Queen who decides when the meal begins? Who is getting eaten? Those mysteries could have clues in either timeline, which makes both feel vital, each part of a decades-long story.

There is the sense that this first episode is a prelude—it almost feels like the first half of a two-hour pilot, with no time to actually witness the wilderness that will become the Yellowjackets’ home. But it’s important that we get to see how they function in their element, before their lives are turned upside-down. And the episode makes everyone pretty distinct early on, sketching in some of the central team dynamics. The standouts so far are Jackie Taylor (Ella Purnell), the captain keeping the team cohesive, focused, and positive; Shauna Shipman (an expressive Sophie Nélisse), the introverted best friend living in Jackie’s shadow; Taissa Turner (Jasmin Savoy Brown), a future politician laser-focused on accomplishing whatever goal she sets her mind to; Natalie Scatorccio (Sophie Thatcher), whose love of partying gets her the “burnout” label; and Misty Quigley (Sammi Hanratty), the overexcited equipment manager with something off about her.

There are potential sources of tension already among everyone there, but off the bat, the most interesting relationship is the one between Jackie and Shauna. Shauna is the type who finds herself fading into the background a lot, but that’s especially true around the sentient ray of light that is Jackie—the golden girl, the beautiful and effortlessly popular queen bee who seems to have everything handed to her. Getting bossed around by her friend clearly has an effect on Shauna—as does seeing how easily Jackie attracts love and attention. In one of the most beautiful and complicated moments of the episode, she watches Jackie walk away from the car in slow motion and turn to look back at her with a bright smile. She can’t help smiling back, too, warmed by her friend’s sincere gratitude toward her. But even in that moment, Shauna knows she’s about to betray her by hooking up with her boyfriend. In that endless moment of two best friends exchanging a glance, there’s love, but also resentment.

The pilot features plenty of levity, but it’s that focus on the dark subconscious that most interests me here. Maybe Taissa didn’t consciously mean to break poor freshman Allie’s leg to keep her out of nationals, but part of her wanted to, so it happened. That horrifying image of Allie’s leg bone protruding from her skin is a reminder that violent impulses exist long before whatever trauma response leads them to come out; we’re not even in the wilderness yet, and these teen girls are already using brute force to get the outcomes they desire. It’s also a sign that Yellowjackets won’t be pulling any punches with its graphic violence.

There might be less of that in the 2021 scenes, but there’s tension there, too, with the fake reporter Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma)’s questions about the crash bringing back a whole avalanche of traumatic memories for Shauna (Melanie Lynskey). We see Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Nat (Juliette Lewis), and Misty (Christina Ricci) in 2021, immediately confirming that at least those four survived, but Shauna remains our main point of view. You get the sense that whatever happened to Jackie, her absence is significant; without her, Shauna seems lonely and unmoored, trapped in her life as a stay-at-home mom and maybe even itching for a taste of the adventure and bloodshed she spent so long trying to escape.

These future scenes have the potential to distract from the main drama of what happened in the wilderness, especially early on, when answers are so difficult to come by. It’s hard to know what to make of Nat following Misty with a rifle she procured from a locked-up Porsche, for example, even if it’s a tantalizing moment. But it’s hard to argue with the glimpses we do get into these women’s lives, especially the delicious black humor of Misty switching abruptly from perky to vindictive to threaten a geriatric patient. And it says a lot that despite all the thrills and surprises of this pilot, the reveal that Jackie’s high school sweetheart Jeff is present-day Shauna’s husband might’ve elicited the biggest gasp from me.

Only one episode into the show, there’s ample reason to keep watching. I’m excited to get to the cannibalism, of course, but I’m also just compelled by these characters, and the realistic tensions that have already developed among them. While we mostly only understand these people in the context of their archetypes so far, there’s already a refreshing depth to the dialogue, a willingness to interrogate subconscious impulses and spotlight different types of violence. And it’s only the beginning.

• So, as Myles noted above, we want these reviews to be accessible to both new Yellowjackets viewers and anybody who wants to refamiliarize themselves with season one in the leadup to season two in March (which I’ll also be covering). As a result, reviews won’t discuss plot points from any episodes later than a given week’s episode. But I’ll have a “Spoiler observations” section at the very bottom, so definitely steer clear of that if you’re new to the show. And please label your own comments with a big ol’ spoiler warning if you want to discuss later episodes. Thanks!

• I should mention that this pilot was directed by Karyn Kusama, who explored similar thematic and tonal ground with Jennifer’s Body.

• I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the soundtrack full of ’90s gems, my favorite being Liz Phair’s “Supernova.”

• Adult Taissa saying she wants to focus on the future instead of the past is an interesting mix of the political and the personal. It would destroy “the queer Kamala”’s burgeoning career if the truth came out, whatever it is, but I get the feeling she also wants to pretend it didn’t happen because it’s too difficult to face herself.

• A great Lynskey line reading: “Aw, Linda. You dumb bitch.”

• We don’t hear too much from Lottie (Courtney Eaton) yet, but we briefly see her packing pills for the flight, which surely can’t last her long, whatever their use.

• Also not much from Laura Lee (Jane Widdop), who so far seems like a Christian girl stereotype, albeit an endearing one.

[Reminder, don’t read if you haven’t seen the entire season. Like, I’m not even reading them, because I’ll be watching on some plane trips over the next week or so.—MM]

• Given the nature of how many questions remain unanswered at the end of season one, I’m honestly not sure I’ll end up using this section very often. But for me the main source of dramatic irony in re-watching this premiere came from knowing who dies in the finale. One interesting line from Shauna that didn’t stick out to me on the first watch: “I liked the saints. They were all so tragic.”

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