The focus turns to Taissa as Yellowjackets layers in more mysteries
Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis continue to have delightfully unhinged odd-couple chemistry in “The Dollhouse”
TV Reviews Yellowjackets
So much of Yellowjackets seemed set to deal with trauma, the ongoing nightmare that the girls, now women, are still trapped in, even decades after the crash. But more the third episode, “Welcome To The Dollhouse” introduces us to the trauma they entered the woods with—in Taissa’s case, it’s something terrible that seems to have been haunting every stage of her life.
The episode starts, rather sweetly, with a burial. The devastated girls gather ’round their dead teammates’ graves. They hold hands, and search for nice things to say about them all, lamenting that they didn’t know them better or have more profound things to say. It’s been three days now since the crash and hopes for rescue are beginning to wane. Misty, having doomed them all last episode by destroying the rescue transmitter, is fixated on the coach’s recovery, feeding him what she can while his bloody stump causes him agony.
Things begin to look up when Taissa, returning from a hike, spots a lake. Jackie doesn’t want them to leave the crash site but gets outvoted. The factions are beginning to form: We know that one girl (probably a girl, technically could be the coach or Travis) will end up behind the horns and veil so Jackie and Taissa now seem like likely candidates.
Down at the lake, the girls have a moment of pure joy frolicking in the water. It’s hard to believe they’ll soon resort to hunting each other, but darkness creeps in the edges. They discover an abandoned cabin in wilderness that looks straight out of The Evil Dead. Plethora of blankets aside, it’s no great sanctuary—the tinned food is rotten, the floorboards creak, and, as poor Lottie discovers, there is a desiccated corpse in the attic. Bringing in the cabin in the woods is an enjoyable little reframing of the narrative; up until this point, viewers may have assumed the show would be hunting a very human type of monster.
This is coming back again in the present day with son Sammy, who in three episodes has gone from sweet to full Damian. He attacks other kids and stares his mother down with all the power of Lucifer but seems to have relaxed by bed-time. He asks his mother, “Why don’t people like you?” and tells her “you’re not the bad one.” When asked “Is someone else the bad one?,” he shakes his head. Are there two Taissas? Is this a possession by something in the woods he’s talking about? I don’t know but I want answers soon. For all that Yellowjackets is setting up so many mysteries, I hope the show doesn’t resort to a single exposition dump to explain everything in the final episode. It bodes well that the journalist storyline comes to a conclusion, where it is revealed she has been hired by Taissa to try and get information out of the others, checking to see if anything nasty could be leaked during the election run.
We’ve also got new questions surrounding Shauna, Misty, and Natalie in the present. Least compelling is Shauna, who does some seriously low-skill stalking to find out where Jeff is going and with whom. She follows him to a hotel but doesn’t manage to convince the receptionist to give her the room number. Then, out of nowhere swoops in Adam, the world’s most suspicious man, to buy her a martini which, as martinis so often do, leads to them getting a hotel room together and start the full-blown-affair portion of their relationship.
Far more exciting are Nat and Misty’s antics, with Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis’ continuing to have delightfully unhinged odd-couple chemistry. They further their quest to find Travis, who has changed his name and is living in the middle of nowhere. When the ladies break in, they find nothing but a small pay stub and an expensive bottle of booze. Before they can investigate further, a high-strung cop enters, pointing a gun, and arrests them for breaking and entering.
Thankfully, as always, Missy is good in a crisis and has been cat-fishing Nat’s old pal Detective Kevin just in case he came in handy. It’s a little convenient, but Ricci going about her perky busy body antics continues to be sublime. Sadly, when they get back to Travis, they find him hanging from his neck, long dead. It seems the expensive booze was a makeshift final meal. It’s a beautiful bit of acting from Lewis as the devastated Nat confronts the reality that Travis is dead, made all the sadder by the flashbacks where you see their bond being formed. Misty finds a final note from Travis with a cryptic “Nat was right”—though right about what exactly can just be added to the long list of unsolved mysteries we are racking up.
Stray Observations
- They come across a bear carcass in the woods that’s had its sides ripped out. When asked how this can happen the coach does some hardcore foreshadowing and puts it down to wolves saying “wolves can kill anything if that pack is big enough.”
- I very much enjoyed Misty is telling Natalie about the guys she unsuccessfully dates, including one who asked for her socks and still never called.
- Is there anyone sadder than the poor coach who’s stump wont stop attracting flies and Misty. When he cried out “I cant just be like this now. Why couldn’t I have just died?” it might be the darkest thing said in a very crowded field of dark things.
- Not looking forward to the plot twist that Jeff isn’t really having an affair.
- We also learn that Taissa has been paying for Misty’s rehab. Misty seems to have gone to rehab a lot. How rich is Taissa supposed to be?
62 Comments
This show is so good and so stressful and I lowkey wish I’d just waited to binge all five seasons at once.
Oh I know, and kind of despair that they have five seasons planned. It’s a tad presumptuous on their part, so we must help them by watching this show!!
It is on Showtime where they hardly cancel anything. Except “On Becoming A God In Central Florida”, goddamit. But five seasons? I dunno, I don’t see how they can keep up the pace and don’t want to see this devolve into a soap opera to fill time.
Are you familiar with Arrow, and that fucking island they kept flashing back to?Yeah, even 2 seasons might be too much.
I wonder how many seasons have already been filmed? Maybe they are filming all five in quick succession?
What cable drama has the budget/clout to ensure Kirsten Dunst’s availability to shoot multiple episodes, especially when she’s in every scene? Let alone one on Showtime?The pandemic may have put the final nail in the coffin, but there’s no way Becoming a God ever made it past Season 2.
I believe she produced and developed that series, so I’m sure she wanted to continue.
Movie stars found clearing enough time to anchor a show difficult enough before COVID-19.It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that her plan for this show was to revitalize her career as an A-list movie actress. And with her role in Power of the Dog, she may well have achieved that (although I was surprised not to see more projects in production on IMDB).
Dunst beats to her own drum it seems, and looking at her house in architectural digests recent issue, it looks like she’d never have to work again if she didn’t want to.
Given her history, that’s likely been the case for a while. But yeah, that couple is not hurting for cash.
Just a little correction: you meant to say Nat and not Misty in your last Stray Observation. Also, you missed one, Taissa seems to have inherited her grandma’s awful vision (she saw it in the mirror as a child, later heard it in the forest as a teen). If Sammy were conceived through her and not adopted, whatever this is–supernatural or mental illness–could prove to be hereditary. Lastly, Adam is totally Javi all grown up being a creep.
i think javi being adam would be too obvious but who knows–
I’ve seen “Adam is imaginary” and “Adam is Javi all grown up” and I’m gonna propose that maybe it’s both? She ate him, maybe killed him and is now imagining him grown up out of guilt.
we finally got opening titles.
this was my least liked episode so far but the bar is high. i really hate the creepy child trope and i’m turned off by the supernatural elements if there are any.christina ricci as misty is one of my favorite parts about the show.
ha. ha. caligula hasn’t learned how to use the phone yet.so the show was made with 5 seasons in mind and i learned that we won’t even hit winter by the end of this season. also ella purnell said basically there is no adult jackie this season.jackie’s leg not looking good…
highly unlikely but it’ll be a letdown if adam is just an affair. he’s annoying so that storyline better turn out to be fun.
we finally got opening titles.Thank you for pointing this out, because I spent the entire credits sequence wondering how I could have possibly overlooked opening titles that creepy/good.
there’s a whole right leg theory going on. the symbol indicates someone with one leg, and there’s been lots of storylines around missing/injured right legs.
yeah i lurked on reddit. i don’t think you can lose a limb from a poison ivy rash. it seems you can die from a bad untreated fever with your immune system trying to fight it off. who knows though because at any moment misty could just do a drive by axe amputation while jackie’s asleep lol.
so the show was made with 5 seasons in mind FFS, after that great pilot this is so disappointing to hear. Maybe the writers will surprise me and find a way to drag this out and keep my attention but I am not optimistic; Orange is the New Black keeps coming to mind (also Dexter, Homeland, etc.; Showtime seems all too happy to flog a good idea to death). There is absolutely nothing wrong with one or maybe two seasons of a concise, compelling story (other than the fact that you don’t make as much on ad revenues from 2 seasons as you do from 5 even if 3-5 are crap).
At least they have an end game in mind, but yeah I really don’t think I want to watch this for five seasons. I really do just want some one and done season shows because a movie isn’t long enough but stretching things out for years rarely works. I also especially hate shows winning awards for “limited series” and then going on for several years.
The difference with those other shows is they completed arcs every season and eventually ran out of compelling stories. This looks to be one continuous serial from start to finish.
they did complete arcs every season but lately it feels like the creators of movies and TV series feel the need to drag everything out whether you want it or not (and I know their defense of “I want to tell a full, complete story to share my vision” is code for “I got a sweet bonus for creating the last 3 seasons no matter how much they may suck”). Ultimately I know I don’t *have* to watch any of this but I want to see a resolution, and in the case of Yellowjackets, knowing a resolution is 5 years away, ugh. I hate-watched ER every year after Mark Greene died and I’m pretty sure if I kept up with YJ I’d probably end up hate-watching it as well (much the same as I’ve heard with viewers of the Walking Dead).
Can you add ‘Spoilers’ as you reveal some things that we shouldn’t know yet? It would be respectful.
Okay so a cabin in the woods. Right away, there’s gotta be a road or at least a trail leading from it to… out of the woods. Like literally how else would whoever built have… built it? And clearly made trips to “town” for supplies. I can suspend my disbelief for a lot here, but not that. Either this gets brought up soon or we jumped the shark already.So the gramma sawr some creepy dude with no eyes. Didn’t creepy kid last week say he put those creepy pictures up so the lady in the tree couldn’t SEE him? And all those pictures had a focus on eyes. Hell one picture was nothing but eyes. So maybe we are dealing with something supernatural? not sure how I feel about that. Plus there’s the random rune/symbol thing that was carved into random trees in the woods. And the attic floor. Anyway, have fun in your creepy cabin, kids
Yes I was going to mention the cabin means there’s a road and a town nearby. I hope that’s addressed quickly too.
Nope! Discovered a cabin while hiking when I was a kid; there was absolutely no driveway…granted, a seasoned hiker could find the road without much trouble, but you’d have to know the lay of the land.It was immaculate; like nobody had lived there in 40 years, but aside from the dust, the place was super-clean. Ended-up spending Halloween night there with my sister and a few friends; look back, it’s really surprising that the owner didn’t randomly wander-in and shoot the trespassers squatting on his property.
I’m starting to think it’s going to be a “The Most Dangerous Game”-type situation. As in, the island is a privately owned game reserve where humans have been hunted before. It’s hard to tell how long the cabin has been abandoned—the porn magazine looked like it might be from the ‘70s, and the plane crashed in the mid ‘90s, so maybe 20 years? In all that time, no one has reported the mummy in the attic missing. He could be the owner, he could be human prey/a hunting buddy/both who turned the tide on the actual owner.Either way, anyone knows what happened to him has significant resources a lot of incentive to cover his death/absence up. They may also control whatever portion of coast it’s easiest to access the island from.
If it’s a private unpaved road that only leads to the cabin, and the cabin was abandoned and nobody has been there since the 70s, it’s possible it’s become grown over.
Not really, I live in Kentucky and there are off grid hunting cabins in the Appalachian mountains. A person just goes to the woods off trail and brings supplies over the course of a couple years and uses the trees as lumber, etc.
Being from Northern Ontario, where this plane crashes, I can tell you there are many “camps” that would not be accessible by roads, only ATV or snowmobile or even fly-in with a lake landing. So this plot line doesn’t require suspending any belief, a completely remote camp is something many up North see as desirable.
I can understand the cabin, but the lake stretches credulity for me a bit. Because it is one thing to be in the woods when rescuers are searching for you. It is notoriously difficult to spot people through the dense foliage. But a lake? That’s a big wide open space, with a beach from which one could make a signal. Your odds are far better of being spotted, of their being puddle jumpers that will fly over.
Some cabins are only accessible by air travel, bush plane with floats landing at the lake
Plus why go up to your cabin’s attic to off yourself? Purely so the show could have that reveal at the end.
Oh, I got the sense from the carving in the floor that whoever died in the attic had been killed by someone else, so there’s a strong possibility the killer is still on the island.
Interesting, he had the rifle in his hand with the butt down and the barrel up towards the skull, I thought. But I could be wrong. Also could be that he(?) killed himself because who or whatever was outside the door.
I mean, scenes can be staged. I definitely think it ties into a larger mystery somehow or another.
so not true… people build cabins with no access all the time. some are only accessible with snowmobiles, or motorcycles. Upstate NY those are scattered throughout the Appalachia and Catskills.
nah there’s a lot of homes that are legit in the middle of nowhere where I am from in Canada, some are only accessible by boat and lots are never touched again once the original owner dies. People have gone missing for weeks in the woods where I’m from in Canada too, and that’s just them roaming off a main road from a community. It would be very difficult to find a handful of people up north in the woods without any indicator where they may have landed.
That’s a fair conclusion, except fly-in cabins are relatively common in Canada. The cabin is right beside a lake, meaning it’s well-accessible by float plane
(That said, I’m still gobsmacked that they a) survived 19 months and b) no one found them)
I think Yellowjackets has no shark to jump. And what puzzles me still is the tone. It isn’t really a nostalgic 90s trip, despite the fantastic music licensing budget. Going full genre would cover-up the ridiculous premise. But it still doesn’t strike me as a black comedy or a horror series. It seems to be playing this story straight. As if, sure, a jet airliner would disappear from Winnipeg or Calgary air traffic control, be lost forever like Malaysia 370, and the survivors’ secrets would remain secrets as we entered the smartphone and social media era. I mean, the ‘cannibal’ label is being used against Taissa in her re-election campaign. So does the world really still not know what happened in the Canadian Rockies in 1996-98? The fallout of losing a plane that big and not knowing about the survivors would be a massive scandal in both the US and Canada. But the show plays that all straight. This is a different universe. There is no shark to jump. During this series I have thought about Anne Hjelle, the fantastic Minnesota native and former marine who survived a mountain lion attack in Los Angeles. She went on to write a book, give paid speeches, and still makes media appearances two decades later. I myself am a minor 9/11 survivor, and i still get the occasional invite to appear in a documentary or news show. But this show expects us to believe that Shauna continued to live a quiet life, secrets intact?
I’m not looking forward to Jeff being revealed not having an affair. And I’m not looking forward to Shauna giving birth in the Rockies and the girls eating the baby.
I liked the cross-cutting between Taissa walking towards the horror at different ages. Her kid being horror movie weird still continues to be done poorly. If tonight’s ep introduced the “supernatural element” the creators talked about, I hope they know what they’re doing as we don’t really need it for a harrowing Lord of the Flies tale. One can find precedent in Lost but I liked how it did it. We’ll see.
Yes, I think it’s clever how the girls have layers of trauma. The plane crash is unimaginable, but they also are carrying the trauma most of us carry. It’s a reminder that we often try and triage trauma, but sometimes it all exists on multitudes.
That whole big build up to the attic of the cabin was a bit over-dramatic. There’s been people horribly dying all around, an old dusty skeleton isn’t that shocking.
Not to mention that those girls scoured the cabin looking for food and supplies, and confirming that there was nobody/nothing to stop them from sleeping in there safely. I refuse to believe that nobody went up to the attic until the middle of the night.
You mean the scared, terrified schizophrenic wouldn’t voluntarily climb a creepy attic staircase in the middle of the night? Surely you jest!
To be honest, I was more excited for them because HEY! They found a gun! To defend themselves! And hunt for food!Oh right, skeletor is there too but pfft. Just bury him and move on.
“We also learn that Taissa has been paying for Misty’s rehab. Misty seems to have gone to rehab a lot. How rich is Taissa supposed to be…”You meant Nat, right? Misty is crazy but I don’t remember her being an addict. Nat seems to have gone to a lot of rehab…
Since the first episode I have wondered what the rest of the world thinks happened to them. It was obviously a big story at the time and interest would have been revived 19 months later when they were found. It makes sense that a lot of people would assume that at some point they resorted to cannibalism (Alive had just come out a few years earlier) but there’s no way someone would have just asked any of the survivors that.So is it just one of those things where people all assume these girls eventually ate each other but everyone is too polite to say it? I assume there was some sort of statement put out after they all came back, did people just not believe it?
I imagine the reddit theories discussing the potential of cannibalism is very heated.
I have a theory that Adam is imaginary:
He comes out when Shauna is stressed.
He does not seem to interact with anyone else.
It explains why he “gets her” so perfectly.
Ooooh. I like this theory.
I am on board with that theory! It sounds plausable… but also I need anything to make his character believable.
That is interesting. Except, wasn’t her car fixed? I never could catch a good glimpse of it.
So just want to tally the mysteries so far:1. Who sent the postcards?2. Who killed Travis?3. Who carved the symbol in the tree?4. What is the origin of the cabin/symbol?5. Whose the dead person in the attic? 6. Who shinned the light over the hill?7. Is someone stalking Sammy? Or is someone haunting Sammy? And what does Sammy mean by I know you’re not the bad one? And who broke the doll? 8. What are the pills? And what will happen when they run out?9. Which girl died in the pilot? Why does she now wear Jackie’s necklace?10. How many survivors were there? 11. Does anyone currently know that Misty broke the flight recorder?12. How did they end up getting rescued? 13. Is there more to Adam then what he lets on?
8. The pills are an antipsychotic commonly prescribed for schizophrenia. (Googled name on label.)13. Undoubtedly.
5. My guess, but who knows with five seasons, is that the suicide skeleton isn’t relevant. It’s just a person who owned a cabin and wanted to commit suicide alone, and the girls just stumbled onto their cabin. Maybe s/he haunts them but probably not relevant to the story. Maybe.6. No one shined a light, it was the sun reflecting on the glass window in the attic.9. The girl who died was wearing a necklace? I didn’t see that and they didn’t show a close up of their face, so I’m confused by this one.You forgot one. 14. Why did the plane crash?
9. In the pilot’s opening scene, after they show her body in the pit, they cut to a closeup of her neck and hair, and you can see the heart necklace around her neck.
Jackie gave Shauna her heart necklace. Was it similar? The same?
14. Yes, indeed. There has to be a non accidental reason for that I’d say based on the symbol business.
I think it’s gonna be Shaina under the veil and horns
There were a few errors in this review. 1) It’s Misty, not Missy.
2) Kevyn, not Kevin.
3) Taissa paid for Nat’s rehab, not Misty’s.
I think Taissa was paying for Nat’s rehab, not Misty, right?
Shauna and the fantastically sketchy Adam exchanging the lines from Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night about being careful who you pretend to be was fantastic & I wonder if it applies to both of them or one more than the other. Taissa paying the fake journalist to rattle the survivor’s cages & see if they would rat on her is so very fucking stupid. But we have seen that she is very assured in her decisions regardless of if they are actually any good or not. Whoever had the idea of casting Christina Ricci & Juliette Lewis as those characters and then teaming them up, just, thank you