Yellowjackets recap: Happy hunger games
A not-so-friendly competition between Nat and Lottie divides the survivors as the wilderness’ influence deepens on their adult counterparts
TV Reviews Akilah Nia Sondaya
If Yellowjackets’ teen timeline refutes one classically-held ism, it has to be “cleanliness is closest to godliness.” As the months in the wilderness drag on, the laundry list of unmentionable acts the survivors are bonded over keeps getting longer; in short, they’ve never been more desperate for a miracle. In this world, clean hands don’t get you closer to devout spirituality and the blessings that may or may not come with it—starvation does.
At the top of the episode, we slowly regain consciousness with both teenaged and adult Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress, respectively), entering both scenes as if awakening from a dream and giving the viewer a new angle into her fractured psyche. Usually, we’re asked to discern how and when “the bad one” is maneuvering Tai’s body; this time, we’re thrust into her perspective, coming to groggy and beleaguered only to realize blurry visions of being outside her body weren’t her unconscious imagination; her astral proclivity has gotten the best of her again. As an adult, Tai awakens at the wheel of her car, pulled over on the side of a rural road with an empty gas tank and Jessica Roberts’ files on the Yellowjackets in the passenger seat. As a teen, she wakes up to the sound of an awestruck Van’s voice calling her name, pointing out to her that yet again she led them to a tree engraved with a symbol. Frightened and insistent she doesn’t know anything about it, Tai lays down the law when Van (Liv Hewson) asks her to just tell Lottie (Courtney Eaton)—now fully cemented as the group’s unofficial high priestess—what’s going on: “It’s none of her fucking business.”
Unfortunately for Tai, her aversion to Lottie’s eerie abilities (and her own) places her squarely on one side of a brewing war between the hungry, haggard survivors. On one hand, there’s the camp that believes in Lottie’s blood magic and wants to use it to their benefit: Misty (Samantha Hanratty), Akilah (Nia Sondaya), Travis (Kevin Alves), Van, and—most zealously of them all—Mari (Alexa Barajas). Months in the wilderness spent listening to incessant dripping from the cabin attic that only she seems to be able to hear have hardened Mari’s deadpan feistiness into something more animalistic and self-preserving. When Coach Ben (Steven Kreuger) asks if she would eat him like they ate Jackie when Mari accuses Ben of stealing bear meat on the grounds of believing he’s “so much better” than the rest of them, Mari doesn’t say no (which, at this point pretty much means yes).
In the other camp, there’s the majority of the core four: Shauna, Tai, Nat, and an increasingly weak Coach Ben. As we’ve seen before, Nat’s at odds with Lottie for more than a few reasons, from jealousy surrounding Travis to genuine fear of Lottie’s abilities. The opposing viewpoints bubble over into some real-life ire when Mari opines that Nat’s the reason they still don’t have any food—for months they’ve been eating starling soup from the birds that dropped dead onto the roof, which Mari steadfastly asserts Lottie told them to do. In Mari’s mind, it’s Lottie, not Nat, who is responsible for keeping them alive. Outraged, Nat proposes a contest: both she and Lottie go out for the day and whoever comes back with an edible prize first wins. Misty eagerly steps in to set the rules: leave any game you find right where it is, return to home base for assistance, and be back by sundown. If that latter clause isn’t followed, Misty assures the group will come searching for anyone who needs help. With that, they off, Nat slinging the gun and Lottie armed with just a knife, both of them sporting the straps fashioned out of seatbelts they’ve long since fashioned into jacket straps, an echo of the perceived safety they never really had in the first place. Let Yellowjackets’ own version of the hunger games begin.
As adults, Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Nat (Juliette Lewis) aren’t at war with each other anymore; within themselves, each woman has bigger fish to fry. Nat, who is finding herself more and more down to clown with Lottie’s way of life, goes on an off-commune expedition with Lisa (Nicole Maines)—who she stabbed just a few episodes earlier—and ends up meeting Lisa’s disapproving mother, whose protestations towards Lisa’s way of life leave Nat surprisingly defensive of alternative healing, even forgoing a whiskey shot at the bar while chatting about suicidal ideation later that night. Meanwhile, Lottie is desperately seeking traditional medicine and begs her longtime therapist for a higher dose of her medication to quell her visions. “It keeps happening, and it needs to stop…they need to stop,” Lottie shares. “The last time, it became something different. It can’t happen again.” That “something different” is left unexpanded upon, hanging in the air like the series premiere’s ill-fated pit girl.
When her therapist questions what Lottie believes the visions might mean, Lottie is taken aback: “Nothing, because they’re not real.” So terrified of her own mind she’s rejecting the very visions that guided her moral compass through more than a year of wilderness survival and into a life dedicated to imbuing those gifts in others, Lottie has never seemed more vulnerable. Towards the end of the episode, after a persistent vision of a queen of hearts card with her eyes scratched out sends Lottie spiraling (Reddit detectives, your moment is nigh), she slices her hand to spill blood on a private commune altar, begging to whatever out there might hear her: “Can this just be enough? Please?” Beyond the spiritual connotations of the sequence, the question feels poignantly prescriptive. How much will it take for Lottie to free herself—whether through empathy, therapy, or a whole lot of bloodletting—from what happened to her as a girl?
Speaking of that: The competition for game goes about as well as could be expected. At first, Nat’s discovery of a dead moose frozen in ice at the center of the lake (the same animal Nat hallucinated last time she visited the crash site) suggests she’s clinched a win. But the survivors struggle to pull out the cumbersome corpse with ropes. When they lose their grip, they lose the animal (which Nat had hoped would feed them until spring) to the depths of the lake. Meanwhile, Lottie’s journey takes her to a considerably less earthly place. After encountering a snow-covered altar ostensibly fashioned by dead cabin guy, Lottie wanders into a clearing that reveals his plane, the same one that exploded with Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) inside during her faithful and fatal season one attempt to save the team. When Lottie looks inside, Laura’s bear Leonard sits intact on the seat; her sparkling gold cross necklace is there, too. By the time Lottie’s hallucination leads into an astral-plane mall food court, Laura Lee steps in, telling Lottie if she doesn’t get warm soon she’ll die. Unlike Jackie (Ella Purnell), Lottie has an irrefutable higher power on her side, keeping her alive even in the most hypothermic moments. The questions are, at what cost— and why?
Thankfully, episode four isn’t all failure and frostbite. Consistently proving to be a light and buoyant note in both timelines, Misty continues to experience two kinds of love: a blossoming bestie-ship with fellow crash survivor and musical theater aficionado Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman), and a tiptoeing romance with her eager partner in citizen detective work Walter (Elijah Wood). Episode four finds Walter and Misty fumbling through a scenario worthy of any great rom-com: an impromptu road trip (set to the Evita soundtrack, Misty’s choice) that turns into an even-more-impromptu overnight. On the hunt for the commune where Lottie’s “intentional community” has swept Nat off to, Walter suggests they share a room nearby before Misty hedges. After they retire to their separate suites, a sweet split-screen montage demonstrates just how alike the duo are, each plastic-bagging the TV remote to avoid leaving fingerprints and falling asleep on their side to the soothing sounds of “Sleep Kitty” and “Birds of the Tropics” respectively. For better or worse, Misty truly seems to have found some sort of other half. Walter revealing that he’s a secret multi-millionaire thanks to a negligent scaffolding company, a wayward ton of bricks that landed on his head, and a very successful lawsuit, certainly doesn’t hurt either.
Although they don’t arrive until the end, this episode of Yellowjackets is defined by two major returns, both of which center around Taissa and the still-nebulous workings of her dead-eyed alter ego. As a teen, while searching for another symbol-engraved tree to complete a pattern Van is convinced other Taissa has been spelling out in her sleep, they find none other than Javi (Luciano Leroux) racing through the woods. God only knows how or why he survived out there (and what helped him do so), and the once-shy boy now has a decidedly sullen, silent air about him.
The way Nat shies away from the group as they welcome him back in—alive and intact, just as Lottie predicted—all but puts the nails in the coffin for her and Travis’ increasingly at-odds relationship. Whether or not it will come to light that she forged the bloody, torn trousers of Javi’s she “found” during a hunt, Nat’s decisions—as benevolent as they are self-interested—seem primed to bite her in the ass. Despite her sharp tongue and airs of orneriness, Nat has always displayed a sense of team spirit so profoundly ingrained she wishes a frostbitten Lottie “good game” after both of them nearly die on the hunt for food.
As an adult, however, the return is one Taissa makes on her own, although not consciously at first. After ditching her car and hitching a ride with a friendly trucker who voted for her in the election, Taissa arrives at a dusty small-town video store sporting a rainbow flag out front. When Tai walks in the door, there she is at the counter, as nonchalant as ever, scars faded into the lines of age on her face: Van (Lauren Ambrose). Since news of Ambrose’s casting confirmed Van as a survivor back in August 2022, a reunion for her and Tai has been inevitable—that Tai herself sought out the one person who seemed willing and able to piece together the fragments of her psyche makes the moment all the more affecting. Van loved Tai despite and because of the things she keeps closest to her chest, so close they can barely even exist on the same plane. It’s no wonder, then, that teetering over an abyss, Tai and her subconscious finally agreed on something: getting in that car and finding Van.
Stray observations
- Van’s face has healed incredibly well. The girls don’t seem to be patting themselves on the back enough for this!
- Hello, a brand new Alanis Morrissette cover of the series’ theme song! Wouldn’t it be fabulous if they found different artists from the era to put their own spin on the credits?
- The only thing better than a sweet new little mouse friend for Akilah is her finally getting even the slightest character arc of her own.
- Although this was a decidedly Shauna-light episode, adult Shauna struggling to be honest with Callie about her past (and the circumstances of Adam’s death) has to be a series-best moment between the two. Loving your mother and learning to see her as a complex, imperfect person is a real knifes edge, and the more Callie takes on secrets of her own, the more she seems both opposed to her mom’s choices and uncomfortably understanding of them. All I know is after this episode, I needed to call my mom.
- The way the girls use seat belts from the plane to hold together their makeshift jackets is such an incisive costuming choice. It speaks to the fact that the girls are still in many ways trapped in that moment of trauma when the plane went down, the exact point that split their lives into two unique timelines, but are also reforming the last environment where they felt some sense of safety–real or perceived–into something that can suit them. They’re building their own safety nets; they have no choice.
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1. WOW. I thought for sure that kid was dead.2. I love Lauren Ambrose, so happy she’s here, great casting for adult Van.
Seems likely with Lauren Ambrose they added an actress who is up to the very high standard of the adult actresses on this show. Excited to see her in the mix as Van … though I think she needs to be extremely cautious about potentially getting back together with Tai. I assume they broke for a reason
That slow, subtle, shifting expression on adult Van’s face as she realized who she was looking at… that made this episode for me.
well id assume either:1. Something fucked up happens between them before they get rescued2. The trauma and memories were too much and they each wanted to go on with their lives
Oh, absolutely, but at this point I’m actually more worried for Tai. Past-Van is getting a bit too cosy with Other-Tai for my taste, I see a potential love triangle with the split personalities … or maybe not a love triangle exactly, but Van does seem a bit too keen on instrumentalizing Tai’s potentially supernatural affliction. “Helping her piece together the fragments of her psyche” is one interpretation, but from what we’ve seen so far past Tai is not at all comfortable with Van’s increasing interest in Other-Tai and she clearly didn’t want Van to announce her special skills to the group. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with the supernatural, maybe quite plausibly fearing that once she gives in to that impulse, other Tai will take over for good. Van, at this point however is no longer prioritizing Tai’s feelings on the matter.
They’re obviously headed towards a pretty severe ideological split, with Van being team magic, and Tai being team reason. So far it seems plausible to assume that the magic faction eventually won, and made them do the worst they’re now so ashamed of, which might be the reason why they haven’t been in touch since the rescue.
I think Tai returning to Van is an analogue to Lottie making another blood sacrifice – a sign that there’s no running from whatever haunted them in those woods, the wilderness is once again getting to them, an increasing willingness to once again give in.
“Van does seem a bit too keen on instrumentalizing Tai’s potentially supernatural affliction.”I think this is spot on. There’s there’s a line between trying to help and exploiting that Van seems about to cross. It also becomes a little otherizing because she’s brushing aside Tai’s emotions and needs.
I’m as thrilled as anyone that we’re getting to see adult Van – she’s one of the most likable survivors, and has often been a voice of reason and compassion until now. She has so far been my probably least problematic fav in this show. But one thing that makes her a fav for me is definitely also her pragmatism, and that’s the thing that’s gradually making her just as problematic a fav as all the others. Because pragmatism can turn into ruthless pragmatism quickly enough, in a sufficiently dire situation. And no one can question the direness of the situation at this point.
My heart will always skip a beat whenever I see Lauren Ambrose. My first thought was “Claire Fisher looks so beautiful! She must still miss Nate and David every day.”
What can I say, Six Feet Under left an imprint on my soul.
yeah, i loved Claire
A kid that comes back not talking and a foot taller is totally sus.
That was in fact NOT Lottie’s longtime therapist, who ultra-suspiciously did not show & was replaced by a shady (fake?) therapist with a suspicious interest in her visions & apparent disinclination to up her meds
yeah that “interim therapist” is majorly sus
I have no idea who would be behind replacing Lottie’s therapist to get her to give in to her blood-demanding visions. I think it is somebody though (Mari? Javi?)
Another thing that comes to mind is that in the flashback in the premiere to the press conference after they were found, the person speaking says the plane was found 600 miles north of its logged flight plan, which is way the hell off course, and hard to attribute to just instrument malfunction.It feels like there might be a larger conspiracy at work ever since the Yellowjackets’ high school days.
That is interesting, and the plane was chartered by Lottie’s parents—and her mother believed in her visions, and I could see as the person behind the therapist switchThough I thought the plane rerouting north was just because of bad weather. I might have to think about that one
When the teens are on the plane the pilots announce an that they’re changing the flight plan to avoid bad weather. It’s kind of tucked into the background sound mix – the focus of the scene is something different, so it’s easy to miss.
Or, to use one of the fandom’s favorite ideas, she’s a figment of Lottie’s imagination.
nothing shady about it; it just means she can’t openly talk about what she’s going through and it will probably makes things worse
Yeah. The therapist was saying some radically stupid shit to a woman with decades of diagnosis behind her. “What do you think your visions are telling you?” Get the fuck out of here.
No mention of the book Ben was reading, The Magus? When they spent a couple seconds focusing on the title, I Googled it, and wowzers. That’s something, right?
Yeah The Magus is a colossal mind game, pretty weird for Coach Ben to be reading & seems like it bodes … something not great
to be fair, he does put it away pretty quickly, because he’s actually living through this shit, and doesn’t seem to have the nerve for the fake version. It’s a deeply preposterous book. But certain parallels are undenieable. I hope the thematic relevance is just about moral quandaries, having to do some awful shit for utilitarian reasons (betraying the partisans to save the village, eating your friend to survive the winter, creating a cult to keep up morale..) and not about some secret hidden mastermind orchastring elaborate schemes to conduct psychological experiments on unwitting test subjects.
The “godgame,” they call they manipulation in The Magus. I hope it is not that & don’t understand how it could be, unless there is some force manipulating things we don’t understand. I don’t think Coach Ben or Lottie is capable of that kind of gamesmanship
honestly, I might hate a “it’s all just an experiment enigneered by an evil mastermind” -twist even more than a comparatively straightforward supernatural ending. (Still, at this point, hoping for “natural causes, poison, group dynamics, mass delusion”) . Like you, I don’t see a way to pull it off in a plausible manner.
Yeah I hope not the “godgame” manipulation from The Magus. I actually might be in the minority and would be okay with a supernatural angle, or at least possible supernatural angle. For one thing that would feel too much like Lost, and Yellowjackets has been more its own thing, and for better or worse has empowered its leading ladies and given them agency in weird ways which I would not want it to undermine.
Oof. I will point out that there are supposed to be 5 seasons of this show, and they’ve already gotten to the cannibalism. There’s got to be some bigger picture stuff coming up, and unfortunately “super cult” is just as likely as anything.
There’s a copy of The Collector there too. Someone loves that author. I do believe teen Misty was reading The Magus last season. They could be Cabin Daddy’s. It isn’t out of reason for a cabin to have a shelf of books, especially older ones from the 60s and 70s.
Misty was reading it in the finale of last season as well.
I may be wrong but I think the straps are holding together makeshift backpacks they’re wearing.
But why, oh why aren’t they using the snowshoes on the wall?
We’ve seen that altar before – Lottie buried the bear heart there in season 1. I don’t remember if she also made the altar or it was already there, though
Yeah, that was a strange miss on the recappers part. That altar was pretty important last season.
The seat belt straps also very strongly evoke for me a 90s vintage-store shopper fashion trend of belts made from car and airplane seat belts. I assume everyone’s proto-hipster friends wore them.
That mouse is super dead, right? Somebody’s gotta get hungry enough to eat it.Meanwhile I’m amazed that the goldfish survived its trip in Nat’s mouth. Unlike its 13 predecessors, this Gilly is a survivor.
Someone will decide it’s a snack when they find it, and the girl who will defend it won’t end up well because of it. It’s food (if even a little mouthful), and she’s hiding it from them.Yeah that whole goldfish thing was fucking stupid, but I admit to checking out a bit when they go back to present day stories.
Since the mom left the room, I surprised Nat didn’t just grab the whole fishbowl (or steal a teacup).
She’s committed to doing things in the most slapstick way possible.
Let’s hope Gilly appreciates it.
(Reddit detectives, your moment is nigh)“There are no queens in that deck” seemed like a loaded line in season one. A lot of people noted it. It wasn’t some ARG or people zooming in on the diary. It was something presented fairly directily. I don’t think you need to be a citizen detective to grasp the show’s use of the “Queen” idea.
Tbh, Van’s scars look more healed in the forest than they do on Lauren Ambrose. They must be using different makeup artist for the two, and they obviously need to talk to each other more. It seems like bad continuity.I have to give them credit for making Ambrose look as much like Van as they do. With teen Van, I can’t stop staring at her seven-head(it’s way beyond a five-head), but with Ambrose they make her look like Van while covering up teen Van’s defining feature.
I think the queens are a red herring. I don’t think it will matter who turns out to be the antler queen. Someone else proposed in a previous comment section that the girls might be taking turns; it might be a purely ritual role, maybe the antler queen is just the person to be sacrificed next.
Of course, actual leaders emerge in such situations – those with a plan, or a skill, or plain courage to make a choice. We’ve seen that with the core girls in various situations, Miss is the authority when it’s about tending to the wounded, Taissa makes the bold choices, Shauna and Nat feed them, Lottie gives hope. The others turn to them in various hours of various needs. But the shows is gradually establishing the limitation of their agency. The king is played by the other actors, and so, I suppose, is the queen. There will be queens, but they might not drive the plot. It’s much more interesting to look at the queenmakers.
In this episode two queenmakers emerge: Van for Taissa, and Mari for Lottie. Van pushes Taissa to give in to her dark passenger, because she sees the potential power in her connection to the spirit of the wilderness. Van is the one who reveals Taissa’s gift to the group, against Taissa’s own wishes. But will she try to crown regular Tai, or rather Other-Tai?
Then there’s Mari, clearly the truest believer, already a fanatic, already persecuting non- believers, ready to chomp on the coach, ready to blame all misery on Nat’s lack of faith. If Laura Lee was Lottie’s John the Baptist, Mari might be her Saint Peter…. or Judas. The fact that we don’t see her dressed in purple in the present-day-scenes however suggests that there might have been a rift between queen and queenmaker, just as there was between Tai and Van. There are readings, where Judas does not betray Jesus out of greed or opportunism, but out of disappointed idealism.
I think that in the wilderness, the queen candidates got pushed to the brink by their queenmakers, but snapped out of it just in time to prevent a battle royale, ultimately rejecting their roles. And now everything seems to be conspiring to push them into those roles against, to play out that unfinished third act.
There was a queen card attached to a tree very early on.
Red herring!
So excited for Lauren Ambrose as Van but I am also dreading anymore of this split-personality “Dark Tai” bullshit storyline. It’s sad the two have to be so closely linked.
Dark Tai is dragging the whole season down for me.
and an increasingly weak Coach Benlooks like the girls are gonna have to share a leg this time
With all the wistful flashbacks I’m wondering if Coach Ben is going to kill himself. Maybe pull a page from The Terror and cover himself in poison first so they don’t eat him.
Man I was bummed when that moose went under. I wanted Nat to win the competition (Team Lottie-skeptic), but when the girls all started hacking away at the ice I knew it didn’t have a chance. Nat’s frozen “we needed it, we needed it” was heartbreaking.About time adult Shauna stopped lying to her daughter for once. The series is so eye-rollingly slow in the modern day scenes that whenever they switch perspectives from out of the woods, I roll my eyes.I also find it baffling how well Van’s scars have settled, especially teenaged Van. Wolves almost tore her face off, but now we can barely see a scar? It’s like when Game of Thrones had Tyrion suffer a horrendous cut at the end of season 2, and in the books I think he actually loses a nose, but it just gave Dinklage a pretty scar for the most part. Coach Ben is certainly next on the menu.
Someone Elijah Wood’s age, I don’t think $6 million is enough for a lifetime, not in this economy. He did already buy a boat (though I guess he’s saves a lot of money by living in it) and staying at nice B & Bs takes a chunk. ETA: Okay, I guess he could use his detective skills to make smart investments.
Since she’s been in the opening credits from the beginning of the season, I wondered, and including during this episode, when Lauren Ambrose would show up. Good thing she did.Have become a big fan of Jeff and Warren Kole.
I don’t remember if we saw much of Mari last season, but I’m wondering if she’s going to be the Big Bad of the show. It’s a good idea—introduce a secondary character in the first season we don’t see much of and then make them more prominent in the second until they become the main villain.This show has often reminded me of Lost; one big way is teasing a supernatural story that people expect good answers to with a character-based show that’s the main purpose of the series. And tonight we got a hatch! Even if it was hallucinatory.
If you’re intelligent and prudent enough with your investments $6 million can go a long way.