“She wants us to.”
Who is Shauna referring to when she invites her teammates to gnaw on Jackie’s corpse, now cooked to a crisp by the bonfire that was meant to cremate her? The “she” is ostensibly Jackie, but is it? How could Shauna know what Jackie would have wanted? The Jackie we met in Season 1 was vain and selfish when it came to survival. It seems unlikely that she would have offered up her body, even in death.
It’s more likely that “she” is the Jackie with whom Shauna has been spending time in that meat shed, the Jackie who is an invention of her psyche, who can absolve her guilt and ease her hunger. When Shauna ignites the branches that will essentially cook Jackie for the Yellowjackets’ consumption, she says, “I don’t even know where you end and I begin.” The bratty Jackie of real life is gone. Only the one who exists in Shauna’s head remains.
Or perhaps “she” is someone else. Maybe it’s Shauna’s unborn child who wants them to eat. After all, Shauna clutches her swelling belly before digging in. Is Shauna just a starving pregnant woman talking?
Whoever is speaking to Shauna, what results is one of the most delirious and disturbing moments of “Yellowjackets” so far.
It also answered a question that had been lingering over the series for its entire run: When would the cannibalism start in earnest? The consumption of human flesh was teased in the opening moments of the pilot — in which an unknown girl runs through the woods and falls into a trap — but the showrunners resisted for the entire first season. Last week’s episode gave us a taste, with the snack Shauna made of Jackie’s ear. Now the feast truly begins, and it really is a feast.
After Shauna gives the group permission, they look at one another hesitantly as they gather around Jackie’s body, which has been roasted to look almost mummified. The hedonistic nature of the meal is emphasized in the cuts to a fantasy sequence in which the girls and Travis are dressed in Greco-Roman garb, their skin clean and hair curled and styled around golden crowns. On the table in front of them is a decadent spread. Shauna reaches out to take a strawberry and the eating commences. Except they are not eating juicy fruits and succulent chicken. They are picking apart their friend’s charred flesh. The longer the scene continues, the more ravenous they all grow and the more the difference blurs between what’s real and what’s in their heads.
It’s awful and entrancing, an effective rendering of how the girls (and Travis) dissociate as they devour their peer. The initial imagery of their alternate reality is at first almost beautiful, but as they grow more gluttonous it serves only to enhance the horror.
The assistant coach Ben (Steven Krueger) is the only person who does not participate, and the episode ends on him and his horror at what he just witnessed. It is almost as if a spell had been cast on the survivors, and he is the only one able to resist. Something otherworldly seems to draw them to Jackie that night.
The hours leading up to the feast are filled with tragedy and sex. Shauna has been persuaded to say goodbye to Jackie after Taissa discovers Jackie’s body made up like a doll — a result of her and Shauna’s quote-unquote conversations. Additionally, Natalie has convinced Travis that Javi is dead. She takes a pair of Javi’s shorts and smears them with her own blood, later presenting them to Travis as if she found them during their hunt. It is an act of kindness on her part — she believes he needs to stop dwelling, given the likelihood of Javi’s death — but it is also selfish, and that night his sorrow brings him into her arms.
Sex in the wilderness is fraught, and not just because of the teen hormones running wild. During the first season’s “Doomcoming” episode, Jackie convinced Travis to sleep with her in an act that led first to her ostracism and then, ultimately, her death. Now, as Travis and Natalie finally get together, they open up a doorway to something we can’t yet name.
As they have sex, Travis has visions of a beatific Lottie cradling him like the Pietà, and it’s during their copulation that a wind comes along and dumps snow onto Jackie’s pyre, stopping her from turning to ash. Or at least it appears to be a wind — given the way the gust is filmed, we can’t see who or what is propelling it.
The mysticism of “Yellowjackets” is still more theoretical than definable at this point, but in both the past and the present, we appear to be inching toward a revelation. In the 1996 timeline, Taissa, sleepwalking, sees a gaunt, suited man in the snow. In the present, despite trying to stay awake with copious amounts of coffee, Taissa hallucinates that her son, Sammy (Aiden Stoxx), has come to visit. Thinking he has gone missing, she calls her wife (Rukiya Bernard) only to crash their car in a possessed state after they learn that Sammy has been safely at school all along.
The scenes in the current time line also deepen our understanding of the conflict between Lottie and Natalie and clarify, at least little, the circumstances of Travis’s death. Lottie explains that she had her minions kidnap Natalie to rescue her from her own potential suicide and then confesses how she was involved in Travis’s demise.
In Lottie’s telling, Travis contacted her in a manic state with the idea that he needed to have a near death experience in order to “confront the darkness.” She says she reluctantly agreed to help him hang himself to the point of blacking out, but when he went limp, the button wouldn’t work to lower the noose. Natalie is understandably skeptical of this explanation, and what Lottie doesn’t share is that the night Travis died, the “darkness” — or whatever you want to call it — returned to her in the form of Laura Lee (Jane Widdop), who in Season 1 exploded as she flew an abandoned plane to search for help.
At first, the sight of Laura Lee is welcome for Lottie. But as the ghostly figure draws nearer, its skin rots and its eyes blacken. For all of Adult Lottie’s quasi-hippie composure and ramblings about ashwagandha, she may be plagued by the most horrifying visions of anyone.
I wonder how long it’s going to take to find out what that “darkness” is, and whether the teases are going to grow frustrating. (Or maybe we’ll never know.) At the same time, this is a nightmare-inducing episode; no matter how vague the supernatural elements remain, they are thoroughly creepy in a way that itches the bones. And, you know, the girls are eating people now.
More to chew on
The way Melanie Lynskey delivers, “Oh no,” when her former classmate Kevyn (Alex Wyndham), now a cop, comes to inquire about Adam Martin’s death is perfectly not-quite-nonchalant.
Shauna’s daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), had all the makings of Annoying Teen TV Daughter (see: Dana Brody of “Homeland”) in the first season. But I’m starting to feel for her. She is bound to get her heart broken by the cop posing as a Brooklyn hipster to get information. (He’s played by John Reynolds of the great “Search Party.”)
What happened to Steve, the Yorkie, during Taissa’s fugue state?
Misty — in both the past and the present — hasn’t had a lot to do yet this season. I’m hoping that changes soon.
FYI: Lottie’s followers don’t wear “purple.” It’s “heliotrope.”
And, most important, who pooped in the pee bucket?
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