The Yellowjackets girls are hungry, and since its opening moments back in Season 1, the show has promised to feed them. After the infamous pit scene that opened the pilot saw the girls hunting and ritualistically eating one of their own, the rest of the season slowly brought us closer to the cannibalism that was promised—and Sunday’s episode finally brought perhaps the most gruesome meal yet.
In the show’s second season, the feasting finally begins. But much like the rest of the show, the feasting scenes are never simple and never what we expect. Instead, in Season 2 of Yellowjackets, each of the show’s “feasts” has been a seismic, oddly artistic event. In fact, the act of eating takes on a myriad of subtle meanings, as shown through the layered representation of the feasts themselves.
Episode 2, aptly titled “Edible Complex,” concluded with the show’s first cannibal feast since the pilot’s stomach-churning final moments. After the girls place Jackie's frozen body atop a makeshift pyre and set it alight, the gruesome conclusion seems inevitable: A gust of wind puts out the flame, leaving only burning embers below the body. It is, effectively, the perfect barbecue.
We all know where this is heading. The girls are awoken by the, apparently, irresistible smell of Jackie's slow roasted body. They stagger towards it as though in a trance. “She wants us to,” murmurs a wide-eyed Shauna. But then, instead of the wince-inducing gore fans may have expected, we cut to a shot of the girls at an opulent Roman banquet. They wear elegant white robes and golden headpieces. Before them sits a feast—there are roast chickens, grapes, and goblets of wine. We then cut between the real feast and the imagined one.
As actor Kevin Alves, who plays Travis, told The Hollywood Reporter of the surprising hallucinatory beauty of the scene, “It had that supernatural feel where you feel like you’re in everyone’s mind and this haze, and we’re not fully present as human beings anymore. It was so beautiful and terrible at the same time.”
Writer Jonathan Lisco also spoke about the scene to Vulture, noting that the creatives “do not shy away from the gruesome, but we also don’t want to be gratuitous about it.” He added that, “It’s funny, because people say the show is so brutal, and I want to be clear that we never set out to be salacious or sensational. We have to objectively render some of what they’re going through because that’s truthful, but at the same time, this gave us an opportunity to add an extra element of mass hallucination that they needed to collectively protect themselves from the horror.”
“When they’re shoving figs and pomegranates and mutton and whatever in each other’s mouths, and it gets into a really histrionic state, we thought that was a thing of beauty,” he added, noting that the scene had multiple layers of meaning. Not only is their collective hallucination about self-protection in a time of trauma, but it also takes on an oddly sexual, Bacchanalian tone here.
With the multi-layered, dreamlike presentation of this first cannibal feast, Yellowjackets establishes that the girls are desperate; they are, after all, literally starving. But the show is also doing something else that might be even more interesting. It is setting up a visual metaphor whereby eating—especially hallucinatory eating—becomes a way of bringing the girls’ increasing trauma on the screen.
The visual language of the hallucinatory feast continues in Episode 4, when Lottie, looking for food, discovers Laura Lee’s crashed plane from Season 1. She enters the plane and suddenly finds herself in a busy mall. We are, of course, in another hallucination. There, she finds the whole team eating in the food court, a now-alive Laura Lee holding court at the head of the table. “I got that for you. You look hungry,” she says to Lottie, pointing at a box of Chinese food on the table. This may be a different kind of ritualistic feast, but it remains a feast nonetheless. After all, what meal could be more iconic for a ’90s teen than the ritual of eating with friends at the mall food court? For Lottie, this vision is about more than hunger—it's about the guilt of losing Laura Lee and her fear of disappointing the group.
That takes us to the latest episode, Episode 6, which is the most disturbing of the series thus far. After giving birth to her child, Shauna struggles to breastfeed. She wakes up one day to find Lottie feeding her child instead. “You said he needs to feed,” says (a very creepy) Lottie. “You'll understand soon enough.”
Later, Shauna wakes up to find the crib is empty. She stumbles into the main room to find the entire group humming and—you guessed it—chowing down. Each girl looks up guiltily, blood smeared across her face; although we do not see him, it’s clear that the body they’re tearing apart is that of Shauna’s newborn son.
The horrifying scene, it turns out, is a dream. In fact, Shauna's baby never survived childhood and she's been hallucinating for hours.
Each of these feasting scenes does what Yellowjackets does best: They hide nuance within the macabre. On one level, each feast is a raw, gory gut punch, a grotesquely satisfying conclusion to the creepy Lord of the Flies-esque tension that the show builds so well.
But beyond the physical gore and stomach-churning spectacle of each feast, there is always another layer of meaning to be gleaned.
The girls have a dark side, and the trauma of life in the wilderness seems to be bringing it out. And yet, within even their darkest impulses, there is something oddly beautiful. There is also love, friendship, understanding, and hope.
Yellowjackets, through its unusually artistic representation of “the feast,” complicates our own understanding of the girls’ growing darkness. It helps us to see the human truth of each character that lies beyond the gore. By showing us the girls’ grandiose hallucinations of gluttony, the show illustrates that eating for these teens isn’t just about staying alive—it’s about other layers of consumption, too. In these girls’ twisted, trauma-warped minds, what could be a better way to get close to the people you love than to consume them?
