Yellowjackets remains a Showtime hit, and with some reason. Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s series has spun an engrossing mystery regarding the unappetizing survival tactics employed by (and supernatural forces preying upon) a 1990s female high school soccer team stranded in the middle of wintery nowhere, which has played out like a cross between Lost and Alive, the latter evoked by the girls’ notorious decision to resort to cannibalism to keep their bellies full.
When it focuses on the efforts of its pre-adult protagonists’ snowbound travails—especially in these last six episodes of Season 2, which has leaned into outright gruesomeness, all while teasing revelations about the “wilderness” spirits wreaking havoc on the girls’ psyches—it’s been an intriguing genre thriller with meat on its bones.
The same, alas, cannot be said for Yellowjackets’ present-day storylines, which are begetting carnage of an unintended sort. Absurdly conceived, poorly written, and altogether pointless, they’re time-fillers that have hopelessly unbalanced the show, suggesting in the process that the greatest mystery afoot here is why we should care about what became of these characters in their later years.
This isn’t the fault of the Yellowjackets’ over-thirty cast, as Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci make for engaging headliners. Yet the work they’re asked to perform is of an arbitrary, wheel-spinning sort that’s either connected to the 1990s events in the wispiest manner possible, or untethered from it altogether.
Nowhere is that clearer than with Lynskey’s Shauna, who continues to spend her time trying to cover up the murder of her extramarital lover Adam (Peter Gadiot) with the aid of her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) and daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins). What this has to do with her wilderness ordeal is absolutely nothing; it’s just a random dilemma that she’s been saddled with in order to give her some suspenseful purpose. Moreover, not only is it unrelated to her prior plight, but it’s a cartoonishly complicated criminal crisis that’s only grown dimmer this season, lowlighted by detective Saracusa (John Reynolds) going undercover to date Callie in order to get dirt on Shauna—a turn that’s not so much pulpy as soft-headed.
Shauna’s storyline has strayed miles away from Yellowjackets’ primary concern—i.e., all that evil paranormal cannibalism stuff in the woods!—and, as such, it comes across as tedious padding. That’s even truer of Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) stay at the remote cult run by Lottie (Simone Kessell). Lewis is a live-wire actress and, in the first season, she put that energy to good use as her damaged and guilt-ridden survivor. Consequently, it’s frustrating to find her largely sidelined this season, stuck sitting around Lottie’s commune, where she bristles at their New Age ideas but also kinda-sorta warms to them.
The idea that, after being kidnapped (to spare her from committing suicide) and dumped in this enclave, Natalie would placidly accept her captivity is both unbelievable and, worse, leaves her in narrative stasis; Natalie has done approximately jack and squat for the season’s first six episodes—a situation exacerbated by the fact that her dialogue in particular has been brutally clunky.
The rest of Yellowjackets’ contemporary material hasn’t fared much better. Taissa’s (Tawny Cypress) extended schizophrenic-sleepwalking freak-out is tiresome in and of itself (albeit thankfully associated with her teenage nightmare), and made outright laughable by the fact that, despite being this damaged, she somehow managed to recently become a United States Senator.
Pairing her with old flame Van (Lauren Ambrose) at least got the proceedings moving toward its long-awaited adult-gang reunification, although Van—who runs a VHS movie rental store, because nostalgia!—seems like a transparent throwback construct rather than an actual person. Ricci’s deviously chipper Misty is the show’s most vibrant light, as proven by her rapport with Elijah Wood’s (unimportant, but not unlikable) Walter. Still, if her efforts to track down Natalie have lent the 2020s-set action a bit of forward momentum, they’ve also felt tangential to the core questions at the heart of this tale. They’re just more plot for plot’s sake.
Yellowjackets is a bifurcated affair in which the then and now are supposedly intertwined. Unfortunately, now past its second season’s midway point, it’s barely developed those ties, instead indulging in inconsequential and excessively drawn-out mini-dramas designed to delay adult Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, Misty, Lottie and Van’s reunion for as long as possible.
With the gang finally together (in both timelines), perhaps the show can get back to the business of investigating its central mystery from its dual perspectives. The sheer wastefulness on display this season, however, is reason to be worried about the series’ overall direction—and, additionally, to wonder if there’s really a satisfying destination on the horizon.
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