(Warning: Spoilers ahead)
Even when the women of Yellowjackets dine and dash, someone ends up dead.
Considering how many bodies are stacking up in the past and present, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Friday’s long-awaited Season 3 premiere of Showtime’s creepy drama deals with the fallout from the bloody events in the woods at Lottie’s (Simone Kessell) wellness—some might say cult—compound. While “It” appeared to select Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) as the next sacrifice when she drew the Queen of Hearts, it was Natalie (Juliette Lewis) who received a fatal dose of fentanyl at the hands of Misty (Christina Ricci). Oh, and Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) shot Lottie.
Everyone takes a different approach to the re-emergence of the game of life and death first experienced in the wilderness. Denial, gallows humor, reigniting romance, reckless abandonment, and self-medicating with booze are all on the menu.
Set six weeks after the events in the finale, Natalie’s poorly attended memorial offers some closure, but this group is preoccupied with their own concerns and sidequests. Misty doesn’t even attend, and Lottie is in a psychiatric facility—but will soon be released. The Daily Beast’s Obsessed sat down with the adult versions of the survivors, Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey, and Simone Kessell, as well as Warren Kole and Sarah Desjardins, to spill all about the two-part return after a long hiatus.
Van (Ambrose) and Taissa (Cypress) are still navigating romantic waters that are further complicated by Van’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Taissa suggests a date night, but the fancy restaurant serving foie gras with house-made cotton candy feels incredibly stupid to Van. But rather than settle up, Tai wants to replay a memory from their pre-plane crash teen years when they skipped out on a check at a diner. “It’s just a moment for them to come alive and feel back into their time in the wilderness. That sort of naughtiness is a great thing to slip back into,” says Ambrose.
The server quickly clocks what they are doing and gives pursuit. As the exuberant “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany plays, the burst of adolescent exuberance briefly makes the duo forget what they have recently gone through. “No matter how far they try to run from it, they are always chasing after the feeling of aliveness they had out in the woods,” Ambrose adds. After rebuffing Tai earlier in the episode, the giddiness of youthful rebellion spills into passion. Sure, Tai sees the disturbing no-eyed man briefly, but she isn’t going to let this intrusion kill the horny mood.
If only they knew what had happened to the server. First, a passerby stops him from getting hit by a bus. But then the waiter falls to the floor, clutching his chest. When Tai goes to pay their bill the following day, she spots a memorial to the dead employee and begins to wonder what this means. “I think if that death in the first episode didn’t happen, the season would go very differently,” says Cypress. “I think that’s a major catalyst to push them toward what they wind up doing for a lot of the season.” An ominous tease! Oh, and the name of the restaurant? Pas D’Âme, translated from French, means “without a soul.” Yikes!
While Tai and Van take a trip down hooking memory lane, Misty channels her inner Natalie after missing the memorial. “She’s had trouble connecting with her grief, with her sadness. I don’t know that she feels guilt,” says Ricci. “It’s very complicated, and she doesn’t necessarily know what she feels—that she’s in shock and upset.” Walter (Elijah Wood) has acquired the key to Natalie’s storage unit (of course he has!), and unboxing a signature leather item gives Misty a chance to cosplay. “When she finds the jacket, this idea that she’ll keep Natalie alive by acting like her sounds like a really good idea,” says Ricci.
How does Misty emulate Nat? Going to a dive bar and switching out her espresso martini for seven shots of whisky. “She’s trying so desperately to be the person she was completely in love with. Natalie, for her, was always the best version of what she could be,” says Ricci. “Natalie is an outsider as well. If that’s an outsider and she’s so cool, then amazing, it’s okay for me to be an outsider.”
Unfortunately, Misty takes a compliment about the jacket to be a slight, threatening to set a guy’s crotch on fire. “I think what she’s doing in the bar is trying to connect with Natalie,” says Ricci. Misty is “not that person,” and it quickly falls apart. “That’s so sad, but I love that bar scene so much. Oh my god, yes!” says Cypress. Alas, Misty does not receive this level of support from her fellow survivors in the series—both as adults and teens.
Walter theorizes that Misty’s “friends” only call when they need something. Misty rejects this, but Shauna does precisely this in the second episode. Callie isn’t left alone with unwanted houseguest Lottie. Thankfully, Lottie bears no ill will toward Callie for shooting her, and Kessell relished this storyline: “That was the highlight going into the Sadecki household. That was the most fun.” Likewise, Lynskey was thrilled to have this time with Kessell to dig into a prickly dynamic with a lot left unsaid. “There’s a lot of history between Lottie and Shauna and a very, very complicated history,” says Lynskey.
Despite Misty’s best efforts, Callie does fire off questions under the guise of truth or dare about the wilderness (“I want to know what ‘It’ is”), cannibalism, and if Lottie was going to kill her mother during the recent jaunt in the woods. “Callie has a curiosity about Lottie. There’s an energy about her that Callie feels drawn to, yet a little afraid of; she’s not sure what that is,” says Desjardins. “There’s a certain openness about her that Callie also is like, ‘Hmm, I think if there’s anyone I could potentially get answers from, it might be this person.” That is some pretty spot-on intuition.
Lottie or not, the Sadecki family is never going back to how it was. No matter how much wife guy Jeff (Kole) wishes for less drama. “He just wants to go back to the soft suburban reality he knew, but that’s not really possible,” says Kole. There are already far too many dead bodies for that.
