Mmm, smell that? No, not the strangely alluring, umami aroma of crisp human flesh, though that’s certainly on the table now. I’m talking about the sweet scent of a return to form. After a less-than-stellar season premiere, Yellowjackets Season 2 has blessedly started to pick up the pace in its second episode.
That’s not to say that everything has been righted, of course. There are still quite a few wonky aspects of this season that weren’t present (or, at least, as glaringly obvious) in the first. But at least while Yellowjackets stumbles around in the cold, dark night, we thankfully get to see Taissa doing the literal same thing. Less clunky exposition, more sleepwalking and starving teenagers under the influence of a mysterious forest spirit! Last episode’s heaping dose of present-day Shauna drama doesn’t begin to compare to the chilling feast that capped this week’s installment.
But more on that in a moment.
This episode begins with the quest to answer an age-old question: Who took a shit in the pee bucket? Back in the ’90s, rations from the bear that Lottie killed are thinning, and teenage Shauna is spending all of her time doing makeup on her dead best friend and posing in her in silly positions. No wonder an anomalous piece of human timber is causing such distress! The case of the suspicious shit is never solved, but it does provide a comical grounding point for Taissa later on, after an intense, near-death sleepwalking incident.
Van awakens to find that the rope that ties her and Taissa together while they sleep has been severed. In a panic, Van flees the cabin and follows Tai’s footprints in the snow. We get a glimpse of what Tai sees while she’s sleepwalking, bringing us the return of Yellowjackets’ creepiest, most Twin Peaks-esque horror: The Man with No Eyes. This terrifying figment was introduced in the third episode of last season, and barely discussed afterward. For Yellowjackets fans who love the show’s supernatural elements, his return is cause for Marvel movie cameo-style screams.
The Man with No Eyes is a good example of what Yellowjackets did so well in its first season. Those 10 episodes crafted small moments of sheer, bone-chilling terror against a backdrop of real-life teenage destitution. It wasn’t always consistent, but it was effective. Seeing Tai follow this spirit that has apparently plagued her family for generations is one of the most compelling mysteries the show has set up so far. Van gets to Tai just as she’s about to stumble off a cliff, and tackles her awake, right next to a tree with the cabin’s mysterious symbol carved into it.
What the connection is between Tai’s somnambulant terrors and these supernatural woods will have to remain shrouded in mystery for a bit longer. It’s time to check in on the activities of these intrepid women in the present day! I’ll be honest with you: Cutting back and forth between timelines is like a tire blowing out when you’re enjoying a nice, pleasant car ride with your favorite music. The present-day story is severely lacking so far. Though we’re getting some kernels of interesting plotlines, it feels a bit like Yellowjackets is dragging around a foot that fell asleep.
As an adult, Tai’s memory blackouts are getting worse, so she’s chugging near-lethal amounts of Nespresso to stay awake. Elsewhere, Misty is annoyingly downvoting Reddit posts; Natalie is discovering that adult Lottie is less of a cult leader and more of a contemptible holistic healer; and Shauna is…well, she’s Shauna-ing. And I don’t just mean drinking Starry soda (I am keeping a product placement counter; this is number two!) and working with raw meat on a wood cutting board—two things that someone should never do.
The Adam Martin murder storyline continues to rear its dreary head, and unfortunately, there’s no end in sight. Shauna’s snooze-worthy, unnecessarily angsty daughter Callie meets a handsome stranger in a bar (John Reynolds, blessedly mustached) while doing some underaged day drinking with her friend. Turns out this series newcomer is actually a detective working on the Adam Martin case, ignoring protocol to get close to Shauna’s family. Guess we better (reluctantly) strap in.
That boredom just makes returning to the ’90s all the more sweet. Tai, deservedly bugging out after a brush with death and having to throw out one of her friends’ shit the day before, has had it with Shauna. She finds Jackie’s frozen doll body in the meat shed, caked in blush and looking like Tammy Faye Bakker, and loses it. Tai demands that the group cremate Jackie’s body, and the ensuing struggle between Tai and Shauna provides a welcome illustration of just how many layers of trauma these poor girls are incurring. Lottie, ever so devious, encourages the cremation—but she comes to Shauna’s aid first, ensuring she’ll have another ally as the group continues to split between Lottie’s sycophants and non-believers.
From there, we jump back to the present day, which I only mention to shore up a couple of important points. Misty has her first run-in with her Reddit foe, who is so far nameless but played by Elijah Wood; this will thankfully give Misty something to do outside of hanging around waiting for her friends. Tai blacks out and imagines her son, Sammy, has come to visit. Surprise! He hasn’t. When Tai calls his other mother Simone, they end up in a horrific car wreck in the rush to pick Sammy up from school.
Finally, there’s a sequence where Natalie and Lottie discuss Travis’ death, which feels a bit confounding. Lottie insists that Travis called to let her know he was in danger, and when she arrived, he was about to hang himself by the crane. But, according to Lottie, this was actually an attempt to speak with the same forest spirit that Lottie is imbued with. We see teenage Travis affected by when he and Nat first have sex, earlier in the episode.
In an attempt to make Travis’ request safer, Lottie agrees to lower him back down the minute he goes unconscious. That is, until the buttons on the machine become stuck. Travis goes unconscious, and Lottie experiences a demonic, fire-shrouded vision of Laura Lee, meeting her fate in the exploding plane. When she comes to, Travis has been hung high in the air, a glorious tribute to whatever evil they wrought in those woods.
What any of this means—and if Lottie’s account is even true—is still unclear. But it does give us an inkling of how powerful this forest spirit truly is. Adult Lottie knows that it’s a malevolent force, but teenage Lottie still believes it has come to empower her. We know that the former is the truth, as is confirmed by the episode’s fantastic final sequence. In what almost seems like a tribute to 2013’s Evil Dead remake, we witness the supernatural spirit circling overhead, always watching but invisible to the Yellowjackets. The spirit pushes a pile of snow from a tree branch onto Jackie’s funeral pyre, inciting what we’ve all been waiting for.
The snow melting into the fire allows the group to smell something other than just burning wood. Each one of them is awakened by their own howling stomach, detecting a whiff of meat, cooking somewhere outside. The girls emerge to see Jackie’s body burnt to a well-done crisp, then huddle around it. The scene is intercut with a collective vision of the group, seated for an ornate Roman feast. Clad in white robes and gold tresses, each of them peers over the mounds of food, looking at one another, as if they were peasants who had stumbled upon the riches of royalty.
Shauna, rubbing her stomach, whispers, “She wants us to.” It isn’t immediately clear whether we’re meant to understand if “she” refers to Jackie or Shauna’s unborn baby, but either option is just as twisted for different reasons. Don’t forget, there’s a fan theory that Shauna’s first child was possessed when Shauna served as the conduit for Lottie’s seance last season. If Shauna is referring to her child, we can expect a whole host of gnarled things to come.
At Shauna’s encouragement, the Yellowjackets slowly begin to pick at their dead teammate’s body. Scenes of this grisly event play against the Roman feast, as the girls clink gold chalices full of wine and indulge in all of the spoils of gluttony. The flashes between fact and fiction tell us that this isn’t just cannibalism. This is the wanton hedonism of being a teenager, on full display. In another life, these girls would be making bad decisions and enjoying their adolescence, their brain’s receptors taking heed of whatever mistakes they might make. Instead, they now live a voracious existence, where outside opinions are imperceptible and the insatiability of their youthful nature is their primary driving force.
Now that they’ve all experienced their first taste of human flesh (except for Coach Ben, who hobbled back into the cabin, horrified), the Yellowjackets have crossed the one remaining, if flimsy, moral boundary they had left. Inhibitions no longer exist. It also means that, sometime soon, a target is going to appear on everyone’s back. And even if your favorite team member is still alive in the present day, there’s no telling what abhorrent horror they could face from here on out.
