While Yellowjackets took a break last week, I used the time off to catch up on Prime Video’s Dead Ringers. Watching that series turned out to be a twisted form of prep for this week’s episode, with its crash course in all of the potential health risks of fertility and conception, as well as some of the gnarlier horrors of new motherhood. I had figured that whenever Yellowjackets finally got around to showing Shauna give birth, the show would explore the baby’s delivery in one of three ways—more on those in a minute. But I certainly didn’t expect it to make space for each of those options within the runtime of a single episode.
But Teenage Shauna does spend a good portion of this episode actually in labor. All of her fellow Yellowjackets are trying their best to remember what they can from their high school health class. But in the chaos of the moment, no one can seem to remember why it’s important to time contractions, or “crowning” means. It certainly doesn’t help that Misty is having a crisis of conscience, as she’s trying to bring a new life into this world, just hours after she took one out of it in last week’s episode (RIP Crystal!).
We’ve been primed for the delivery of Shauna’s baby since the moment she decided that she was keeping the child in Season 1. This long-awaited episode, however, was largely filler. Even the birth itself seems like a means to an end, helping the show get over yet another hump in search of a more tightly focused narrative. Only six episodes of Yellowjackets Season 2 have aired thus far, and a good half of those have played out in similar ways.
However, Episode 6, “Qui,” didn’t feel like a labor (thank you) to watch at all. Maybe it was because the season has finally found a steady beat, or maybe it was because we had a week off, and I missed these ladies. Whatever it was, “Qui” genuinely felt like this season’s first glimpse of the Yellowjackets we know and love, complete with a nod to what this show does so well in its best moments.
Not the entirety of the episode was so consistent, though. One of Yellowjackets’ biggest problems is that the writers don’t seem to understand that the audience doesn’t need a backstory for each character’s rich, full life happening at all times. Coach Ben, for instance, has been having visions of an alternate reality, where he never got on the plane with the rest of the team and is happily living with his boyfriend, who had broken up with him when Ben wasn’t ready to commit. We’ve been subjected to at least one of these per episode, and they seem to be leading absolutely nowhere.
The writers don’t need to be working on every character, all the time. The great brilliance of episodic television is that character arcs can come and go! One extended scene with Ben confiding in another member of the team, mid-season, could’ve sufficed and even been more powerful. It seems that the writers are aiming to show us just how intensely Ben is folding into his own visions—his deep catatonia likely making him an eventual mercy meal for the girls—but it just feels like a bland way to pad each episode’s runtime.
But Coach Ben’s story is really the only misstep here. Even Adult Shauna has something captivating to do this week. As you probably know (and would agree with), that’s the bar with which to measure an episode’s quality in Season 2: “Is Melanie Lynskey Still Being Criminally Misused?” In Shauna’s present-day story, we’ve had to bear witness to—or fast-forward through—Callie’s subplot of her torrid, unknowing romance with a cop investigating Adam Martin’s death. Things finally come to a head this week, when the police catch on to Shauna’s maneuvering, bringing both her and Callie in for questioning. Blessedly, we do not have to spend half the episode leading up to this; we can just skip right to it! See how quickly we can move things along, if you trust your audience to keep up?
Lynskey gets to do some more wonderful work this week, unraveling the grief that Shauna has been holding on to ever since she had Callie, despite not wanting a child. “I did not start out a bad person, but in case you haven’t noticed, life doesn’t tend to turn out the way you think it will,” Shauna tells Detective Saracusa, behind closed doors. “You have a kid you don’t want, to save a marriage you got into out of guilt and shame, and you just can’t really let yourself love either of them. But, of course, you do. You love them, despite yourself.” This is what the writers have been trying to get to with Shauna all season—the reasons why she is so beleaguered by her role as a housewife. Intercut with the trauma of her teenage self trying to give birth to her first child, her words are all the more effective.
When Teenage Shauna awakens after passing out during the birthing process, her healthy baby boy is thrust into her arms. She’s filled with love, joy, and even the smallest sliver of hope that she’s felt since her team first crashed into the woods. But having a baby with no resources, medical care, or qualified professionals is not easy, no matter how many times women have been forced to do just that under all kinds of horrific circumstances. Shauna couldn’t quite get her baby to latch to her breast to feed him, which isn’t an uncommon phenomenon, but it’s all the more dire here, given the harsh conditions surrounding her.
It certainly doesn’t help that Lottie found joy in stealing Shauna’s baby into her arms at night. The two of them sit across from Shauna while she sleeps, as Lottie mutters about feeding “their” child. One of the last things Shauna saw before passing out while giving birth was Lottie, Travis, and their culty cohorts making a blood offering to the spirit of the woods for the child’s safe delivery. So, no, waking up to Lottie holding her child does not bode particularly well for Shauna’s postpartum state.
But after several attempts, Shauna finally gets her baby boy to latch. It’s a beautiful moment of maternal triumph, underscored by Sophie Nélisse’s joyful performance. Unfortunately, this happiness can’t stay for long. Yellowjackets has other visceral horrors in mind for us.
The night after she’s finally able to feed her son, Shauna once again awakens to find him missing from his crib. In a panic, she leaves the room, fearing the worst. What she stumbles onto is a scene of pure, unimaginable terror. Each of her fellow teammates is on their hands and knees, their mouths covered in blood, entranced in a feral state, and devouring Shauna’s child. This is the result that every single viewer feared from the very beginning, and seeing the show breach the stomach-churning taboo of infanticide was ghastly. Yellowjackets has done a fine job of balancing its horror elements with dramatic ones, but this is the hardest it has leaned into full-on, gruesome dread. It’s an unforgettable sight, one that is surely lighting up Twitter as you read this.
Luckily, it’s not real. Yes, Yellowjackets going full mother! is just a fakeout. And while I welcome this show falling deep into raw, cannibalistic horror at every possible turn, I am happy to live with the knowledge that none of these characters killed and ate a child. There are things you can’t come back from, and I don’t think even prestige streaming can go to those lengths without being run off the air by puritanical zealots.
The reality of what happens during the birth is just as haunting, but thankfully less grisly. Without proper care or nutrition, and potentially due to a host of other unknown complications, Shauna gives birth to a stillborn child. Shauna herself is lucky to be alive, after losing untold amounts of blood during the process. But the relief of having her own life intact is far outweighed by the trauma of losing her child. The group hands Shauna her child, wrapped in a blanket, and lets her grieve.
Nélisse is tasked with a difficult scene, and she caps the episode with a poignant, moving performance. Shauna, still caught in a haze, looks at her child and tries to find anything of the hope that she felt when her unconscious brain imagined a healthy birth. “I can still hear him crying—don’t you hear him cry?” Shauna screams, Nélisse’s voice turning hoarse from sobs. The episode fades to black over a powerful shot of Nélisse, staring into the camera, and repeating, “Why can’t you hear him crying?”
It’s a truly stirring moment, and one that I’ve been moved to tears by each subsequent time I’ve watched the scene for this recap. This ending is a fantastic, truly gutting way for Yellowjackets to affirm what it has been trying to tell us since Episode 1: that the girls’ experience with real life is just as horrific as their encounters with anything supernatural. With a week off in between episodes, the scene hits even harder, elevating Season 2 with its strongest entry yet.
