Part of the fun of Yellowjackets has been all the speculation surrounding its many alluring, harrowing mysteries. The show is centered on a core question: How do these teens get out of the Canadian tundra? Each episode has given fans a new clue to chew on—as well as new questions to start asking themselves. It’s all led to a fervent fan community on places like Reddit, where viewers have been sharing their various theories since the series premiered in December 2021.
Sometimes these theories are completely out of left field, reaching for the wildest possible answer to every question. Sometimes they sound incredibly on the money—which is extra fun, because it’s always nice to see someone proved right. The show’s actors and creators have gotten in on the whole theory shebang, discussing them in interviews, while the Yellowjackets Instagram page has even surfaced some of the most intriguing theories in its own posts.
In anticipation of Season 2—the first episode of which dropped on streaming March 24, before premiering March 26 on Showtime itself—we’ve corralled some of our favorite theories from the Yellowjackets subreddit and judged them based on their plausibility. To us, that means how likely they are to come true during the show, whether during Season 2 or later in the series.
Follow along with us, and feel free to yell at us on Twitter about how wrong we are about how wrong the fans are! (Disclosure: One of us has seen some of the new season, but don’t worry: He’s not telling.)
“The first person that the survivors eat is Jackie.”
Jackie died in the Season 1 finale. Why the hell would they not eat her? This is the one thing that the fans have to be spot-on with—because these girls would be ridiculous not to eat Jackie, if they’re gonna eat anyone at all! Her corpse is right there! Hello! Plausibility: 10/10.
“The chosen survivors to be hunted must wear tokens from the Antler Queen’s previous victims.”
This theory may not have much to do with how the plot is advanced (or so we think), but it certainly deepens the series’ lore. In the pilot episode, we see the Yellowjackets hunting and trapping one of their own, who is clad in a white nightgown when she falls into a pit of spikes. The frame tightens on Jackie’s necklace, which made viewers assume that Jackie was the one being hunted.
Well, the high school’s Queen Bee is now frozen solid in the Canadian tundra, and we know that she’s neither the hunted girl nor the Antler Queen. But given that the person in the pit was wearing Laura Lee’s nightgown and Jackie’s necklace, it seems as though the Antler Queen *cough* Lottie (we think!) *cough* could be forcing their tributes to wear symbols of the group’s former victims. What these tokens might mean to the group is unclear, but it’s likely we’ll find out by the end of Season 2. Really, this is just cruel. It’s like draping a cow in a leather blanket before sending it to the slaughterhouse. Sure, these girls are hungry, feral, and on the edge of insanity. But, my goodness, have a little tact! Plausibility 10/10.
This could very well be the case, and it’s a clever catch by viewers. In shows like Yellowjackets, writers plant several seeds so casually that audiences often don’t notice. Of course, with a fanbase as dedicated as this show’s, everything is under a magnifying glass. Given that winter has descended upon the cabin, and that Coach Ben’s lack of a leg makes him an expendable target for flesh-hungry high schoolers, it’s doubtful that he’ll survive until the group is rescued. Additionally, this is just an easy way for the writers to introduce a new character with a fresh motive later in the show—they’d be almost foolish not to act on it sometime. Plausibility: 9/10.
Considering Yellowjackets is meant to run for five seasons, I’m not sure we’ll find out if this theory is right or not in Season 2. But I think it’s a fun one to think about regardless!
In case you’ve forgotten, the opening scene of the entire series is of an unknown girl running through the woods, clearly being chased. She’s wearing Jackie’s golden heart necklace and a nightgown. Her foot is bleeding. We have no clue what happened, who she is, or why she’s running—and before we really have time to ask ourselves these questions, the so-called “pit girl” falls to her pointy death.
From there, the survivors (we only see Misty; the rest are obscured) hang her, bleed her out, and then cook her. Then our little cannibals feast on their dead, delectable friend. No wonder everyone calls this the teen cannibals show!
The idea that this is the final kill is compelling, in part because it plays into the show’s fascinating supernatural elements. If the girls think that they are sacrificing their friend to a supposed forest spirit not just for food, but also for luck, it’s a fun way to substantiate the whole mysticism thing the show’s got going on. It’s also a shocking way to end their time in the forest—the team does their most horrifying kill for their own survival, just as they’re about to be taken back home. We dig it and we support it! Plausibility: 9/10.
Here’s another one that relies on holding close to a one-off mention from Season 1. Because of that, it does seem like it might come into play in Season 2 or beyond. Using basic math, we can deduce that Shauna and Jeff’s daughter, Callie, is not the baby that Shauna is pregnant with in the woods. The first season of the show is set in 2021, while the Yellowjackets went missing in 1996. That would make Callie 25 years old, and we know that, in the show, she’s still in high school.
This means that something is bound to happen with Shauna’s first pregnancy. Given that the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets will amp up in Season 2 (much to some fans’ dismay—and our gleeful joy), it’s not too far-fetched that we could see a Rosemary’s Baby-esque fate be deployed here. Sure, that’s unfortunate. But ask yourself what’s better: A possessed baby, or the campers eating the baby? There’s nothing good that can come of this. Plausibility: 8/10.
A large part of the plot in the show’s 1996 timeline is about whether Travis’ little brother Javi is still alive. He disappeared in the plane crash—and considering he’s not seen in the present-day timeline whatsoever, and the fact that they’re all stuck in some cold-ass winter, the likelihood of him being alive is slim.
But this theory supports our girl Lottie’s own theory, which is that Javi is still alive. Lottie can feel his presence, or so she claims; her insistence is both convincing and encouraging for Travis, who certainly doesn’t want his brother to be dead. But it’s hard to know if Lottie’s full of it or not, considering her supernatural powers are, well, supernatural. The realistic take is that Javi is dead, but I do think that Yellowjackets is able and willing to surprise us by following a more subversive path. Plus, the idea that something proves Lottie’s own ability to sense and predict the future could divide the group of survivors makes a lot of sense to us—whether that has to do with Javi or something else entirely. Plausibility: 7.5/10.
“The Yellowjackets theme song is a clue to the characters’ fates.”
While it’s certainly a interesting theory, it would require the show’s writers to lay out the plan for the entire series for Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, who wrote and recorded “No Return.” We know from an interview with Showtime’s President of Entertainment that the show’s creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, had not yet laid out the second season’s plotline for execs prior to the end of Season 1. What’s more, Wedren and Waronker confirmed to Pitchfork that the song’s lyrics were written very quickly, in a grungy stream of consciousness to convey the show’s ’90s setting. So, while it’s solid detective work, this is a very loose theory that doesn’t hold as much weight. The theme is just a good, old headbanger! Plausibility: 2/10.
We love the way this Redditor’s mind works. The theory here is that the show throws us for a loop by doing the impossible: keeping this baby alive, despite being born into the literal worst possible circumstances.
Shauna already has a daughter in the present-day timeline, the annoying teenage brat Callie, but we know that she’s not the baby that was born in the woods; she’s 16 in the present-day timeline, which means she was born in the early 2000s. But what if Shauna (and Jeff) has a full adult child running around somewhere out there, unaware of who their birth parents are and even where he was born? It would be kind of hilarious to find out that the baby who was born despite his mom taking mushrooms, surviving the freezing cold, and probably eating her friends is the most well-adjusted member of the cast.
This seems incredibly unlikely, but I wish it were real. Here’s hoping the show throws us for a loop—even though there is no way that this baby is making it out alive. Plausibility: 1/10.
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