Summary
Yellowjackets sees evil manifesting in various forms in both the past and present day, showcasing a darkly comic undertone all the while.
This recap of Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 3, “Digestif”, contains spoilers.
The thing about sinister, presumably ancient evils that lurk in forests is that they tend to be quite persistent.
Thus, “Digestif” is largely about that evil – we’re agreed on the show’s supernatural component being a real thing, aren’t we? – haunting the Yellowjackets both in the past and present, manifesting as deadly psychoses and cult leadership and murder cover-ups.
Either these are the unluckiest women in the world, or something sinister is afoot.
Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 3 Recap
How does Shauna get her minivan back?
Nobody in the present-day storyline is doing especially well, but Shauna is unraveling quite quickly. Although, perhaps unraveling isn’t the right word – maybe it’s more like coming into her true self, as evidenced by her excitedly threatening to shoot a man while trembling with anticipation.
How did we get here? In the past, the girls throw a baby shower for Shauna that takes quite a turn thanks to Lottie. She gifts the kid a blanket with the weird symbol stitched on it, and then it starts raining birds. Lottie instructs the girls to gather the mysteriously perished avians as “blessings”, and not having a better option, they do.
I’m not sure how this connects to Shauna chasing down a minivan thief in the present day and describing to him, in detail, what it feels like to peel someone’s skin off, but I’m sure it does.
Everything with Shauna and Jeff cracks me up, especially now the pressure of covering up Adam’s death is getting to them. Jeff trying to be more masculine and impulsive but instantly crumbling at the last minute is a riot. But it’s exposing some deeper rot in Shauna’s psyche that doesn’t bode well for the future.
Speaking of psyches and rot, let’s talk about Taissa.
Why does Taissa go looking for Van?
Taissa’s past and present storylines both touch on the same ideas: That Taissa is inhabited by a dark alternate personality, and that she has a particular connection to Van. We obviously haven’t seen Van in the present day yet, but she’s coming, especially since in “Digestif” Tai decides to go looking for her after her demonic reflection makes a symbol in the mirror evoking Van’s mask.
I’m unclear about whether Tai has always had this split-personality thing or if it’s just a manifestation of what’s happening in the woods, though if it’s the latter I don’t know why it would manifest in this way specifically for Tai but nobody else.
However, in the flashbacks, we see that she wasn’t conscious of the girls eating Jackie. She doesn’t even recall it, and Van has to remind her that she hungrily ate her face. When the dark half of Tai takes over, it always heads straight to trees marked with the weird symbol, chasing the Eyeless Man.
In the present-day Tai’s alternate persona is beginning to take over more and more. She’s so exhausted that she can’t tell what’s real and imagined, but it’s clear these aren’t delusions. Whenever she loses control, she does terrible things to her wife and dog and son. It’s more like possession.
The logical question is whether Shauna’s murderous rant was the same thing happening to her – the evil taking control. It might be, but Shauna seemed cognizant of what she was saying and doing, and there was no suggestion after that she couldn’t recall it.
Is Lottie really supernatural?
Lottie is obviously connected to all this, but not in the same way.
In the past, it was strongly implied that Lottie somehow commanded all the birds to drop dead. In the present, after describing to Nat how newborn queen bees kill all the other queens in their eggs, she discovers all the bees in the honey farm dead and pulls out a tray sticky not with honey but blood. It’s a vision, not real, whereas the flashback sequence creates no ambiguity around the dead birds, but the parallel between them is clear.
So, what’s the deal here? Is Lottie a charlatan, or is she using some kind of “gift” given to her in the woods as a means to control her cult? Why did something unseen apparently murder Travis in front of her, and why did she see Laura Lee’s ghost?
There are no obvious answers to any of these queries, but it seems as if Lottie is functioning as some kind of conduit for the evil; she was then, and she is now.
How does Misty find out about Lottie’s cult?
There’s always a darkly comic undertone to Yellowjackets, and you can definitely see it in Shauna and Jeff, but it mostly manifests through Misty.
After hooking up with Walter (Elijah Wood), a citizen detective team-up for the ages, they (badly) interrogate a potential source of information who turns out to be Randy, Misty’s old classmate and Jeff’s best friend.
While Randy reveals nothing concrete, he does mention people dressed in purple, which obviously puts Misty on the trail of Lottie’s cult, suggesting she can track them by tracing the credit card used to make payments at the vending machine.
Misty has no idea Lottie is at the head of this cult, or even that it is a cult, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens when she follows the clues. It’s also unclear what Walter’s motivations might be, beyond having apparently fallen for Christina Ricci, which is understandable enough.
You can stream Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 3, “Digestif” exclusively on Showtime.
