Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5 Recap – Who did Misty Kill?

This recap of Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5, “Two Truths and a Lie”, contains spoilers.

One of the most common responses to trauma is to pretend it never happened. People do it all the time. You don’t talk about it. You live your life in such a way that you’re rarely reminded of it. You don’t heal this way, of course, but sometimes you’re allowed to forget, if only for a while, which is almost – but not quite – the same thing.

But it always catches up. In the same way that a lie will always be exposed, and a debt will always come due, trauma lives inside you. You carry it around, and at the slightest opportunity, it’ll once again reveal itself in its horrifying fullness. Immediately, you’re back where you started, the pain as fresh as it ever was.

Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5 Recap

Yellowjackets, with its dual timeline structure, has always been about this. As it turns out, you can’t eat a dead friend in the wilderness and just carry on as normal after. You can’t leave your friends for dead, splattered at the bottom of an icy cliff, and just forget. Every footprint you take beyond the line of what’s moral and acceptable leaves a clear imprint in the snow that’ll lead to you forever. You carry the guilt of your failures wherever you go.

“Two Truths and a Lie” is more adamant than any previous episode that the Yellowjackets haven’t just carried this guilt home with them, but something else besides.

Where are Tai and Van “supposed to be”?

Episode 4 of this season ended on a substantial cliffhanger, with Adult Tai hitchhiking across America to reunite with Adult Van, who hasn’t been seen thus far in the series.

Even in the snippet we saw of her last week, it was frightening how much her adult counterpart resembled the teen version. But you really see it here. It’s a casting flourish, obviously, but it’s also a triumph of the writing and a finely observed bit of performance. The uneasy, vaguely exciting chemistry between the two continues in the present day as if no time has elapsed since the past.

Van is living a life that is essentially in stasis, barricading herself in a quaint little store behind towers of VHS tapes. It’s like nobody told her the 90s ended. They did, though, and you can occasionally see the light of the present refracted through half-empty bottles of prescription pills.

Van is one of the few people aware of Dark Tai, and, it seems, one of the few people Dark Tai doesn’t want to torment or behead. In fact, after Tai has a brief nap, she awakens as her sultrier alter-ego and plants a big wet kiss on Van before telling her, “This isn’t where we’re supposed to be.”

But where are they supposed to be? The implication, I suppose, is that it’s back in the wilderness, back where everything started, where whatever evil is stalking them took root.

Who did Misty kill?

There’s a funny bit of juxtaposition in “Two Truths and a Lie”, which while we’re on the subject is named after the game that Walter has Misty play while they’re driving around. (He cheats and offers three truths, surely the behavior of a narcissist.)

Walter thinks he has it all figured out, and as we see in the flashbacks, he almost does.

He has certainly pegged Misty for a killer. He’s wrong in that he thinks she killed Adam, but she did kill someone. And she wasn’t shy about covering up Adam’s death either, so maybe he gets half a point.

This deduction doesn’t put Walter off Misty. He actually finds it quite charming, since apparently his grandmother killed his grandfather and she was a lovely person, so what can you do? It’s probably telling of Misty that this show of openness and expression of interest in her scares her so completely that she runs into the embrace of Lottie’s purple cult.

So, who did Misty actually kill? It was Crystal, though whether by accident or intentionally it’s a little hard to tell. Either way, while getting carried away with their closeness and sudden bouts of revealing, freeing honesty, Misty confesses to having destroyed the black box in the plane wreckage since she was enjoying being needed and respected so much. Crystal is horrified to hear this, and Misty, recognizing immediately she has made an extraordinary error in judgment, pushes her off the edge of a cliff.

What does Shauna ask Randy to do?

We mentioned Adam’s death above, so we might as well talk briefly about Shauna, who spends this episode cleaning up a mess her daughter Callie has made by oversharing with a man she discovers is really an undercover policeman. (This discovery occurs during a wonderfully awkward scene in which Callie tries to entice him into a snog while ten-pin bowling.)

To cover her back, Callie “reveals” that Shauna was having an affair with Jeff’s best friend Randy, and not the guy she’s suspected of killing, so Shauna, suspecting that the police will be following her, gets Jeff to set up a meeting between her and Randy in a seedy motel. She instructs him to jerk off into a condom – with specific instructions not to think about her while doing so – so that the police have some evidence to discover. However, Randy can’t complete the assignment and instead fills the contraceptive with strawberry-scented lotion.

Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5 Ending Explained

As ever, both the present-day scenes and the flashbacks reiterate the idea of Lottie being some kind of magical vessel for whatever evil inhabitants the wilderness to move through the other Yellowjackets.

This is most apparent in the past, which is where the episode ends on another characteristic cliffhanger. But of particular note is not just how Lottie’s influence is growing but how her otherworldly preaching and bizarre methodologies seem to be working.

What seems very much like some kind of burgeoning psychic connection leads Tai and Shauna back from the woods to the cabin after they get trapped in a snowstorm, which is just as well since Shauna is in labor. We cut to black just as she’s presumably about to give birth.

You can stream Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5, “Two Truths and a Lie” exclusively on Showtime.