Summary
Yellowjackets Season 3 gets very weird in Episode 3, much to its own detriment, and it’s becoming increasingly unclear where this show is ultimately going.
If I asked you what Yellowjackets is about, what would you say? For most shows, it’d be an easy question to answer, but for this one, I’m not so sure. The first season was pretty explicitly a dark comedy riffing on the Mean Girls trope by taking it to its logical extreme. The second season is much more difficult to describe, though, and Season 3 seems similarly inscrutable. The two-part premiere seemed to be getting things back on track to an extent, but Episode 3, “Them’s the Brakes”, can’t wait to go off the rails.
Depending on where you’re sitting, this will be either a good or a bad thing. Some people like absurdity, after all, and a talking llama – more on this below – certainly qualifies. But the concern with Yellowjackets is that this is all happening in the absence of anything else. Following on from the question I posed at the start, if I asked you if you knew more about the show’s central mystery now than when you started, would you be able to say you did?
Part of this comes down to the show’s refusal to clarify whether it believes in the supernatural or not, which is of particular concern in “Them’s the Brakes” because it descends into a string of elaborate visions that speak in the language of supernatural horror but also have a rational-ish explanation. So, if they’re just hallucinations with no deeper meaning beyond what they have to say about the particular characters experiencing them, what’s the point?
This all occurs in the past timeline. Picking up after the premiere Mari is still a captive of Coach Ben, but his heart isn’t in it. Their exchanges harken back to the show’s more darkly comedic roots, I thought; Mari trying to seduce him, Ben cutting her down, and a mutual bear spray exchange which is really ridiculous. Eventually Ben lets Mari go, and she does no more than immediately tell the others where she’s been. Since the gang still thinks Ben burned down their cabin at the end of Season 2, they’re out for revenge.
While looking for Ben in the dark, Shauna, Van, and Akilah all succumb to some kind of airborne toxin and start having pretty wild visions. Shauna’s is at least comprehendible, since it’s an outgrowth of the pain she feels over her stillborn child; she imagines an older version on the shore of a lake she’s in the middle of, but no matter how hard she swims, she never gets any closer. Van’s is a bit weirder. She finds a door in the cave leading to a plush little cabin in the woods, which promptly catches fire. As it burns, Van’s chair transforms into plane seat, and arms reach around from behind to hold her in place as she struggles against them.
But it’s Akilah’s vision that’s properly nuts. She’s the one who encounters the llama, which talks in the voice of a mid-level New Jersey mobster and gives cryptic insights about “it”, which frustrates me because I’m reasonably confident that nobody in the show’s writers room has firmly decided what “it” even is. It’s a bit like how the Force is a deliberately nebulous thing designed to paper over plot contrivances with a magical handwave. Yellowjackets is using the concept of “it” the same way. Is it a legitimate supernatural force that existed in the wilderness before the girls arrived and compelled them to acts of cultism and savagery? Or is it a collective excuse for the lengths they had to go to in order to survive?
Sophie Nélisse in Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
It’s possible that it’s both. But the length of time that Yellowjackets has spent undecided on the matter has created an environment where a silly talking llama is so out of place that it’s actively frustrating. What are we doing here? After a final shared vision that finds all the girls in a classroom with Lottie as the teacher and Jackie present just to excuse an Ella Purnell cameo, they wake up to Ben telling them they’re all suffering from some kind of gas poisoning. But they take him hostage anyway.
The present-day sequences of Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 3, though, seem to operate on the basis that there is some kind of longstanding supernatural influence shaping things. How else do you explain, for instance, Van’s miraculous cancer remission, which is even puzzling her doctors? Tai assumes that her newly extended lifespan has been bought and paid for by the death of the waiter who chased them, which causes her to pray to the wilderness – to “it” – in thanks.
Tai also identifies the Man With No Eyes as a character from an old ice cream commercial that she reckons she must have manifested in her visions after squatting in her subconscious all those years, but that doesn’t make a great deal of sense because in the shared classroom vision, it seems like all the girls see him walk past, and Tai’s grandmother also saw him before she died. It also doesn’t explain why Tai and Van visit the abandoned ice cream place and are greeted by a coyote holding a rabbit in its mouth, which they both interpret as a sign from “it”, even sceptical Van.
Shauna’s subplot thankfully doesn’t have these issues, but it’s slower moving and a bit frustrating on its own terms. After her brakes fail, Shauna accuses Misty of sabotaging her car and says some very unsavoury things to her as a result, which annoyingly kind of proves Walter’s point, and she then goes home to find Callie wearing Jackie’s necklace, given to her as a gift from Lottie, and goes ballistic. It’s nice to see the more sinister side of Shauna creeping into the present day, but it’s still very, very difficult to see where all this is going, and not in a good way.
Let’s just hope it’s going somewhere.
