Summary
Yellowjackets Season 3 loses a bit of its energy in Episode 7, which has a couple of shocks but is mostly content to be more workmanlike.
I’m not sure now’s the time to be introducing new characters into Yellowjackets Season 3. The show has mostly worked by maintaining a tight cast, albeit two distinct versions of them. But that’s the point. The drama and the mystery live in what happened in the past to define the present; what the adult versions of these characters are still hiding that – we’re led to believe – the wilderness demands they eventually share. Episode 7, “Croak”, introduces not only a wildcard outdoorsman but also, potentially, a new inductee of the Yellowjackets themselves.
It’s also worth noting that after “Thanksgiving (Canada)”, the best episode of the season, “Croak” feels like a notable step down. Is it bad? Absolutely not. It makes progress in all of the key areas and has a couple of shocking scenes. But it’s also largely unambitious and content to be workmanlike in both timelines, lacking that additional pizazz just as it seemed like the show was whipping up a head of steam.
Anyway, things start more or less where they left off, albeit after a brief contextual introduction for three new characters played by Joel McHale (Psych 2), Nelson Franklin, and Ashley Sutton. It’s Edwin (Franklin) who showed up at the end of the previous episode and was shocked to see Coach Ben’s head being served for dinner. He and Hannah (Sutton) are comically enthusiastic scientists trying to record the vocalizations of an undocumented frog species during their rare mating ritual, which is also, as it happens, the explanation Yellowjackets offers for that deeply weird noise that we were to assume was the wilderness keening for offerings.
Kodiak (McHale) is a crossbow-wielding wilderness guide whose unsubtle flirting with Hannah is reciprocated right in front of Edwin in a way that makes it feel like a high-school drama has been transplanted to the Canadian wilderness. Seriously, the pretty geek girl falls for the abrupt jock at the expense of her bookish husband? I’m glad we don’t linger on this for too long.
The reason we don’t linger, by the way, is because the second Kodi arrives in the camp, Lottie buries a hatchet in the back of his skull. This is the most shocking moment of Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 7, but in the context of the show overall it’s not a big deal. We’ve seen Cult Leader Lottie do plenty of weird stuff already. Braining a stranger isn’t quite as sinister as serving your friends for dinner.
But the other girls aren’t keen on the development since the new arrivals potentially meant salvation, even though Kodi had followed the smell of barbecue to the camp in the first place because his flirting with Hannah earlier had broken the satellite phone and he wasn’t confident in his ability to lead them out of the woods. “Croak” packs a lot of details into the brief, chaotic scene of Edwin’s death – check out Shauna’s reaction – but it’s too frenzied to draw anything meaningful from. The main takeaway is that it divides the camp between the girls who fervently want to go home and have just been playing up to the wilderness spirits for something to do in the meantime, and those like Lottie who might quietly intend to stay here forever.
This division becomes more literal throughout the flashback scenes, with the Yellowjackets splitting into groups to try and track down Kodi and Hannah, who escaped in the chaos, while Gen and Mari stay behind to tend to Melissa, who took one of Kodi’s arrows in her chest. This ultimately ends up being Hannah’s bargaining chip, since when she’s cornered, she reveals the location of some medical supplies that might be used to save Melissa’s life. Shauna, the most likely to kill her, is also the most likely to put Melissa’s life first, so Hannah doesn’t quite realize how lucky she is.
Joel McHale and Ashley Sutton in Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
Of course, she can’t be that lucky, since the present-day scenes strongly imply that Hannah and Kodi never made it out of the wilderness. Shauna is now fixated on the theory that Hannah’s daughter is the one who’s trying to kill her. The tape she received was recorded by Hannah as a message to her daughter, who she gave birth to as a teenager. So, it’s not a totally wild theory that news of what happened to the group might have left the wilderness, even if Hannah, Edwin, and Kodi didn’t.
And as far as we can tell they didn’t. The press reported on their disappearance, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary because people go missing in wildernesses all the time, and since they were supposed to be 100 miles away from the Yellowjackets crash site, the two incidents were never connected. But they’re about to be – by Callie, of all people.
The road trip to confront Hannah’s mysterious daughter, which Tai, Van, and Misty all come along for, is waylaid by two developments. The first is that Misty gets a call from Walter confirming that the DNA under Lottie’s fingernails belongs to Shauna, implying she’s the killer. But this is coming right after Tai was implicated in the same murder, so unless they were working together without the knowledge of the other, it’s probably more likely that it was someone else entirely.
The other thing is Van starts vomiting blood. The last we heard her cancer had stopped metastasizing, but she isn’t totally out of the woods, which only enables Tai’s warped viewpoint that it’s perfectly acceptable to keep sacrificing people to the wilderness to prolong their own lives. This, she claims, is what she was asking Lottie about when she secretly met her on the day she died. This is also why Tai’s darker half seems to be in control; she’s going against Van’s wishes to keep her alive. It’s almost a romantic gesture. Almost.
Fittingly, it’s Other Tai who Van sees as she slips in and out of consciousness, implying that Tai is going to do whatever she needs to in order to keep Van alive, and Van is going to have all that guilt on her conscience. This is somewhat less romantic.
Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 7 ends with Shauna parked outside Hannah’s daughter’s house with a knife, after having stormed off from the hospital following Misty’s accusation about Lottie. It also ends with Callie taking her findings about Edwin, Hannah, and Kodi to Jeff, floating the very viable theory that perhaps Shauna isn’t quite the good guy she has painted herself out to be. At this point, that seems a given. But quite how bad is she?
