Summary
Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 8 finally reveals who Hilary Swank is playing, but that’s the least notable thing that happens in “A Normal, Boring Life”.
One of the meta mysteries of Yellowjackets Season 3 has been who Hilary Swank is playing, and if nothing else, Episode 8, “A Normal, Boring Life”, answers that question. But it’s probably the least interesting thing that comes up in both timelines, especially when you’ve got incredibly poor decision-making in the past and Shauna biting chunks out of people in the present.
I still don’t love how sudden the arrival of Hannah and Kodi was, and how important it now feels to the plot. In the present day, Shauna finally decides to confront Hannah’s daughter, who she figures is the person who has been tormenting her about what happened in the wilderness (and is potentially trying to kill her), and makes an alarming discovery – she’s married to a grown-up Melissa (Swank), who has reinvented herself as a woman named Kelly after staging her own suicide.
Melissa claims to have faked her death out of fear of the other surviving Yellowjackets, especially Shauna, but marrying the daughter of someone they killed – Hannah’s still alive in the flashbacks, though one imagines not for long based on this – isn’t exactly distancing herself from the situation. Shauna calls Melissa out on this contradiction, but she also starts to lose it in a way that suggests Melissa was probably right to be scared of her in the first place.
To be fair, Shauna has a right to be annoyed. She brandishes the incriminating tape she was sent and demands an explanation, which is innocuous enough. Melissa explains that Hannah told her where the tape was and asked her to share it with her daughter, Alex, when she made it back to civilization, but once she heard its contents, she realized she couldn’t do that. So, she kept it in a safe deposit box instead, intending to perhaps use it as a nuclear option if the other Yellowjackets tried to implicate her in anything, and then kept tabs on Alex. Those tabs led to them meeting, falling in love, and having a daughter. The “normal, boring life” of the title is theirs.
But she did send Shauna the tape. It was supposed to be a nice gesture after a therapist encouraged her to dispose of any attachments to her past, and was apparently sent with a note that explained all this. That’s news to Shauna, but on the flip side, Shauna’s brakes being cut and her being locked in the freezer, not to mention Lottie’s murder, are news to Melissa. So, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. But Melissa’s theory that Shauna is perhaps imagining it all, reinventing mundane random events in her mind as attempts on her life through self-importance, doesn’t sit especially well with Shauna.
So badly does it sit, in fact, that when Melissa makes a dash for a knife, Shauna jumps on her and begins pummelling her. Just when it looks like Melissa might get the upper hand, Shauna bites a chunk out of her arm and rips the flesh away with her teeth. With blood smeared across her face, she demands that Melissa eat herself, or else she’ll expose who she really is to her new family.
Yikes!
While this is going on, Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 8 occasionally flits back to Jeff and Callie languishing in the motel room, both steadily coming to their own conclusions about Shauna that largely mimic Melissa’s. But I have a new theory. I think it’s Callie who has been tormenting Shauna. Her adamance about how wrong she is about everything, her behaviour throughout the season, it all points to her being guilty. Are we doing a warped variation of the apple not falling far from the tree? I think we might be.
Jasmin Savoy Brown and Liv Hewson in Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
Either way, Jeff is buying what Callie’s selling (his steady breakdown throughout “A Normal, Boring Life” as he tries and fails to get back in touch with Misty is very funny.) He even throws Shauna under the bus to try to secure the business deal that she ruined. He and Callie seem to be moving on, but as mentioned above, I reckon Callie will ultimately have other ideas.
In other bleak news, Van is dying. And I don’t just mean the cancer is back despite her being told it was mysteriously in remission, I mean she’s looking at end-of-life care. And Tai, predictably, can’t accept this, so she drags Misty to the palliative care ward with the intention of suffocating a dying man to death, appeasing the wilderness spirits, and buying Van some more time. She can’t quite go through with it, but the guy flatlines anyway, raising some questions about the logistical issues of forest spirit sacrifices. Does this count?
It’s probably neither here nor there, since Other Tai has very much taken over at this point, but interestingly, the two personalities seem to have completely diverged into two separate physical forms. When Tai walks into Van’s room, she hears a knocking on the door and turns to see her saner half trying desperately to get in. But the dark side is in control. And I can’t quite tell if this is a filmmaking flourish designed to highlight the two warring personalities inside Tai’s body, or if there are genuinely two of them knocking about.
This question of what’s real and what’s not is also pondered over in the flashback sequences, since Travis tries to convince Akilah that her visions were simply the result of cave toxins, and all the wilderness hoodoo mumbo jumbo has just been something that they’ve clung to out of desperation. But there’s a clear schism forming between the true believers and those, like Travis, who just want to get out of there and see Kodi as a way of doing that.
This becomes very literal when Akilah leaves a trail of fabric so the other Yellowjackets can track them, and Kodi and the other two end up being taken back to camp. Kodi reckons he can get them to rescue in six days, and at first the camp seems all for it (with the predictable exception of Lottie). But with the possibility of salvation closer than ever, the wilderness seems to be acting up, and there are signs that some of the girls are strung to “It” by more visible tethers than others. The Man with No Eyes hovers behind Tai, Shauna is hypnotically distracted by a moth, Akilah hallucinates that all the animals and crops have died, and Natalie hears noises.
This is perhaps why they decide to stay. Lottie is the first to decide that she’s remaining behind, but Shauna quickly follows suit and bullies the others into remaining. Why? What’s in it for them? And if they don’t leave with Kodi, how are they ultimately going to get home?
