Summary
Yellowjackets Season 3 gets suitably bonkers in Episode 9. “How the Story Ends” doesn’t quite live up to its title given there’s still the finale to go, but you can see the light at the end of the tunnel by now.
I’ve got to be honest; I’m starting to lose track of Yellowjackets a bit. Between the dual timelines, switching perspectives, surreal dreamscapes, dark side alter egos, and flesh-eating past and present, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s what. I’m not an oncologist, but even keeping up with Van’s cancer is hard work, though admittedly, after Episode 9 of Season 3, that isn’t much of a concern.
A lot of the weird stuff revolves around Van in “How the Story Ends”, which technically isn’t how the story ends, since there’s still another episode to go. But since she’s technically dying in a hospital bed, it’s a good excuse for a few scenes in a halfway house of consciousness, somewhere between living and dying, where teenage Van counsels adult Van on her mysterious purpose.
There’s some novelty in seeing the younger and older versions of the same character interact in the same scene, since that’s generally impossible for obvious reasons, and it’s deployed to good effect here. Yellowjackets has been building to this sleight-of-hand trick for multiple episodes. First, Van was dying of cancer, then she wasn’t, then she was again. Imminently. But because this has been folded into Taissa’s ongoing battle with her evil alter-ego and has repeatedly floated the idea of sacrifices to “It” to keep Van alive indefinitely, the audience logically assumes that Van’s The Goonies-inspired hero’s journey will lead her along a path where X marks the spot to her own salvation.
It’s implied during “How the Story Ends” that Melissa represents that salvation. The dots join themselves. After breaking out of her own home where Shauna has held her captive, Melissa runs into the others, who have broken Van out of the hospital, and she’s standing beneath an X on a railroad crossing sign. What else is Van supposed to think?
When it comes down to it, though, Van still isn’t the kind of person who will murder someone on the off chance it might prolong her own life. Melissa is, though. I was genuinely shocked when Melissa plunged the knife into Van’s chest, for multiple reasons. One of them was just shock – it was unexpected given how seemingly forthright Melissa has been (even though Shauna’s ruthlessness, intimidation, and violence in the past is what initially attracted Melissa to her). But another was confusion. If Van’s the sacrifice, who is she being sacrificed for?
It becomes obvious eventually, through a few scenes with Tai and teen Van’s explicit dialogue, that the point of Van’s sacrifice was to free Taissa from her dark half, the Other Tai, to give her the power to overwhelm that persona. The greatest treasure of all – true love. It’s sweet in that sense. But it also means that it’s naïve, vulnerable Tai who finds herself sobbing over Van’s corpse. The noble self-sacrifice is here rewritten as a betrayal of Van by Melissa, and of Van by herself, who deliberately misled her into believing that she’d survive.
Kevin Alves in Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
Van’s death isn’t the only one in Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 9, but it’s the most impactful. The other is Kodi’s, which is in the past timeline. Hannah stabs him in the eye to prove to the others, particularly Shauna, that she wants to be part of the gang. It’s a pure survival play with very little subtext unless you want to float the idea that perhaps meek, bookish Hannah has been waiting for this kind of opportunity all her life (and I’m not stopping you.)
Hannah is caught in the middle of a civil war of sorts. The camp has divided into two distinct factions – those led by Nat, who think that the smart thing to do is allow Hannah and Kodi to lead them out of the woods and home to safety, and those led by Shauna, who want to stay and brave the wilderness winter again for totally inexplicable but inevitably cult-y reasons. In the midst of this is a bit of business involving Misty having kept the plane’s transponder since Season 1, which has an antenna that could be used to fix the satellite phone, so I guess that’s going to be the ultimate path to salvation for the Yellowjackets. But there’s plenty that could – and probably will – happen to them in the meantime.
It’s easy to imagine that the avatar of their remaining discomfort will be Shauna, since she even turns on Melissa in “How the Story Ends”, going some way towards explaining the state of their relationship in the present-day scenes and why Melissa is so terrified of her, despite initially finding allure in that power. We know the Yellowjackets do eventually get home, but at this point, it’s still hard to see how they’re going to broach this impasse and get everyone on the plane.
But we mustn’t forget – there’s a killer on the loose in the present day that seems so likely to be Shauna that I can’t help returning to the theory about Callie that I posited last week. The only hints we get in this regard in Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 9 come from Misty, who leaves Melissa’s house when she – rightly – senses things are getting out of hand and heads to Walter’s, where she finally compels him to let her have a look at Lottie’s phone. On it, she finds something that causes her visible shock, but we don’t find out what. I reckon that’s the proof that Callie murdered Lottie, and is perhaps trying to murder her own mother too.
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