Summary
Yellowjackets undermines Season 3 with another frustrating finale, one which lacks all the payoff clarity you expect from an ending.
The point of an ending is, ostensibly, to provide answers and dramatic payoff, which is a concept that for some reason Yellowjackets has never quite understood. This is a show that has had spurts of brilliance – as a character drama, as a mystery, as a supernatural horror. But it’s also a show that has had no idea what to do with itself, what it wants to be, or at least be about, and that is always most evident in its finales. Season 3 is no different. Episode 10, “Full Circle”, provides some answers to season-specific matters like who Pit Girl is and who killed Lottie, but it completely fails to unpack the core questions at the heart of the story or conclusively determine whether that story should continue or, mercifully, conclude.
This finale is so-called because, I kid you not, Shauna starts journaling again. That admittedly sounds more ridiculous written down than it is in practice, because what she’s journaling about is why she and the other Yellowjackets have struggled so much to recall what happened in the wilderness. Her thesis is that they enjoyed it so much that in the intensity of being so alive, they lost the capacity for self-reflection. She’s clearly talking about herself more than the group, though, since the flashbacks have made it pretty clear that she enjoyed it much more than everyone else did. But that’s the point of this “full circle” moment. Shauna is a monster, and the wilderness allowed her to embrace that. It made her a warrior-queen, and since returning to civilization she has traded that in to be a wife and a mother and an upstanding(ish) member of society. In picking up the pen and writing this down, she is re-awakening that side of herself.
In some ways this works. It calls back to Shauna’s early habit of writing down her experiences after the crash. It sort of explains why in the present day Shauna has always seemed like the most well-adjusted of the survivors, the one who truly moved on and recalled the events in the woods with enough clarity to know that she had to distance herself from them, not allow them to continue dominating her life. It stands to reason that she was able to rationalize them because they didn’t cause her to suffer any genuine trauma. She was the trauma. She has been cosplaying normality ever since.
But on the other hand it doesn’t work as the big season-ending cliffhanger because we already know Shauna’s nuts. She has been monstrous in the past all season and just last week she force-fed her ex-girlfriend’s arm to her. Nothing is illuminating about this. And the claims that Shauna was repressing the memories feel nonsensical to me; the show never indicated that was the case. It runs contrary to all of her established present-day characterization. Yellowjackets once again wants us to blithely swallow something that hasn’t been set up or developed before this moment.
Nowhere is it more obvious that the show has no idea what it’s doing half the time than the resolution to the Callie subplot. I’ve been pushing this enthusiastically for weeks, predicting that we were doing the whole “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” angle, assuming that Shauna embracing her true nature would dovetail with the reveal that she had inadvertently birthed an equally monstrous successor. But nope. It turns out Callie did kill Lottie, but it was just an accident.
This is the stupidest possible outcome given how everything else has been framed. It’s significantly more interesting for Callie to be living up to Shauna’s nutcase example than trying to avoid becoming her. Taking the easy way out leads to a slightly more effective payoff in Jeff’s development, since the reality of what Callie has done compels him to take her and leave the house and Shauna behind, finally standing up to his wife. But I’d have much rather seen his reaction to the news that Callie was his wife reborn.
As for the conclusion to Tai and Van’s love story, I’m not so sure about that either. The idea that Van’s sacrifice freed Tai from her dark other half works well enough, but in “Full Circle” Tai tearfully buries her love… and then cuts out one of her organs – it’s difficult to tell which – and eats it raw. What is this trying to imply? That Tai never got over what happened in the wilderness? That she thought the best way to honour Van was to consume her as they did back then, and that’s all there is to it? It’s clearly just a scene shoved in for shock’s sake.
A still from Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 10 splits its time pretty evenly between the present day and the flashbacks since there isn’t a great deal actually going on in either timeline, so it has to fill time somehow. Of primary concern in the past is the reveal of who Pit Girl is – and it turns out to be Mari. The circumstances surrounding this reveal are a little forced. It’s initially supposed to be Hannah who draws the Queen and becomes the hunted, but Shauna, who is now ruling the camp with an iron fist and Hannah at her side, recognises that Tai and Van manipulated the draw and it’s instead Mari who ends up with the Queen.
It’s nice to get an answer about this but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it all since really the identity of Pit Girl was the least pressing issue. Of more concern, at least to me, is the nature of the wilderness itself and the precise circumstances of the Yellowjackets’ eventual rescue. And the Season 3 finale does obliquely address these things, but largely makes the situation worse by being deliberately vague in its explanation.
There are two competing possibilities. One is that the wilderness was never really conscious, and that the girls, primarily through Lottie, used the idea of “It” to justify the lengths they had to go to in order to survive. And then, they used it to justify how much further they took things than that; to justify the pleasure they took in killing, be it each other or outsiders, and the joy they gleaned from eating each other. If Lottie was mentally susceptible to this kind of thing in the first place, it makes sense that she would then return to civilization still believing that “It” was real, which is what flashbacks reveal she said to Callie when she confronted her just before her death.
The other possibility is that the wilderness is real, and was a legitimate driving force behind what the girls did. If this is the case then Lottie’s claims that they could never escape it, that it lived inside them and would follow them home, ring true. In this context, Callie would be a gift from the wilderness itself, a purer vessel for its malice, which would totally jive with the idea of her having killed Lottie deliberately. But she didn’t, or at least claims not to have done. It’s totally bizarre that Yellowjackets still refuses to commit one way or the other.
The ending of Yellowjackets Season 3 brings the girls one step closer to rescue. Nat teams up with Hannah to outsmart Shauna and use the repaired satellite phone to summon help – the very end of the finale finds a static-y voice on the other end of the line respond to Nat’s desperate pleas for help. But it doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding what’s really going on or why we should care about any of it, which seems like a pretty major issue three seasons in. Usually being unable to deduce where a show might go next would be perceived as good thing. In the case of Yellowjackets, though, I’m beginning to suspect it’s because nobody has any idea.
