Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! After Yellowjackets came out of nowhere like the best kind of jump scare in late 2021, the wait for season 2 is almost over: On March 24, we’ll get some more answers about what really happened to the girls’ soccer team stranded in the woods for 19 months in 1996, and how that has affected the adult survivors 25 years later in 2021. (But not all the answers, since the Showtime series has already been renewed for a third season, with showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson operating on a five-year plan.) And it all comes back to the Wilderness…
Spoilers ahead for season 1!
Operating in dual timelines, Yellowjackets season 1 had so much ground to cover, from establishing all of the key team members as both teenagers—with their fraught friendships and high-school-stereotype misconceptions about one another—and adults whose methods of coping with their trauma run the gamut from rehab to true crime to disappearing into suburban numbness. We grew to care about Shauna (Melanie Lynskey / Sophie Nélisse), Nat (Juliette Lewis / Sophie Thatcher), Taissa (Tawny Cypress / Jasmin Savoy Brown), Van (Liv Hewson / Lauren Ambrose), and even Misty (Christina Ricci / Sammi Hanratty) and Lottie (Courtney Eaton / Simone Kessell). There was blackmailing and affairs, séances and almost-murder-orgies, sabotage and disposing of bodies—then and now.
But with the season finale ending on two brutal moments: the accidental death of Shauna’s best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell) coinciding with the start of winter and the end of their food stories; and Nat getting kidnapped by Lottie’s cult, who also seem to have been behind Travis’ death. With all that in mind, here are the questions that can’t stop buzzing in my head, and hopefully yours, too.
The Wilderness
Season 1 slowly set up all of the dynamics among the team (and resolved some, RIP Jackie), with the flashbacks only spanning a few of the 19 total months they spend in their own world cut off from society. But with winter approaching in 1996, we’ll get to see how the Yellowjackets really fare—and how they cope with presumably their first act of ritualistic cannibalism, via Jackie’s unintentional sacrifice. With season 1 having ended on Lottie (flanked by Van and Misty) offering up the steaming bear heart to the Wilderness, it seems clear that she’ll lead the Yellowjackets in their unsavory ceremony in order to feed themselves. And, of course, there’s the question of what will push them to start hunting one another and offering up future bodies to feed the team?
Aside from the cannibalism, I’m also curious what other traditions and markers of time we’ll see the girls create to line up with the solstices and other significant events. I’m wondering if we’ll see another Doomcoming, this time with intentional shrooms, or if Lottie comes up with another self-made holiday. And what about when they get to the one-year anniversary of the crash?
Season 1 has already made it clear that Shauna, Taissa, and the others carry the Wilderness with them. So what will bring the Wilderness out of the woods and into real life?
Buy the Book
A House With Good Bones
Just Enough Spooky Shit
Lottie’s French séance ghost, Taissa’s eyeless man in the mirror, whatever mysterious energy made that bear sacrifice itself… Even though this show skews more realistic horror, it’s not not supernatural. With the season-finale discovery that Taissa (unwittingly or not) sacrificed the family dog on an altar in order to win the election, we see that some of the more inexplicable elements followed the Yellowjackets home. There’s an excellent eerie shot with adult Tai’s reflection staring her down that implies there’s more to be explored; but it could also only go so far as a manifestation of her trauma. What I really appreciated about the season 1 plot with her son Sammy was that it initially seemed like a clichéd “creepy kid” story, but it turned out that she was the woman in the tree. I don’t need complete explanations of the spooky shit, just answers like this, hints at the darkness within.
Lottie’s Cult
We’re all assuming that Lottie’s cult is named the Wilderness, right? What’s very curious is that they mention that she was committed to an asylum in Switzerland—I’m going to assume they’re talking about teenage Lottie after they get rescued, because adult Lottie very much seems to be in control of her mysterious organization that kidnapped Nat in the season finale. Is Nat playing her—in the scenes where she seems to be crying in her lap, and we get flashbacks to them doing the same in the Wilderness—or will she be emotionally fragile enough to fall for the familiar teachings?
Rosemary’s Shauna’s Baby
The creators did a tricky thing by having Shauna be pregnant in the woods as a major driver of drama… but that’s obviously not their teen daughter Callie, which makes you wonder why Shauna let herself get roped into a marriage with Jeff. (Most likely it was Jackie’s death that guilted them into getting hitched.) With the Yellowjackets stranded for 19 months, they’ll have a baby that’s well past newborn stage when they get rescued… if, of course, the kid makes it. We’ve already seen Shauna’s surreal dreams about giving birth to hamburgers and fried chicken, yet the creators have reassured us that baby is not on the menu. But if Shauna and Jeff got married without her being pregnant… and there’s no talk of Callie’s older sibling… my guess is either that their first child isn’t born alive, or that the kid winds up somehow given to the Wilderness. Not sacrificed like the bear heart, but I could see the kid somehow going into the foster system and then getting taken by the cult and growing up inside the Wilderness ethos.
Javi and Coach’s Fates
There was that bonkers season 1 theory about Adam being Javi grown-up and using a fake identity to seduce Shauna (yuck), but thankfully that was just fans’ wheels spinning in overdrive. But that said—where is Javi? Presumably he and Travis kept in touch, so his “suicide” will likely bring Javi out of the woodwork. It seems a little too neat to imagine that he’s also part of the cult, especially since that imagery was present at Travis’ death, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Or we could find out that Shauna has been secretly in touch with him this whole time—remember how she looked after him in the woods—and has just chosen not to reveal that information yet.
As for Coach… it’s not looking good. There’s no mention of him in the present, and he’s already sorta odd-man-out among the girls; you can see during Doomcoming how he tries to stop them and they snarl at him. He’s rapidly losing authority; he’s already lost a leg; I fear that he may become a sacrifice in season 2.
How the Yellowjackets Get Home
I have a feeling that the flashback timeline in season 2 is going to cover a lot more ground in those 19 months, even if they do some Lost-style flash-forwards to their rescue. While none of the present-day Yellowjackets have explained exactly how they made it back, I bet it has something to do with that mysterious symbol—why else would it remain so important to them, to Lottie’s cult, and so forth? On our rewatch, my husband pointed out that it looks something like a sextant, so I wonder if it were intended as some sort of tool for measuring latitude and longitude? Here’s a wonderfully in-depth Reddit theory delving into potential meanings behind the symbol, as well as various other theories concerning trigonometry and Laura Lee’s crash.
The ’90s Media Storm
Yoinking this from the Yellowjackets subreddit, where one poster made the keen point that 1997 is a ripe time for media sensationalism. Seeing as we glimpse teen Misty being shielded from photographers’ lenses, we’ll get at least a taste of what the girls’ lives look like after they’re rescued, and no doubt how invasive the media was in those early weeks and months. Also consider everything in pop culture that they missed while they were stranded: the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Princess Diana; Tamagotchis and Beanie Babies; Jurassic Park and Clueless; Ellen DeGeneres coming out on Ellen; the Buffy pilot!
Nostalgia Casting and Needle Drops
Lauren Ambrose as adult Van is incredible, no notes, my Six Feet Under heart is bursting. Elijah Wood is some fun cheeky casting as one of Misty’s fellow citizen detectives. But who else might we see? Any of the names I have in mind are big enough that if they were involved they’d probably already be announced, but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming of seeing the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alicia Silverstone, Linda Cardellini… maybe next season.
And when it comes to throwback music, the trailer has Florence + the Machine warbling No Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” and I’m hoping that means we get more ’90s covers. “Semi-Charmed Life” (yes, I know it’s 1997), “Always Be My Baby,” “Lovefool”…! But really I just can’t wait to hear that Yellowjackets theme song again.
Natalie Zutter wonders if anything can top the Yellowjackets’ a capella rendition of “Kiss From a Rose.” Talk the horrors of being a teenage girl with her on Twitter!
