Spoilers below.
It’s been almost two years since we’ve convened with the wilderness, but it’s finally time to go back to the world of Yellowjackets for a third season. In the aftermath of season 2—which saw Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) death in the 2021 “adult” timeline and the girls’ only shelter burning down in the 1996 “teen” timeline—the stakes are immeasurably high and the delusions are only growing.
In the ’90s
The two-part season 3 premiere opens in the ’90s wilderness in “It Girl,” wrapped in the golden yellow glow of spring instead of the drab blues of winter that set the tone for seasons past. Still, the mood at first isn’t as hopeful as the color gradient suggests: Mari (Alexa Barajas) is running scared only to be tackled by Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), who bites her when she tries to escape. But the nod to cannibalism is more innocent than it initially seems—the girls are playing a team game, trying to get a bone over a finish line. Mari is on the winning team, meaning Shauna’s team has to wait on the others hand-and-foot for the rest of the day.
Shauna is, notably, a sore loser who chooses to opt out of any group activities. She takes to her newly-constructed hut to furiously journal and her voiceover provides a nice bit of exposition for those who need a primer on the show’s twisted themes. “Once upon a time, a bunch of teenage girls got stranded in the wilderness and they went completely fucking nuts. They worshipped evil spirits and they hunted their friends, feasted on their flesh, and they fucking liked it,” Shauna succinctly recaps, leaving out the detail that it was she who initiated the flesh-eating when she ate her bestie Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) ear in season 2.
Shauna’s bad attitude doesn’t leave her totally alone: She’s befriended by a blonde girl, Melissa (Jenna Burgess) who will certainly become her underling when Shauna begins to fray the connection between herself and the rest of the team. The writers have fun pointing out that she’s been there the whole time: “Wait, do you, like, have a personality?” Shauna asks after the girl makes a joke at the expense of her enemy Mari.
But Van (Liv Hewson) offers a different account of history. “They survived hunger, they survived blizzards…could they survive an unthinkable act by a raging psychopath?” she asks the Yellowjackets, positing that Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) is the one that burned down their cabin. This seems to be the prevailing theory among the group, as they rapturously listen to Van like a preacher at a twisted church, with their elected leader Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) standing by.
Liv Hewson (far right) as teen Van.
Natalie doesn’t necessarily believe this though. During a meeting with her most trusted advisors, she says that Coach is dead and couldn’t possibly have burned down the cabin. We know she’s wrong about at least one of those statements: Coach is alive and wandering the wilderness alone with his makeshift crutches. There have been many comparisons of Yellowjackets to Lost and the Showtimes series continues to draw parallels—this time, Coach stumbles upon what my Lost-trained brain can only call a hatch, stashed with general supplies and food inside. We see a briefcase with the initials “KUH” on it (a cursory Google search tells me that “kuh” is the German word for “cow” and also the abbreviated name of the Division of Kidney, Urology, and Hematologic Diseases at the National Institute of Health…so let’s start working on our theories) but Coach only has eyes for a protein bar that gives him enough energy to set a few animal traps nearby.
Back at the girls’ camp, Lottie (Courtney Eaton) is experimenting with a new tea concoction. Travis (Kevin Alves) drinks the tea and Lottie acts as his shaman, trying to guide him through his feelings about the loss of his brother Javi (Luciano Leroux) last season. But their chat is cut short when he begins hearing a loud, unsettling scream that he says are coming from the trees—again, reminiscent of Lost’s smoke monster. And by the end of “It Girl,” the entire camp hears the screams during a funeral for the three souls that died in the wilderness, perhaps indicating that it’s hungry for more.
Jenna Burgess as teen Melissa, Courtney Eaton as teen Lottie, and Sophie Nélisse as teen Shauna.
With a new friend by her side, Shauna is defiant. Because her team lost the game at the beginning of the episode, she has to serve the winning team their dinner. Shauna spits in Mari’s soup and then denies it when Mari calls her out. When Mari pours the soup out on the ground in retaliation, Shauna then shoves Mari’s face into it. Mari is, understandably, pissed off and runs away from the camp. No one follows her. She runs for a while before falling into a hole: her fate now rests in Coach’s hands.
In the second hour of the two-episode premiere, “Dislocation,” Mari and Coach reluctantly trudge forward together. He is adamant that he didn’t burn down the cabin, saying he’s stayed as far away from them as possible after they ate Javi last season. But he’s full of mixed signals: After helping her out of the hole he trapped her in, he ties her up and blindfolds her so she can’t trace their steps; then later, after settling into a cave for the night, he offers her some hot chocolate. Mari isn’t sure what to make of this last gesture, especially as she hears him whispering to himself about what to do next.
Misty accompanies Natalie on the hunt for Mari and the duo come across traps in the forest. Natalie is quick to claim them as their own, which makes Misty suspicious. Desperate to be taken seriously, Misty runs to Shauna to tell her that she believes Natalie knows where Coach is, and Shauna swears her to secrecy.
Steven Krueger as Coach Ben Scott.
Shauna’s anger only grows in “Dislocation,” both grieving her dead baby and spewing anger about her interactions with Mari. She’s a loner but for Melissa, who keeps popping up at inopportune times, but somehow feels like a calming presence for Shauna. At her baby’s grave, Shauna threatens Melissa, but in a moment of both fear and passion, the two make out at the end of the episode, with Shauna’s knife still at Melissa’s neck.
Lottie’s experiment with Travis also continues, though he seems to reach a breaking point after drinking more of her mysterious tea. He hears the voices again, ominously announcing, “they’re coming,” before he strangles Lottie. She believes that Travis is the vehicle for learning more about what “it”—the wilderness—wants, but he refutes this: “It didn’t want me,” he tells her, indicating instead that their animal whisperer Akilah (Nia Sondaya) is the one who actually holds the key to get answers, and should be Lottie’s next target.
In Present-Day
In the adult timeline, the core Yellowjackets gather for Natalie’s funeral with one notable exception: Misty (Christina Ricci) both can’t bring herself to go to the funeral, blaming herself for Natalie’s death, and also expects an invitation from her friends that never arrives. Walter (Elijah Wood) offers to go with her, but she blows him off. On his way out, he drops Natalie’s storage unit key on her table with a smile that indicates he got his way somehow when Misty takes the bait and shows interest in going to the unit.
Tawny Cypress as Taissa, Lauren Ambrose as Van, Warren Kole as Jeff, and Melanie Lynskey as Shauna.
But when she arrives, she only finds old pictures and clothing, including a leather jacket that she takes as a keepsake of her old friend. Her grief takes her to a bar, where she tries to channel Natalie and drinks way too much whiskey, picks a fight with some men that complimented her jacket, and walks home drunk before Walter comes to her rescue. He’s clearly trying to wedge himself into Misty’s life by continuously pointing out how the rest of the women aren’t really her friends. It’s cruel but not altogether wrong: The others seem to only tolerate Misty because they feel like they have to.
Natalie’s actual funeral is a grave affair, with her mom giving a curt and detached eulogy about her only daughter. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), and Van (Lauren Ambrose) head to the bar afterwards, giving their own messed up speeches. The camera zooms out to capture the women from across the bar, giving the eerie feeling that they are being watched. To compound this feeling, Shauna also appears jumpy, like she also noticed something’s amiss, but we don’t get answers about that theory in this set of episodes.
At home, Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) is clearly acting out after discovering her mom killed a guy last season. But she is Shauna’s blood, so when she overhears a group of girls at school gossiping about what Shauna did in the wilderness, Callie takes revenge. She orders raw animal guts on DoorDash (something that I did not know—and hope is not—actually a thing you can do) and pours them in front of the gossipers. She’s suspended from school and Jeff (Warren Kole) is concerned about his daughter, but Shauna is amused by the gag.
Melanie Lynskey as Shauna and Sarah Desjardins as Callie.
When Callie is home alone later, we get a brief glimpse of someone with blonde hair standing outside the Sadecki house. Callie hears someone rustling near the door, but when she opens it all she sees is an envelope with Shauna’s maiden name scrawled on it. Inside, there’s a tape that Callie pockets. My immediate instinct is that the gift-giver is Shauna’s new wilderness friend Melissa whom we haven’t yet seen in the present-day timeline, but what does she want and what will the tape reveal?
We don’t really find out in “Dislocation.” Just as Callie is about to press play on the tape, Lottie (Simone Kessell)—who shows up on the Sadecki’s doorstep and guilts them into letting her stay—comes into her room. Though they spend more time together than Shauna would like, Lottie doesn’t reveal much to Callie about what happened “out there” even though Callie is certainly hellbent on finding out.
Simone Kessell as Lottie.
Misty, whom Shauna enlists to help keep Lottie away from her daughter while she and Jeff are at a business dinner, tries to do damage control, but winds up being duped into getting drunk. Misty goes home wasted for the second night in a row, unleashing a tirade at Walter when he points out (again) that her friends don’t have her best interests at heart. Misty is a girl’s girl to a fault, telling Walter that he has to accept her friends if he wants to be with her, and then shows him the door.
Poor Jeff’s business dinner also couldn’t be going worse: Shauna at first can’t put her phone down, and then later has some choice words for his prospective partners. But she has a right to feel rattled—while in the bathroom stall mid-dinner, she sees someone come in and then turn off the lights when they leave, placing an iPhone in a separate stall that starts ringing ominously. The caller is, of course, “No Caller ID.” Instead of keeping the phone, Shauna turns it in to the bartender, but she can’t rid herself of the curiosity. Later that night after a meek apology to Jeff, she calls the restaurant to find out whether someone had claimed the phone. The scene is intercut with Shauna and Melissa’s fiery interaction in the woods 30 years prior, hinting that we may see adult Melissa sooner than later.
Tai and Van’s love affair continues, even if it’s currently on rocky ground. Van’s cancer is worsening and they fight over her signing DNR paperwork. Tai is desperate to make the moment better, asking Van out to a fancy dinner at a restaurant in town. But it’s the total opposite of what Van is all about, so aiming to please her date, Tai suggests they dine and dash. As a former senator, there’s no way this wouldn’t be all over social media and the news, but in the Yellowjackets universe, public figures seem to be allowed some privacy.
Tawny Cypress as Taissa and Lauren Ambrose as Van.
Tai and Van escape out the back, making a run for it while being tailed by the waiter from the restaurant. It’s unethical but exhilarating and sort of romantic as the high school sweethearts run through town and find a secluded alley to make out. The moment is briefly interrupted when Tai sees a flash of the Man with No Eyes in the distance. Then she blinks and he’s gone.
Tai’s visions aren’t the worst of their problems. As Tai and Van bolt across a busy intersection, the waiter is almost hit by a bus and then immediately suffers a heart attack. When Tai goes back to pay for their meal the next day in “Dislocation,” the discovery sends her into a tailspin. Dashing out without paying for the second time, Tai stumbles into an altar behind a church and places a matchbook from the restaurant into a burning candle as an offering. The flame burns larger and brighter—after all, she gives a hungry flame even more flammable material to chew on—and a dark look we’ve seen before comes across her face. Tai doesn’t tell Van about the waiter’s fate, but it’s clear that this death will surely be viewed as either an omen or a sign—or both.