‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 7 Review: Lightning Crashes

I’m pleased to report that for a second week in a row, Yellowjackets is back to being excellent, powerful and profound—not to mention terrifying, beautiful, sad, funny. The whole shebang.

In ‘Burial’ we deal with fallout of Shauna’s miscarriage from last week, which has left her pretty messed up, in the liminal space between sanity and the other thing. She’s questioning what actually happened to her baby. The nightmare of her teammates eating the infant is as real to her as what actually happened.

The most powerful scene of the entire episode came at the end. In the present timeline, the women have gathered at Lottie’s farm, drinking booze and dancing, talking and laughing, just letting go a little bit after a day of therapy (which we’ll get to). The song Lightning Crashes by Live comes on—yet another great 90s song to marinate in—and Van says “I love this song!” and turns it up.

In the past timeline, in the cabin after a day of digging out from the blizzard, Shauna walks past Misty who—in a weird juxtaposition—is humming the same song. Now, as anybody knows, this is a song about childbirth. It’s also a song about death. Live lead singer and songwriter Ed Kowalczyk wrote it before he’d moved out of his parent’s house and the band dedicated it to a high school friend who’d been killed by a drunk driver. Kowalczyk said the song is often misinterpreted, in part because of the music video:

While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room. Nobody’s dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you’re seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life.

I think this is important both because Shauna is clearly one of the many people who think of miscarriage when they hear this song, which explains her reaction to Misty, but also because if you take the song’s actual meaning at face value—birth, rebirth, death, transference of life, how these are all happening simultaneously—you get a bit deeper into the meaning of the episode. There’s even this discussion between Lottie and the others. The baby died, but Shauna lived. The Wilderness, she argues, gives them what they need. It doesn’t make deals or trades.

Shauna doesn’t react well to Misty’s humming and starts breaking down, accusing her friends of eating her baby. When Lottie confronts her, Shauna punches her in the face. Lottie tells Travis to take Javi into the other room.

“Shauna,” Lottie says. “I know there’s a lot of pain right now, but let it out.”

Lightning Crashes plays over both scenes. The women dancing by the fire at Lottie’s strange healing center in the forest, under antler chandeliers. In the past, a scene of raw violence and fury. Shauna, hitting Lottie in the face, knocking her to the ground. Sitting astride her, hitting her again and again and again, until Lottie’s face is purple and red with bruises, until she’s very nearly dead. “Stop her!” I shouted at the screen. Why did nobody intervene sooner? Shock? The power of Lottie’s will holding them back?

It’s almost like a dream, when Shauna stops and Lottie finally takes a breath and we know she’s still alive (though, yeah, we knew she would be). “What the f*#$?” Nat blurts out, because it’s Nat and we love her.

Transference of life. Curiouser and curiouser, especially with the lingering cannibalism—something now openly discussed between two of the “new” girls when they note that one silver lining of Crystal dying is, well, lunch. But hopefully she’s fine! they both agree, smacking their lips.

Crystal is not fine, of course, but she’s also not where Misty left her. Misty is determined to find the body before anyone else because she doesn’t want them to eat her, which seems a little selfish given the nature of her death. Misty has all the best scenes this episode. I have to give both actresses who play her a kudos at this point.

In the past timeline, Samantha Hanratty does such an extraordinary job in two back-to-back scenes. In the first, she fake cries to the girls she’s searching for Crystal with, telling them it’s just too much, she can’t bear it. She’s clearly faking and at least Mari can tell. It’s not easy, as an actor, to make your acting look convincingly fake!

The next scene, after Misty climbs back up from where Crystal’s body used to be—having mysteriously vanished!—she finds Coach Ben by the cliffside. Ben’s latest vision/flashback ended with Paul leaving, telling him he’s not going to be able to return. Ben cleans up and walks to the cliff, ready to hurl himself from the edge when Misty arrives and begs him to stop. She threatens him, threatens to tell the world he’s gay. “Do it,” he tells her, even more at peace with his plan. But he can’t. He asks if she could push him, which is a pretty horrible thing to ask someone, especially a teenage girl.

And finally Misty gets real. She breaks down sobbing. Crystal is dead. She tried so hard but couldn’t save the baby. “I can’t have another death on my hands,” she sobs, and Ben—realizing, perhaps, how awful it would be to kill himself in front of a young, messed up girl—steps back from the ledge.

In the present timeline, Misty’s big scene comes in the form of a sensory depravation chamber. Unlike Eleven’s Upside Down world in Stranger Things, this sensory depravation chamber takes us deep into the twisted horror show that is Misty’s twisted mind. Here we have Walter dancing and singing. We have Caligula, her pet bird, in human form, telling her—in so many words—that she’s just misunderstood by the world. It’s all deeply affirming for her. She even decides to call Walter and leave the most awkward voicemail of all time afterward.

Caligula is played by John Cameron Mitchell from Hedwig and the Angry Itch, and it’s just fantastic to watch him and Cristina Ricci in this scene.

Ricci told EW of this scene:

Yeah, as much as she argues that the choices she makes are pragmatic or the murders she commits are for the good of the group and are logical and don’t count as murder because they’re not based in emotion, we get to finally see in this moment that actually she is a little bit conflicted. She doesn’t want to be seen as a bad person. We see that, as much as she seems to never question herself or analyze herself in any way, she actually does struggle with this idea that people might see her as a bad person. That is really interesting. But it’s so funny how immediately her subconscious is like, “Nope, you’re fine.” She’s like, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“You’re not a murderer Misty,” Caligula reassures Misty in the hallucination. “You’re a closer.” Too good. So on brand for Misty.

Lottie has her moments this episode as well. In the present timeline we realize—and are not at all surprised—that the ‘psychiatrist’ she’s been meeting with (who is new, mysteriously replacing her old one, and who we didn’t even see at all last episode which was weird) is not in fact real. I know some people were hoping this was a person part of a mysterious third group that’s been messing with our heroes, but I suspected this was a vision. I was right.

At the end of her “session” (that she never leaves to go to, we never see her driving or returning etc. all of which are clues) Lottie realizes the truth, and suddenly the Antler Queen is sitting across from her. “Charlotte, when does self-repression serve us?” the woman asks. “It could be that this reunion strikes a primal chord with you because in the past when you were with these other women you were free. You were your truest, most authentic self. What is standing in the way of you embracing that again?”

“We hurt each other. People died,” Lottie says.

“Tell me,” the vision says. “Is there anything of value in this life that doesn’t come with risk?”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Lottie asks and then the world fuzzes over and there’s the Antler Queen sitting across from her.

“You tell me, does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?” the Antler Queen asks and we hear buzzing and the music goes sour and Lottie gasps. I think it’s Lottie’s voice at this point and not the fake psychiatrist’s, but I’m not sure. It’s distorted, but I think it’s Lottie speaking.

Scattered Thoughts:

• Walter is up to something isn’t he? Some other game. Misty is letting her walls down now with him and it will be a mistake, I’m sure.
• Jeff breaks more bad news to Shauna: Adam’s remains have been found. Uh oh. (Also, I still kind of hate this whole storyline but at least it’s moving along). No great Jeff-listens-to-music-in-the-car scenes but we can’t have that every week! (Or can we?)
• Nirvana’s Something In The Way was a good, bleak choice for the opening this week. Great music every episode.
• Shauna’s confession to Lottie about the goat, Bruce, and how she’s kept Callie at arm’s length because she was—understandably—worried she would die, was so real and raw and heartbreaking. It’s even more powerful when, later, you get the Shauna beating Lottie half to death moment. Lottie has always let Shauna place her pain on her shoulders.
• The snow falling during the dance around the fire scene was . . . chilling. Pun intended.
• Here’s my review of last week’s episode.

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