Great Except For One Glaring Problem

I’ve been really looking forward to the return of Yellowjackets, one of my favorite shows in recent memory. I actually watched the first season three times which is . . . very unusual for me, but that’s how much I enjoyed it. The combination of brilliant acting, writing, mystery, suspense and some really horrific twists and turns make this one of the best shows on TV, period, and Season 1 one of the best seasons of TV I’ve ever seen.

So believe me when I tell you, I really didn’t want to post a review like this about the Season 2 premiere. Mostly, the first episode of Season 2 was pretty good. We get to see the girls right after they’re rescued, though not how they’re rescued. We meet Lottie as an adult, who seems to be leading some kind of self-help cult, which is pretty on-brand. We also learn that she was so messed up when she returned from the forest that her parents had her get electroshock therapy and it appears she was briefly institutionalized.

Actually, let’s go through all the big character beats one-by-one before I get to my very big complaint.

Present Day

Misty

We open to Misty helping coach Shauna about how to handle the police which Shauna fails at miserably (more on her incompetent handling of Adam’s murder and coverup later). Misty is sad that neither Tai nor Natalie have come, but soon realizes that Nat has gone missing. She also discovers that another citizen sleuth is investigating Adam’s disappearance and has zeroed in on a mysterious lady friend. This is Elijah Woods’ character who I assume we’ll meet very soon.

Shauna

Shauna brings Jeff with her to Adam’s art studio which I guess she knows about but the cops haven’t found yet, just in case there’s any evidence of her there. Turns out, Adam had some very bizarre skeletons in his closet as well. “I’m an open book,” he told her before she killed him, but that’s clearly not the case. A dozen paintings of Shauna are in the studio, including one with her face distorted into something demonic and terrifying. Should we call this love or obsession? What else will we learn about Adam?

Whatever the case, this gets both Shauna and Jeff’s juices flowing and they have sex right there in the art studio, surrounded by paintings of Shauna, because hey why not leave a little bit more DNA evidence while you’re at it? Later, they burn the evidence, nearly set a tree on fire, and don’t even burn all of it, leaving half of Adam’s driver’s license for their daughter Callie to find later. Callie is suspicious (and rightfully so) and it’s driving a rift between her and her mother.

Natalie

Natalie was kidnapped at the very end of Season 1 and it’s no great shock to learn that it was Lottie behind it. She sent her cultists to grab her old friend and fellow survivor and when Natalie comes to she’s tied up in a makeshift prison cell (which appears to be some kind of dorm room on the cult grounds).

She escapes, of course, violently taking down her guard and then running from other cultists who try to capture her. She makes her way through the grounds of the estate before spotting a terrifying procession: A group of Lottie’s people dressed in animal masks, beating drums and dancing, before stripping an older man naked and starting to bury him alive.

Natalie rushes in with a big stick and she and Lottie come face-to-face. Natalie asks why she shouldn’t just smash her head in then and there, and Lottie tells her that she has a message from Travis.

Taissa

Taissa, fresh of winning her campaign for state senator, is facing a new crisis. She doesn’t realize how bad things have gotten with her sleepwalking, and when she goes to visit her son Sammy at school to bring him a new dog, her now-estranged wife, Simone, freaks out. She tells her to resign and get help or she’ll go public with what she found in their basement. Tai has no idea what she’s talking about but later finds the shrine. Things are clearly much worse than before. She tells the dog, Steve, that she’ll do better with him. I don’t like Steve’s chances.

25 Years Earlier

Meanwhile, back in the cabin we have moved into deep winter. Coach Ben’s beard has grown out. Javi is still missing and presumed dead, though Travis doesn’t think so and he and Nat search the wilderness for him daily on their hunts. Lottie also doesn’t believe he’s dead, or at least has “a feeling” about it. Nat is angry when she tells Travis he’s still alive, telling her that it gives him “false hope.”

“There’s not such thing as false hope,” Lottie replies. It’s just hope or not hope.

While I’m definitely Team Nat all the way (especially young Nat) I’m not convinced she’s right about Javi despite all evidence pointing to him being dead. Is it possible that he survives? Could he potentially even be in the present timeline? I’m not sure what it is that Natalie sees when she comes to the stump at the end of the episode, but this could be a clue that he’s out there.

Shauna has been spending a lot of time out in the hut they use for the meat talking with Jackie—or, rather, Jackie’s frozen corpse. Jackie talks back, too, because Shauna is clearly going through some kind of complete mental breakdown. At one point, Jackie tips over and her ear breaks off, and Shauna carries it around the rest of the episode until the end when, after agonizing over what to do with it, she plops it in her mouth and begins to chew.

I think this is less about her being hungry, though obviously that’s true also, and more about becoming one with her friend, preserving her by consuming her. Pretty twisted.

Finally, Tai and Van say “I love you” for the first time. Van draws it in blood on Tai’s skin, which is fitting enough.

Oh, and all the girls yell at Misty for getting near the food. Misty protests: “I won’t poison you . . . again . . .”

Crystal

A few things confused me about the survivor/teen storyline. First, Akilah was recast (Nia Sondaya replaces Keeya King) which is jarring. But this bit of jarring recasting was made a million times more awkward with the introduction of new teenage survivors to the cast. Okay, well, maybe not new but some of the nonspeaking extras are now named characters with lines, and they’re just . . . sitting there at a table all of a sudden talking and name-dropping and it threw me out of the episode like a cold glass of ice-water to the face. Honestly, I almost stopped the episode I was so bothered by this scene. It felt like the worst impulses of Lost, where new characters just pop up randomly all the time . . . on the island in the middle of nowhere.

The most important of these three is Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) and she’s also the most ridiculous new addition. She’s obsessed with musicals (just like Misty is in the present day timeline, suspiciously enough) but you’d think a character who just randomly bursts into song all the time wouldn’t be a nonspeaking extra in Season 1. It’s very weird and probably the single weakest moment in all of Yellowjackets up to this point, and just a very puzzling creative decision from a team that has been tracking a near-perfect record so far.

This is a big deal to me, maybe a bigger deal to me than to others, but it just completely shattered my immersion in the show and for the first time since Yellowjackets began I’m starting to worry that the show’s creators are going to ‘cheat’ to get to the end-goal. Sure, okay, there were extras in Season 1, but they really should have worked harder to remind us of that, and to make those extras a little more present in more scenes so that their re-introduction here wasn’t so ungainly. This was just a very poorly done moment in the season premiere. I hate that they did it like this, when surely there was a better way. Curious to hear all your thoughts on this (so hit me up on Twitter or Facebook).

Still, awkward and jarring introduction of new teen survivors to the crash timeline aside, this was overall a really good episode that pushes us further down the path of darkness and despair and mystery and friendship and betrayal and teenage madness and middle-age sadness that makes Yellowjackets so damn special. I can’t wait for episode 2 . . . .

Random Musings

• Steve, buddy boy, you gotta run and never look back. You saw what she did to Biscuit.
• Jeff taking out his anger by blasting Papa Roach in his car is hilarious. Peak Jeff.
• Can we get more Larry? The desk clerk that might have been a throwaway character in any other show was played masterfully by Andy Thompson and I hope we see him again.
• Lottie is such a mysterious character but is it possible that rather than some diabolical mastermind she’s just a new age hack in it for the money? That would be a helluva twist!
• The opening VHS credits have some new and some old images to offer us up clues of things to come, but I don’t want to think about that too much because I like to be surprised.
• The music is, once again, excellent and fits perfectly with each scene. Sharon Voan Etten’s “Seventeen” ushers in the return to the now snow-covered cabin. Tori Amos’s “Cornflakes” sees us out.
• The title of this episode is ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ which is taken from the speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The very next line is “lend me your ears” hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

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