Rise And Shine And Don’t Forget Your Booties

I’m having a bit of a tricky time with Yellowjackets lately. Maybe because the bar was set so high in Season 1, I come to this second season with an unreasonably high standard. Maybe I’m just tired of being burned. Whatever the case, something just isn’t quite clicking for me this season. There have been some extremely great moments, but ever since the introduction of the new teenage girls, it feels like the show is slipping.

Let’s call it what it is: Cheating. Introducing new characters to the survival timeline is cheating. And it weakens the show’s core. This was more apparent than ever with the big death in Episode 5. When Misty and Crystal are sharing secrets, Crystal says “We’re so lucky. Most people never find someone they can share their deepest, darkest secrets with.” (I’m paraphrasing). And, of course, Misty then has a Very Misty Moment and tells her about how she destroyed the plane’s receiver box and ruined their chances at being rescued.

Not really the kind of secret you tell someone who is now starving in the forest about, and it lands exactly how we expect. Crystal is horrified. Misty begs her to not tell anyone and Crystal says “Oh what, are you gonna poison me?” Misty gets right up in her face and says, “No. I’ll kill you.”

And then Crystal steps backwards and falls off the conveniently placed cliff.

Right.

This was, to put it mildly, a terrible scene with a terrible setup. Crystal is effectively introduced this season just to be killed off which is like a bad Lost or Walking Dead technique. Introduce a new character because you don’t want to kill any of the established characters. What brave storytelling!

It’s worse here, though, both because of how great Season 1 was and because they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. Introducing new characters breaks a fundamental logic there, and saying “well there were extras in the first season” doesn’t fix that for me. They should have had those extras talk a little in the first season if they were planning to have them feature this large in the second and the fact that they didn’t plan that out ahead of time worries me.

What else wasn’t planned out? Are we headed somewhere interesting or are they flying by the seat of their pants like Lost?

Beyond the disposable new characters, the scene itself was just extremely sloppy. It was not surprising. As soon as they showed both girls by the cliff, I said “Is Misty gonna kill Crystal?” The logic for them being at the cliff itself is also pretty goofy. This is where they toss their poop bucket when it fills up. Surely this is not an ideal way to dispose of waste. It’s dangerous, for one thing, because it’s a super high cliff and there’s ice and snow everywhere. There’s a whole forest where they could be tossing this.

The cliff is also a new character in the series. We never saw it in the first season but now it’s just right there. I’m not sure where exactly, since we had a pretty good look at the cabin on the hillside above the lake and there was nothing even remotely like a cliff anywhere in sight. So that feels a little like cheating also.

Elsewhere, the show is better but still . . . missing something. The police investigation of Shauna and Jeff isn’t clicking with me. The whole “go to Randy’s” plan wasn’t great and all three—including Callie—are coming across as pretty stupid this season, making weird mistakes. I loved seeing Shauna’s darker side when she got the van back, but Shauna’s moronic side is less compelling.

I did enjoy meeting adult Van, who is even more entrenched in the 90s’ than our other survivors. It makes sense from a trauma standpoint, to go back to the comforts you enjoyed before the plane crash. The guys in her video store asking about VHS tapes like they’d never heard of them was a bit much, though. Another slip in the writing quality that makes me wonder if there’s been some shakeup in the writer’s room.

Meanwhile, the Nat/Lottie storyline and the Misty/Walter storyline are going nowhere fast. The flashback of what Nat said to Travis was great, though. She overdosed and on the edge of death she saw something in the plane with them. Something that she thinks they brought back with them from the forest, which is what I’ve been suspecting for a while now. That’s why Travis tried to fake kill himself so that he could try to see it, too. But it had other plans.

I’m a little nervous about Nat saying that in her vision they all died on the plane. Please don’t let it be Lost, please don’t let it be Lost. Please…

What else? Oh, Javi isn’t speaking and Nat and Travis are in another tiff over her faking Javi’s death. Lottie is running a prayer group that seems to be helping Tai, which is why Tai and Van are definitely going to go pay Lottie a visit next week. So is Shauna, it seems based on the trailer for Episode 6, but I’m not sure why.

Oh, and speaking of Shauna, teen Shauna goes into labor during the storm that blows in the moment Crystal dies. So that’s the cliffhanger.

Finally, but importantly, this episode—titled Two Truths And A Lie—has the best tagline ever: Rise & shine and don’t forget your booties because it’s coooold out there. Anyone who’s seen Groundhog Day will be familiar with this one. I wonder if they’re trying to tell us something beyond just hinting at the extreme cold—like that our heroes are stuck in a figurative time-loop, repeating old behaviors and mistakes, still trapped by the evil thing that haunted them in the forest.

What did you think of this one? Am I being overly harsh here? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

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