‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 2 Review: Feast Or Famine

Damn.

I was not expecting things to get so crazy so fast in Yellowjackets this season. I probably should have—it’s not like this show took its time amping things up in Season 1—but I really didn’t expect them to just dig right in like that in Episode 2. Past the fleshy stuff, straight to the bone. Chomp chomp chomp.

There’s a lot to chew on in this episode. Lots of little morsels to get through before we get to the main course, as it were. We’ll start with the present day timeline and work our way back.

Present Day

Misty (Christina Ricci)

Of all the present day timelines, Misty’s is weirdly the most tame so far. The citizen sleuth has been working to cover up Shauna’s murder. She’s been trying to track down Natalie also, and has even met her match in a citizen detective named Walter (Elijah Wood) who easily tracks her down after she harasses him on some online message boards. Mostly, this is just building toward the eventual Misty/Walter team-up, which I suspect will somehow parallel the past timeline team-up between Misty and Chrystal.

Shauna (Melanie Lynskey)

Shauna’s life is on the verge of unraveling. She’s been covering up some of her sloppy mistakes—like keeping Adam’s driver’s license—but it seems her lies are about to come back to haunt her. Keeping the truth about Adam’s death from Callie (Sarah Desjardins, who is also in The Night Agent which I’m currently binging) is already backfiring. After Kevyn Tan (Alex Wyndham) questioned Shauna about the text messages between her and Adam (an interrogation she handled very poorly) Tan’s partner got Callie to open up to him about her mom’s affair by going under cover as a guy hanging out at a bar. Things are falling rapidly apart.

Natalie (Juliette Lewis)

I’m not sure how to feel about the Nat storyline. She liberated herself from Lottie’s cult last week, but Lottie (Simone Kessell—the second actor from this show that has popped up in Netflix’s The Night Agent) doesn’t seem like quite the menacing cult leader I had expected. Teen Lottie is so mysterious and frightening. Adult Lottie just seems like a new age hack. Her story about Travis’s death, however, is pretty fascinating.

If Lottie is to be believed (and that’s a big IF) then Travis was trying to reach out to the darkness, to whatever sentient evil they encountered in the forest, by going mostly dead. His plan was to hang himself using the machinery at his job, since he could use the button to lower himself at the last minute. Lottie agrees to do it instead but as he hangs, the button doesn’t work and she’s unable to lower him. As she panics, something changes in the air, and then Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) suddenly appears, walking barefoot into the warehouse holding her teddy bear. Her face changes, bloating, rotting, as Travis lifts higher and higher into the air.

Travis didn’t commit suicide. He wasn’t murdered, either. The forest got him, and it may be coming for them all.

Taissa (Tawny Cypress)

Taissa’s eyes have been turning red. I think they were starting to go red by the end of Season 1, but by the Season 2 premiere it was impossible not to notice. That’s not the only change. As the newly-elected state senator tries desperately to stay awake, the Other One is slowly asserting itself even in her waking moments.

We see this first while she’s staring in the mirror. Tai looks directly on when suddenly her reflection looks in the other direction. Whatever it is inside her is no longer content to only emerge when she’s asleep; or perhaps in her fight to stay awake, she’s blurred the lines between sleep and wakefulness. Whatever the case, she begins to have hallucinations or waking dreams.

Sammy (Aiden Stoxx) shows up suddenly, telling her he wanted to see her and walked over from school. She tells him to play with the new dog, Steve (RUN AWAY STEVE) and she calls Simone (Rukiya Bernard) to have her come pick up their son. When she arrives, Tai has fallen asleep and Sammy is gone.

Our moments of panic—could he be her latest victim, decapitated and eyes gouged out in the basement—becomes dawning revelation when the school calls Simone to tell her that Sammy is there, waiting to be picked up. That he never left.

Simone is livid. She begins chewing Tai out, telling her she needs to get help, and then the Other One takes the wheel. You can see it happen. The sinister, hungry look on Tai’s face, a wicked mischief in her red eyes. Hatred.

She drives into oncoming traffic and the car is broadsided. Simone, it appears, takes the brunt of it. If she’s dead—or even just laid up in the hospital—nobody will be left to keep tabs on Sammy, and nobody will be around who knows what’s going on with Tai. I wonder if the Tai we know will disappear completely now.

In The Forest

I think, rather than break each girl’s storyline out into its own section, I’ll summarize as a group. After all, for the most part they’re all pretty much together during this episode, outside of Nat (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis (Kevin Alves) searching for poor, missing Javi (Luciano Leroux).

Nat has been making maps of their excursions and bringing them back to Ben (Steven Krueger) and they’ve mapped out a pretty large area at this point, roughly seven miles out, but still no sign of Javi. So Nat takes a pair of his pants from his suitcase, rips them up and cuts herself, soaking them in her blood when she and Travis split up to cover more ground. When they meet back up, Travis is devastated. He wants to go search but Natalie calms him down and they head back to the cabin where Lottie (Courtney Eaton) is confused. “But he’s alive,” she stammers. Nat grabs her and pulls her aside, telling her to stop talking.

I can’t pick sides on this one. Nat is right on an emotional level. It’s not fair to give Travis hope when all signs point to Javi being dead and buried under the snow. But I also believe Lottie. She’s not lying, not giving false hope. If she thinks Javi is alive, he’s alive. I’m just not sure how he’s managed to survive.

Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) meanwhile, has been having more and more sleepwalking episodes. They’re getting worse in the past timeline just like in the present, and even Van (Liv Hewson) is unable to really help. The Other One is coming alive and she’s able to cut the rope that binds the two girls together and sneak out of the cabin. Van wakes up in time to go after her, and it’s a good thing to. We see Tai walking through the snow in her socks, following the creepy eyeless man that she and her grandmother saw when she was just a little girl. He’s leading her toward a cliff—though it’s unclear if this macabre specter is trying to kill Tai or just messing with them or what.

The big question here is whether the eyeless man Tai sees and who seems to possess her when she sleeps is related to whatever evil presence trapped the girls here to begin with or if they’re separate entities. After all, the eyeless man showed up years before the crash and is uniquely bound to Tai and—so far as we can tell—nobody else. The strange man in Shauna’s dream at the end of Season 1 was a totally different person/vision. The thing that flies through the woods and enters the room during the séance (and again toward the end of this episode) is not necessarily the same as whatever is animating Tai. It’s very mysterious!

Perhaps because she’s upset with herself, Tai takes a strong interest in Shauna’s ongoing psychosis around her dead best friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell) who has stuck around for a couple episodes as a speaking character, though mainly as an imaginary friend that Shauna has long conversations with. She braid’s Jackie’s hair and even does her makeup, which is the last straw for Tai.

Remember: Shauna was still having conversations with Jackie as an adult in Season 1. She spoke with her when she was at Jackie’s parent’s home up in her old room. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now . . . curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

Tai insists that they burn Jackie’s body. This has gone on long enough, she says, ignoring Shauna’s pleas. The rest of the group grudgingly agrees. Even Lottie, who has been Shauna’s biggest defender at this point, relents. So they set up a pyre and light it up. Shauna won’t let them remove Jackie’s coat—both because she feels like it would violate her friend, but also to hide the place where she cut into her flesh.

Of course, any doubts about violating Jackie or cutting into her flesh are soon extinguished.

Travis, finally letting go of Javi’s ghost, comes on to Nat and the two have some much-needed grief sex that takes a wild, bizarre turn when Travis starts having visions of Lottie. They’re not horny fantasies, either. She’s holding him almost baptismally. He has visions of the strange, mysterious hallway filled with candles that—for reasons we can’t yet surmise—exists in almost another dimension where the totem stump is outside the cabin (where Lottie brought the bear’s heart at the end of Season 1). What is this place? Lottie keeps having visions of it and it’s almost as if she’s imbued her visions into Travis, who now has a very strange, quasi-sexual connection to her. He was accidentally aroused last week when she put her hand on his chest and calmed his panic attack, and that arousal has carried over into visions while making love to Nat. It’s all very, very trippy.

And it acts as yet another summoning. The first time it was summoned was during the séance. It came in through the window and entered Lottie and she began speaking in tongues. This time it flies down but never enters the cabin. Instead, it shakes off the branches and dumps snow over Jackie’s burning corpse, putting out the high flames and turning the pyre into a roaster.

Later, they smell the cooking meat. Not burning meat. The smell of slow-cooked meat. Instead of burning into ash, Jackie has been cooked up into tender, juicy food. The smell brings all the teenagers out of the cabin, down to the pyre where they kneel. Only coach Ben hangs back, watching.

It’s Shauna who first reaches out and tears meat from her dead friend’s corpse. Bites into it. Everyone waits for her to okay the transgression. But when she does, the feast begins in savage earnest.

Yellowjackets is such a fascinating show. This scene, by itself, would be a gruesome and harrowing moment in this story. It’s the one we’ve all been waiting for. Other than Misty (Samantha Hanratty), we’ve never seen anyone’s face that was involved in cannibalism. That opening scene of the masked, furred survivors makes it very clear that some of them engaged in hunting, killing, cooking and eating one another, but only Misty showed her face.

Now we know that everyone—except coach Ben—was a cannibal. What we don’t know is how far they take it, or how they go from eating someone who is already dead to . . . drawing straws to see who becomes the next meal. (I don’t know that they’ll draw straws, obviously, but there has to be some method for choosing who dies and who feasts on their remains).

But Yellowjackets takes this already horrifying moment and embellishes it in such a fascinating way. The scene in the woods suddenly becomes one of Roman bacchanalia. The girls (and Travis) are dressed in white togas sitting at an elegant feast. Berries and fruit accompany the meat, which is fowl. The girls stuff the food into one another’s mouths. They tear at it with gleeful abandon, a snarling hunger overtaking them. We’re reminded of the Doomcoming and their wild, howling hunt; of Shauna very nearly cutting Travis’s throat. “RUN,” she growled at Javi, and run he did, away from these wild, demonic young women.

Now it’s Ben’s turn to flee in terror, though he has only one leg so he can’t actually run. He watches them gorge themselves on their former team captain below in the snow with a look of shock and horror on his face. It’s more than disgust or surprise. It’s a dawning realization of the danger he’s facing. Whatever madness has overcome them—and it isn’t just hunger—he’s been spared from it. But he may not be spared for long. Which reminds me of Lottie’s cryptic prophecy last season before the bear arrived. “We won’t be hungry long.”

Not only is Ben a cripple now, he’s even more of an outsider than before. He was always the leader simply by dint of being the only grownup, but now he’s set himself even further apart by becoming the only one to refuse to partake. The only one who hasn’t consumed human flesh.

At least in the Doomcoming, not everyone became part of the wild hunt. Ben and Nat were off reminiscing about love. Misty was spying on them. Tai and Van were having sex. Jackie was locked up and Travis was the prey. There were sides, even if they weren’t intentional. Now it’s just Ben by his lonesome. What dynamic will that create after the madness wears off—or when it returns?

Verdict

It’s remarkable to me how much goes down in a single episode of this show and yet it never runs out of compelling, shocking content. For every mystery solved—Who is blackmailing them? How did Travis die? When/how do they start eating people?—new questions pop up.

Somehow Yellowjackets keeps getting darker, crazier and more—dare I say it?—delicious as we go. This is one of the best shows on TV and one of the best I’ve seen in years. I just hope to the dark gods of the dirt that they have this story mapped out properly and we don’t have our hearts broken. Again.

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