‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 3 Review: Blood & Honey

“Can’t stop what’s coming, Can’t stop what is on its way.”

~Tori Amos, Bells for Her

Yellowjackets continues to be one of the best shows on television in its second, somehow even darker season. Showtime’s survival drama never disappoints (with the rare exception of this season’s first episode and its clumsy introduction of a new batch of teenage survivors).

In Episode 3, ‘Digestif’, we see the darkness of the past timeline coming back to haunt the women of the present, as whatever evil overcame them in the forest 25 years earlier has somehow returned to hunt down the ones that got away.

We’ll start in the present and move backwards.

Present Day

Shauna

Shauna’s modern-day storyline was the most shocking to me. She and Jeff are still dealing with the fallout of Adam’s death and their role in his murder and coverup. The events at the art studio are clearly bothering Jeff, and he’s trying to puzzle out where it all went wrong. He pins the turning point on strawberry lube and his unwillingness to try it with Shauna. “I coulda gone strawberry,” he says, aping Marlon Brando’s famous line: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.”

It’s one of those conversations. But it lights a fire in Jeff. After eating they’re driving home and he misses the turn. He’s done with all this boring mundane crap. He wants to spice up Shauna’s life by . . . churning butter in Colonial Williamsburg, VA. It’s certainly . . . an idea. And maybe even one that Shauna might have gone along with, but they hit a pedestrian and it all falls apart.

When they get out to see if he’s hurt, the guy pulls a gun on them and asks for the keys to the minivan. Jeff tells him they’re in the ignition but Shauna has other ideas. She springs into action, attacking their attacker and grabbing his gun. She’s about to shoot him when Jeff intervenes, stopping her but allowing the thief to get away with the van. Jeff is baffled, clearly upset that she would risk their lives—or risk killing another person—over a crappy minivan. “What is the matter with you?” he yells at her. “Are you Rambo?”

“My purse was in there also,” she says lamely. “Plus . . . all our quarters.” It’s one of those hilarious moments between these two that’s also pretty disturbing under the surface. You can see Jeff questioning everything, and Shauna slowly unravelling.

She tracks the van and goes out later to get it back. And this is where things take a shocking, deeply unsettling turn. The van is at a chop shop and she sneaks inside and pulls her gun on one of the guys there. He tells her that it’s one thing to pull a gun on someone and another thing to actually use it. “Come on,” he says, “I can see your hands shaking.”

“Have you ever peeled the skin off a human corpse?” she asks. “It’s not as easy as you might thing. It’s really, uh, stuck on us. Skin. You have to roll back just the edges of it so you can get a good enough grip so you can really pull. Which again, isn’t easy. People are always so sweaty when you kill them. Just like oily. There’s a look people get when they realize they’re going to die. It’s that one,” she says, and you see the poor bastard’s terrified expression.

“My hand wasn’t shaking because I was afraid,” she tells him. “It was shaking because of how badly I wanted to do this.” She grips the pistol with both hands, breathing heavily.

“Don’t,” he says, begging now. “Just take it. It’s rusted to shit anyways.”

I admit, I didn’t know what she would do at this point. Because Shauna was almost orgasmic with desire here, breathing heavily, hungrily. But she grabs the keys and, in her mom voice says, “Thank you,” and then leaves.

Jeff handles his rattled state in his own way, though he also turns to a kind of violence. When he spots Kevin at the gym they both work out in, he can’t keep his cool or mind his tongue. Rather stupidly—because who would draw extra attention to Shauna and his involvement with Adam?—he confronts Kevin, telling him that he upset his wife. Kevin is clearly taken off guard but manages to keep his cool. He asks if Jeff is aware of the hundreds of text messages the two sent to one another, and that he has it on good authority that they were having an affair. He also repeats Jeff’s accusations back to him. “Shauna was upset?” he asks. Jeff has to back down, realizing how that makes it sound.

When he gets home he asks Shauna how she got the minivan back. We don’t find out what happens next.

Tai

The only other character as frightening as Shauna is Tai, who has slowly been losing her mind, first while asleep and now . . . basically all the time, in her constant state of half-wakefulness. Her efforts to stave off sleep mean that she never really knows when she’ll nod off, but the Bad One seems to be taking over even when she’s awake, like during the car accident that’s left her wife hospitalized and unconscious. Things seem pretty touch-and-go at the moment.

One thing I know for sure? She shouldn’t allow herself to be in the same room as Simone unsupervised. She wakes up in the room only to discover that she’s drawn the Yellowjackets symbol on her hand. When she goes to the bathroom, she looks in the mirror and then turns, trying to collect herself. But her reflection stays, glaring out from the mirror. When she turns, she gasps in surprise. The Bad One mouths some words, but we can’t hear them. When Tai asks what she’s saying, she makes a symbol with her hands over her face. It’s clear immediately who she’s referring to: Van, who once wore that exact mask to hide the scars from the wolf attack.

Tai borrows her assistant’s car and heads out to find her old lover, classmate and friend. All I can say is: No, Tai, you should not be driving, but anything that takes you further away from Simone, Sammy and Steve is probably for the best.

These two—Shauna an Tai—are clearly being affected by something. The sleepwalking that’s overcome Tai’s life is much more than just walking in her sleep. She does strange, inexplicable and often wicked things. Crashing the car, beheading the dog, terrorizing her own son. There’s an evil inside her that’s even beginning to turn her eyes red.

Shauna seems to be infected with this thing—this presence—as well. I don’t think she’s just naturally a killer, some psychopathic serial killer whose instinct to kill has simply lain dormant until stabbing Adam. I think that the same evil that’s inhabiting Tai has found its way inside Shauna as well. Maybe killing Adam welcomed it in. I don’t know.

There are three more adult survivors we’re following now, but only one of them is being similarly impacted by the past.

Lottie & Nat

Nat remains at Lottie’s little cult compound, I think somewhat torn between her curiosity at what Lottie’s up to (and what she might know about Travis that she’s still not telling) and her desire to get as far from here as possible. Natalie is perpetually screwed up, a drug addict and alcoholic. At the end of Season 1, she put a gun in her mouth and almost pulled the trigger, would have if Lottie’s cultists hadn’t beaten down the door (much like Misty burst in when Nat tried to do some blow earlier in the season).

But I think that maybe this has made her immune—or at least more immune—to whatever is infecting her friends. Lottie, on the other hand, not so much. While she was so screwed up after being rescued that she couldn’t speak and was practically catatonic, she’s since embraced both her past and the present by becoming a self-help guru and using her experiences in the forest to help people find inner healing. Whether she’s a spiritual hack or truly cares about helping people is very much up in the air.

One thing is certain, however. Whatever evil came back to haunt Travis and infect Tai’s sleep and put murder into Shauna’s heart, is showing itself to her again. It’s not infecting her in the same ways, but it’s coming to her as visions. Last week, when she was relating the bizarre circumstances around Travis’s death (which was neither suicide or murder, but apparently supernatural) she saw the corpse-ghost of Laura Lee. This week, after telling Natalie about the bees and how a new queen’s first actions upon being born involve killing all the other queens in their eggs, she comes back to the honey farm and finds all the bees dead. The scene parallels the bird scene in the past (which we’ll get to shortly). She pulls a tray from one of the hives and begins to sob as she sees all the honey has turned to blood. Blood on her hands. Dead bees. Sticky red ooze.

Only when one of her cultists talks to her about lunch being ready do we realize it’s just a vision. Lottie is dragged out of her reverie and the bees are all still alive and buzzing.

It’s an ominous sign: Dead bees. Dead yellowjackets. Dead girls.

Something wicked this way comes.

Misty and Walter

Misty, like Nat, seems unaffected by whatever is overwhelming the other three. I think that’s because Misty is already so screwy. While Nat is sane—but troubled—Misty is another matter entirely. She’s perfectly happy to kidnap and poison Jessica (who may or may not be alive) and not only doesn’t bat an eye at cutting up and hiding a body, but seems genuinely thrilled to be a part of it. And yet . . . I don’t think any of this is the thing affecting her actions. It’s just Misty being Misty.

And somehow, it’s all pretty hilarious. Trust Misty to bring the comic relief. She and Walter—Elijah Wood’s new character—are citizen detectives who, I suspect, would be right at home with Dwight Schrute. Walter has a potential source to interview and is posing as an FBI agent. He invites “Agent African Grey” along for the interrogation, but when she shows up she recognizes the guy: Randy, her old classmate and Jeff’s best friend.

At this point, I think to myself that we’re about to see Randy come clean about he blackmail, revealing to Misty that Jeff was actually behind it and that Shauna was lying. But she and Walter, while clearly skilled enough to track people down, aren’t great at getting to the truth. They don’t push quite the right buttons, even when Misty instructs Walter to hit Randy to get him to talk (something Walter is initially reluctant to do, but ends up enjoying more than he should).

Randy does reveal two key details, however. One, that a group of people wearing purple were hanging out around the place, and two, that they had purchased drinks from the vending machine (presumably the same one that Nat broke into). Misty later realizes that they can check if they used a credit card to make the purchase and possibly track them down that way. Clever Misty! I’m definitely curious what will happen if these two actually do track Nat back to Lottie and her cult. There’s stuff going on that we’re not privy to yet.

I’m also quite curious about Walter’s best line. “Maybe I’m just a bored Moriarty looking for his Sherlock,” he tells Misty, who seems flustered and flattered by being called Sherlock. But Moriarty was Sherlock’s nemesis, not his partner. Walter is no Watson, it seems, but Moriarty? What’s his game here?

In The Woods

Back in 1996, in the frozen forest, we learn several things:

• Coach Ben has begun self-isolating. He’s starving which has made him quite a lot worse for wear, and he’s also deeply disturbed about what he witnessed when the teenagers ate Jackie’s body. He keeps having weird “flashbacks” to his time with his boyfriend, Paul, that are not like any of the flashbacks we’ve seen so far. There’s weird TV static that keeps flickering on the screen whenever he enters these scenes. One of them—in which he tells Paul he’s quit his job and is moving in with him—is clearly not a flashback at all. It takes place as the plane is leaving for the tournament, and he was on that plane. Perhaps these are not mere memories or fantasies, but some kind of supernatural mind-control that is overtaking Ben’s conciseness. If he sinks too deep into this unreality, he may not survive. And if he doesn’t survive, well that’s dinner.
• Tai doesn’t remember eating Jackie. She must have become the Bad One immediately as they settled into their feast. When Van tells her that she ate Jackie’s face, Tai vomits. She’s the only one of them who wasn’t consciously participating in the cannibalism. This is important but I’m not sure why just yet. Later, Van asks the Bad One if she can follow her. “If I untie you can I follow you?” she asks. “Yes,” the Bad One replies. She follows her into the forest and the Bad One tells her that she’s following the Eyeless Man. They come to a tree with the symbol carved into it and Tai wakes up, confused and disoriented.
• Nat wants to bury Jackie’s remains so she takes her bones with her to the plane where she spends a little time talking with Jackie about how she’s the lucky one. She died before things got worse, and she’s pretty sure they’ll get worse. Much worse. Even in death, Nat observes sagely, Jackie is making everyone jealous of her. Then a giant, white moose appears and charges the plane. Nat takes a shot but it doesn’t connect. Suddenly, the moose is gone. A vision? A ghost? A sign? I have no idea.
• They put on a baby shower for Shauna. Lottie wants to lift the mood. Misty, at the urging of the thespian, Crystal, performs a monologue from Steel Magnolias that is about as inappropriate as they come, but she does such a good job that the entire crowd is moved to applause. The shower takes a turn for the worse when Lottie gives Shauna a blanket with the Yellowjackets symbol (I’m not sure what to call it) stitched onto it. Not everyone is happy about this since it is definitely creepy, but Lottie thinks it has protective qualities. Then Shauna’s nose starts bleeding.

This is when the birds fall. The sound of things thumping against the roof startles everyone from their argument and they rush outside. Dozens of birds, dead in the snow. “Gather the blessings,” Lottie instructs. Nat is worried they might be diseased, but Nat isn’t a leader of people the way Lottie is. Nat may be the most heroic of this bunch, but she doesn’t have the power over people that Lottie has, and so the girls gather dead birds as their coach lays hallucinating in the other room, and Tori Amos’s haunting Bells for Her plays over all.

All told, another powerful, thought-provoking, disturbing episode of Yellowjackets. It may not be quite as dark or troubling as the previous episode—hard to top that feast in the woods—but it serves as the perfect digestif to wash it all down with. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the 1996 timeline is just how resigned almost everyone is to the devouring of their friend. “Maybe you’ll be the reason we all survive,” Nat tells Jackie’s bones. Other than Tai, who wasn’t really there, and Ben (who isn’t really here) everyone has made their peace with it. “It’s what she would have wanted,” Lottie tells Shauna, though they both know that’s a lie. “For the baby,” Lottie adds, but it’s no more true.

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