‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 6 Review: Little One

I suspect that this will be one of those Yellowjackets that some people love and other people hate, for reasons I’ll elaborate on further down. I actually think it was one of, if not the best episode of the season, capturing much of the creepy magic that made Season 1 so great. Season 2 has been a big letdown in a lot of ways, and this episode was certainly not perfect, but it had some great moments.

The big centerpiece of ‘Qui’ was Shauna giving birth. We learn in the end that the baby was stillborn, and that a good chunk of the episode was actually Shauna dreaming while she was passed out during labor. For some, this will feel like a massive and irritating fake-out. For me, well, I thought it was super obvious and I think the important thing here isn’t the twist, but what happened while Shauna wandered the dream world.

Why was it so obviously a dream to me? Allow me to explain:

• When Shauna is pushing and Misty finally returns to help after nearly succumbing to her post-Chrystal-death nervous breakdown, Shauna passes out. The screen goes dark (this is important) and then we hear the voice of Jackie saying “Shauna . . .” Then, in a quick whisper, Jackie says “Shauna!” Jackie, of course, is dead. This is the first clue that Shauna is waking into a dream, not reality.
• Since this tipped me off, I paid close attention to what came next. Shauna awakens to see the smiling faces of all her fellow survivors. They’re smiling happily as the camera pans to each one. Notably, we do not hear a baby crying yet. This scene is exactly like the Jackie dream sequence at the end of Season 1 when she wakes up and is brought back into the cabin to find everyone standing there smiling at her. In that scene, they give her some hot cocoa. In this scene, Shauna is given her baby, healthy and clean.
• It’s important to remember that the Jackie dream sequence in Season 1 was not actually Jackie’s dream. It was Shauna’s dream. Shauna awakens from it to find her friend frozen to death outside.
• In the first dream, as Jackie looks at all her smiling friends, she sees the face of the Stranger (possibly the Hunter). He says to Jackie, “So glad you’re joining us, we’ve been waiting for you.” In Shauna’s dream in today’s episode, at one point Shauna wakes up and finds Lottie nursing her baby humming the French nursery song Frère Jacques, which of course contains the repeated line “Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” or, in English, “Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?” which is yet another clue that this is a dream. So is the fact that Lottie’s breastfeeding. So is the French, which is the language Lottie first spoke when possessed during the séance.
• More importantly in this scene, Lottie says: “You aren’t producing milk. We need to feed.” When Shauna grabs her baby back Lottie says, “You’ll understand soon enough.”
• The one thing that made me question whether this was a dream was Shauna’s inability to get her child to feed. That felt so real, like exactly what would happen in a starvation scenario like this.
• Much like the cocoa that Jackie receives in the first dream just before she dies, the baby finally latches onto Shauna’s nipple and is able to feed . . . before we learn that the baby never makes it to begin with. Sustenance and death, as though something else is feeding at the expense of these unfortunate souls.

There are other clues throughout this sequence that what we’re witnessing is a dream. The snow has stopped and the sun is out in the dream sequence. It’s still a blizzard in the real world. During the horrific moment when Shauna wakes and hears girls humming and walks out to find her teammates wolfing down her infant son, perhaps the biggest clue that it’s all a dream is Coach Ben taking part in the cannibalism.

Speaking of Coach Ben, his flashback sequence has changed this week: This time around, his “past” self not only seems to be having glimpses of his current reality, he’s also in a new apartment that’s disturbingly rustic and cabin-like.

In any case, I think the important thing here is that Shauna is once again having a traumatic dream that contains within it a message from beyond. In her first dream, she was spoken to by It, whatever It is. This time around, she’s spoken to again, through the voice of Lottie.

The final scene, when Shauna actually wakes up to living reality only to discover that her baby has been stillborn, is heartbreaking. Sophie Nélisse does such a phenomenal job here, it’s hard to not get a little teary watching. She’s in shock, disbelief, she thinks they’re lying, they’ve eaten her baby while she was unconscious. “I can still hear him crying!” she sobs, over and over and over as the credits roll.

Meanwhile, In The Modern Timeline

I admit, I really hate the whole murder investigation storyline in the present day. This is largely a Shauna episode, and hats off to Melanie Lynskey for really giving us a surprisingly out-of-left-field confession to the Saracusa. “You have a kid you don’t want, to save a marriage you got into out of guilt and shame, and you just can’t really let yourself love either of them. But, of course, you do. You love them, despite yourself.” Heartbreaking—but maybe better suited to a therapy session. Her confession to an affair with Adam Martin is terrible for her case. Why didn’t she listen to Misty? “I want my lawyer!” is the only thing she should have said to the police at this point.

Meanwhile, Callie—who I really just can’t stand this season—tries to solve her mom’s problems by taking her advice. She tells Detective Tan that she lost her virginity to Saracusa, and when he suggests that she might be making it all up, she wonders who a jury would believe. Given just how much Saracusa has crossed the line so far, she might be right. Still, it’s playing with fire.

Unfortunately, I just find the whole subplot wildly boring and frustrating. It makes everyone involved look stupid and largely feels like a total waste of our time. The writers this season have wasted a lot of our time in all sorts of frustrating ways but this might be the most egregious. On the other hand, we get another hilarious Jeff scene as he listens to NWA’s “F*&* The Police” right outside of the police station. Never change, Jeff.

The most interesting thing in the present timeline remains Lottie’s psychiatrist. Recall, she visited her shrink a couple episodes ago and was told by the woman there that he was on a trip and that she would be filling in. That was weird enough, but then some of her advice—embracing her psychosis, basically—was really strange. This week is even more peculiar, since we never even see the new psychiatrist. It’s all Lottie’s perspective. Two theories:

• One, this is not a real person at all. This is Lottie having a vision, sliding deeper into her mental illness. She’s having conversations with herself and/or with the thing that has come back within all of them from the wilderness.
• Two, that this is a real person but not a real psychiatrist. A third group of antagonists is working at some nefarious goal that has to do with our heroes and this person is one member of this group.

Honestly, both of these scenarios is plausible. The third is simply that it’s all a red herring and Lottie just has a very crappy new psychiatrist.

It’s all a little too neat and tidy when all the surviving women show up together at Lottie’s cult compound, but here we are. Tai and Van show up just before Shauna does. They’re all standing in a nice little row when Van sees Lottie staring out across the lake at the forest and it all looks eerily like the wilderness where they were trapped for so long. Van is visibly shaken. The camera pans out and we see a grim sight indeed:

I had one thought that maybe, if Lottie really is crazy enough, she is actually both a friend trying to help and, in another form, the villain of the story, possessed by the thing from the Wilderness. The Antler Queen, whatever you want to call it. (I’m leaning toward a Wendigo, personally, or at least Wendigo psychosis). But that’s too much like Tai, who is also two personalities in her waking and sleep-walking selves. We can’t have both Tai and Lottie have multiple personalities, can we? Unless we accept that the thing can possess multiple people in different way (aka visiting Shauna in her dreams).

Outro: Another great episode in terms of music, with Blur early on and later Elliot Smith, who I fell in love with when Good Will Hunting came out back in 1997, and his song Miss Misery blew me away. This episode, as Shauna wakes into her nightmare, we get Pitseleh which means “little one” in Yiddish.

This song is . . . just crushingly sad, especially if you read up on Elliot Smith’s all-too-tragic life. A snippet of the lyrics: “The first time I saw you / I knew it would never last / I’m not half what I wish I was / I’m so angry / I don’t think it’ll ever pass.”

What did you think of this episode, dearest readers? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.