The quality of Showtime’s dual-timeline drama Yellowjackets necessitates an extended rollout time, and with the WGA strike saga, a greater-than-usual delay for the third season is inevitable. Even creator Ashley Lyle’s purported bonus episode preceding Season 3 has no release date, meaning mid-2024 is probably the earliest we can expect it. Sad as it is, the long wait gives us time for an easy and deserving revisit – here are those 2023 highlights that you must check out again in preparation for the over-year-long Yellowjackets absence.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
“What’d you do with my ear, Shipman?”
In Season 2, Episode 2, “Edible Complex”, the Yellowjackets team finally reached their date with destiny. After wisely shortening the number of cannibalism mentions in both timelines, the girls faced their decision with no thought other than survival. This brilliant episode led us up to the final moments by taking every care in properly memorializing Jackie’s corpse, only then allowing fate (or, perhaps, a greater force) to have the final say. And do not forget that Coach Ben did not partake., charting him on a different course to the end of the second season.
“Please don’t let my baby die.”
Teen Shauna’s arc in Season 2 parallels and contrasts with her future self beautifully, with her reliance on the team and extreme vulnerability in her pregnancy leading to a hardened woman desiring only self-preservation and retreating to the skills she mastered in the woods. The sixth episode, “Qui”, ended with her baby’s death in the past, shown alongside the reuniting of the core group in the present; the drama ratchets while we willingly suffer seeing Shauna’s impossible situations in both timelines.
“We have to give it what it wants.”
Yellowjackets‘s commentary on the formation of religions and cults received more focus in Season 2, thanks to the appearance of present-day Lottie and her peaceful band of wilderness hippies. The women had all rationalized their behavior as a result of survival, hunger- and despair-induced paranoia, and the mental instability of Lottie, but the season’s penultimate episode, “It Chooses”, peels back the veneer of their reasoning. The demand for a sacrifice to the wilderness spirit leads to a fated tragedy in the past (poor Javi) and an even more significant one in the present.
“The woods will be ours tonight.”
In the Season 2 finale of Yellowjackets, “Storytelling”, the nuance that propels us into the series’s future astounds even on multiple viewings. Each character has an individual significance and relationship to the events around them, so much so that you could separately follow each one and get a rewarding experience. Natalie’s death is a proper sendoff in its most tragic form, combining all the details of her life into a heroic, drug-overdosing, self-destructive, sacrificing moment for her farewell. And to where Walter (Elijah Wood) is going with his presence in the show, we can only speculate (but we want more).
Yellowjackets is streaming now on Showtime and Paramount+ (with Showtime add-on).
