‘Yellowjackets’ Is Stuck in the Woods With No Escape Plan – Rolling Stone
Source: Rolling Stone
In an episode from the third season of Yellowjackets, two characters cook a meal while singing and dancing along to Cass Elliot’s 1969 hit “Make Your Own Kind of Music.” For TV fanatics, it’s a song that will forever be associated with the second-season premiere of Lost, where Elliot’s soaring vocals accompanied our first glimpse inside the mysterious Dharma Initiative hatch. This soundtrack choice does not feel coincidental, since Yellowjackets is another show about characters struggling to survive in a hostile, possibly mystical, wilderness after a plane crash, as well as one where each episode splits its time between the survivalist tale and stories of these characters back in civilization.
In its third season, Lost was a show palpably struggling to keep its story going without an endpoint in mind, in a broadcast-network business model that dictated hit series were obligated to stick around for however long it took them to become unprofitable. The three main characters spent multiple episodes locked in cages, unable to accomplish anything. One episode’s flashback scenes were devoted to explaining how a character got his tattoos. It was narrative desperation time. After the Lost creators were able to persuade their network bosses to agree to conclude the show after six seasons, the whole production was reinvigorated with new ideas — flash-forwards instead of flashbacks, for instance — and some of the most beloved episodes of the whole run.
Yellowjackets is not exactly Lost for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that all of its major characters are women, and all of the wilderness scenes involve them as teenage girls, with tensions specific to that particular moment. It’s also being made in a different TV era, and a rapidly evolving one at that(*). Three seasons and counting feels like a long run for any show these days, and Yellowjackets co-creator Ashley Lyle told me at the end of the first season, “We have no interest in dragging this show out past its due time. We do have a multiseason arc; we strongly feel we have multiple seasons of story to tell. But at a certain point, we’re going to realize that the story wants to end. And I hope that the audience is reassured that we don’t intend to beat a dead horse.”
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(*) When it debuted in 2021, it was made by the pay-cable channel Showtime, which today barely exists, so now it’s a Paramount+ with Showtime original series that also happens to play on cable a few days after each episode begins streaming.
Still, Yellowjackets Season Three has something of the feeling of its spiritual predecessor at this stage of its life, especially in scenes featuring the adult versions of the crash survivors. There are still a lot of good performances, and more killer Nineties soundtrack cuts, but the show very much could use a shot in the arm leading to its own jaw-dropping equivalent of Jack telling Kate, “We have to go back!”
Season Two ended with cataclysmic events in both timelines. In the wilderness, the abandoned cabin that the girls had been sheltering in through a brutal winter burned down. In the contemporary(*) action, Misty (Christina Ricci) accidentally murdered best friend Natalie (Juliette Lewis) with a lethal injection meant for their mentally unstable fellow survivor Lottie (Simone Kessell). The Nineties material jumps forward a few months, catching up with the girls after they have emerged from the bitter cold to enjoy the relative paradise of the Canadian mountains circa the summer solstice. Things are going so well, in fact, that at times they get to act like the high school soccer teammates they were before the crash, horsing around and teasing one another, with the teenage Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) hunting enough game that cannibalism is no longer a necessity for the moment. Weird things are still afoot, and most of the girls believe a powerful supernatural entity is influencing everything that happens to them. But the show pulls back just enough on the oppressive horror vibes of Season Two without losing a perpetual sense of unease from those scenes.
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(*) Well, semi-contemporary. Because the story is taking place over a relatively compact period of time, it’s
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