Yellowjackets season 2 premieres on Showtime Anytime streaming on March 24 and March 26 on Showtime. To catchup on events before you watch, check out our Yellowjackets Story So Far.
In the late fall of 2021, Yellowjackets burst onto the zeitgeist and grabbed audiences with an audacious setup: a New Jersey girl’s soccer team struggling to survive the aftermath of a 1996 plane crash. This was intercut with some of those survivors still processing their trauma 25 years later. An ensemble cast featuring teen and adult versions of the characters, Yellowjackets’ first season is ablaze with the potency of unbridled hormones, extreme vices, and survival horror, juxtaposed with the horrors of the mundanity of middle age. In the second season, however, Yellowjackets is a little worse for wear in its first six episodes. While the post-crash stories remain the most involving, the present-day side suffers as the writers look for ways to separate the adult characters with less dramatic returns.
The various stories pick up where the season 1 finale left off. In the past, it’s full-on winter with the elements making the survivors more emaciated and testy with one another. And the freezing death of team captain Jackie (Ella Purnell) has left a palpable pall over everyone, especially Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), who had many unresolved issues with her frenemy. How Yellowjackets addresses that lingering guilt and loss is both grim and compelling. In the present, the reunited survivors Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Tai (Tawny Cypress), Misty (Christina Ricci), and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) are now separated again by a variety of highly orchestrated circumstances that test the limits of credulity.
Of the six episodes provided for review, the first two, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” and “Edible Complex” are far and away the best of the group. The first episode works as an effective reintroduction to how all the characters in the past are coping with Jackie’s shocking death. And in the present, the episode answers many of the cliffhangers from the season 1 finale. But “Edible Complex” is really the shining star of the pack. It gleefully and assuredly embraces full-on horror storytelling to pay off story breadcrumbs that have been tantalizingly dropped since the pilot. Every bit of its climax, from the Radiohead needle drop to the cross-cut editing, has the potential to induce goosebumps and slack jaws. It reminds me of why the series grabbed so many of us by the jugular in the first place.
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Unfortunately, nothing that follows reaches those two episodes’ heights. There’s a lot of present-day wheel-spinning and less interesting character progressions that don’t have the kind of impact we’ve come to expect with this series. It’s clear by episode 3 that the past supersedes the present in terms of the best storytelling of the season because that’s where the writers are far more assured in making aggressive reveals and pushing stories forward. In particular, the lure of Lottie’s (Courtney Eaton) rituals and talismans, which bring hope to many of the survivors, unfolds in a way that rides the line of being interpreted as either pragmatic or supernatural. There’s also Shauna’s pregnancy, with an imminent birth they are entirely unprepared to handle. Throw in the group’s overall declining mental health, and you know we’re in for drama all the time in the woods, ya’ll.
Season 2 retains the established series format of flipping back and forth between the post-crash survivors and their adult versions in 2021, but that’s been expanded to include snippets of pre-crash times, immediate post-rescue moments, and even some character-centric memories. The flipping works best when the stories in the past and present dovetail in some way, like in revealing how younger Tai’s sleep-deprivation problems started. This informs how adult Tai’s current problems with sleepwalking got so bad. Yet there are plenty of instances where the cuts between time periods are more random and less meaty, as though the writers are trying to find ways to flesh out underserved characters, but end up leading to a less satisfying episode overall.
The decision that works against season 2 the most is the aforementioned separation of the core women in the present. Having those deeply flawed women come together again in season 1 – with all of their history and legacy chaos – and witnessing that percolating before our very eyes was a huge part of their initial chemistry. You were never certain when someone would go rogue or explode with latent rage, which is part of what made the present-day storylines so vibrant. Now they’re dispersed to deal with their issues individually, like a storytelling experiment that is extended to its breaking point.
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The new dynamics are spotty at best. Shauna gets the shortest end of the stick, having to do her post-Adam murder machinations with her dopey husband Jeff (Warren Kole) and seething daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins). Nat is defanged in her new setting and Tai wanders around a lot in a fugue state, not going anywhere for a long time. Only Misty gets a fun change of scenery: she is paired with an equally odd murder hound named Walter (Elijah Wood). They have great comedic chemistry and give the season some of its funniest moments. Overall, the separated strategy reduces the present-day storylines to soapy scenarios that feel like placeholders, just biding their time until they hopefully get back together once more.
The one past timeline stumble is when Yellowjackets pulls a Lost move, a la the Tailies, by casually folding in more team members who didn’t have lines in the first season and making them speaking characters out of nowhere. That’s disconcerting at times, not to mention foreboding for them when we know where the lack of food takes the storyline.
However, one element that hasn’t missed a beat are the genius needle drops. Yellowjackets’ music supervisors deserve an award for continuing to create a playlist that not only fits time and place, but also honors the female voices of the ‘90s like Tori Amos, 4 Non Blondes, and even Elastica. There are some brilliant marriages of music to scenes that results in some of the most memorable moments of this sophomore season.