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.” Editor’s picks The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time
(*) 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. Related Content How to Watch 'Yellowjackets' Season Three Online ‘Yellowjackets’ Season Three: Secrets From the Wilderness Resurface in Bloody Trailer 'Yellowjackets' Will Return on Valentine's Day, With Hilary Swank Joining the Cast 'Heretic' Proves That Evil Hugh Grant Is the Best Hugh Grant
(*) Well, semi-contemporary. Because the story is taking place over a relatively compact period of time, it’s still 2021 for Misty and friends.
It’s with the adults that Yellowjackets is running in circles, even though that part still has the show’s most famous, and often best, performers, in Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, and Lauren Ambrose.
Losing Lewis’ caustic energy is a problem that has yet to be compensated for in the four episodes critics were given, none of which feature some of the new season’s higher-profile additions like Hilary Swank. The much bigger issue, though, is one built into the structure of the show: The adult scenes can’t spoil most of what happens in the woods, other than identifying some of the people who survive, like Misty, Shauna (Lynskey), Van (Ambrose), and Taissa (Tawny Cypress). So the women have to speak cryptically about the defining event of their lives, and those scenes can’t even definitively answer whether the “it” that teen Lottie (Courtney Eaton) persuaded the other girls to worship is real, or just a mass psychosis brought on by the the crash and its aftermath, lingering into middle age as a form of post-traumatic stress.
As a result, the 2021-set material has always felt lacking in drive and energy compared to the 1996 scenes. But while there were some forgettable adult subplots before, like Taissa’s run for the New Jersey state senate (a job that gets hilariously hand-waved away in a single line of dialogue this season), there was still a compelling sense of danger and mystery overall, not to mention Lynskey, Lewis, and the others owning every second of screen time they were given. The remaining actors are still strong, but they’re not given much to play, at least not dramatically. At times, the adult scenes — particularly involving Shauna; her husband, Jeff (Warren Cole); and their rebellious daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) — just turn into sitcom hijinks, like Jeff volunteering at the nursing home where Misty works and discovering a knack for bingo calling. And whenever the plot veers into darker territory, it can’t really say much of anything, or risk giving away whether “it” exists, and, if so, what “it” wants.
The wilderness scenes have some foundational issues to deal with as well, like the always awkward moment when a crash survivor who hasn’t done anything of note since the show began is abruptly thrust into prominence. Though at least the show is upfront about that at times, when the previously anonymous Melissa (Jenna Burgess) says something funny to a stunned Shauna, who responds, “Wait, do you, like, actually have a personality?” And it’s enormously distracting that there’s zero discussion of trying once again to find their way back to civilization now that the weather is so much better and Natalie has given them a good food supply. (If they’re staying because “it” wants them to, there needs to be new discussion of that.) But on the whole, there’s a level of energy to those scenes that has almost entirely vanished from the adult world.
What would be the revitalizing Yellowjackets equivalent of Lost moving forward in time instead of backward? The best way ahead at this point seems to be to “it” or get off the pot: Definitively establish whether what’s happening is magic or mental illness, and lean way into that direction in both timelines. It would allow the 2021 scenes to feel purposeful again, rather than increasingly sweaty sleight of hand. And it would give greater focus to the teenage plots.
In one episode, the adult Taissa and Van are watching a VHS recording from the Eighties. Taissa is startled when one of the old commercials features a person she has recently been having visions (or hallucinations) of, and insists that, “It means something!” At some point, all the creepy things happening to these women in their teens and in their forties has to mean something — whether it’s mysticism, madness, or something else entirely — and it feels like that point is already here. The first two episodes of Yellowjackets Season Three are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first four.
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