Yellowjackets becomes an unsettling villain origin story in its second episode

There are some personal descriptors that seems unwaveringly positive, like “helpful” or “good in a crisis,” but the second episode of Yellowjackets has some intriguing ideas about how dark those could be, as we get closer to Sammi Hanratty and Christina Ricci’s twisted Misty.

Misty, by all intents, should be to Yellowjackets what Piggy was to Lord Of The Flies—smart, bespectacled, and resourceful, always keeping a steady head under pressure. But where Piggy’s ostracism didn’t convolute his moral goodness, Misty is something far more monstrous. Bullied and ignored her entire life, unable to even handle a prank phone call accusing of her doing “anal in the janitor’s closet,” without incriminating herself further. Ever the outcast, as the plane goes down the other girls clasp each others hands, Misty assumes the brace position alone.

The carnage Misty sits up in is an impressively gory spectacle: Girls are impaled through their necks and screaming on fire. She leaps into action, wrenching open doors and saving who she can. Jackie—the one chosen for her supposed leadership skills—crumbles, leaving Van the goalie to burn alive stuck in her seat, only for her to emerge, singed and furious, a few minutes later. Misty, on the other hand, goes from strength to strength, helping the wounded, and amputating the coach’s leg to stop her from bleeding out. As she swings the axe into his thigh, her cheeks and glasses are splattered red and it seems Misty’s true face has been revealed.

In the present day, the crisis now over, she has returned to her social ineptitude, on a date with a man who couldn’t be less interested. Ricci does a convincing job of persuading us that despite her gorgeous looks Misty is so unnerving a presence no one would volunteer to spend time with her. It’s not until she returns to her apartment, and finds Nat, seated against her coffee table with a rifle purring, “Hello Misty, you crazy fucking bitch,” that the old Misty clicks back into play.

It’s an interesting idea Yellowjackets is toying with, that while the others were broken by the tragedy, Misty was empowered by it. Ricci’s performance becomes energized, even gleeful, when trying to figure out who is threatening her and Nat, sending them postcards of the familiar wilderness with the words “WISH YOU WERE HERE!” on the front and a mysterious abstract symbol (that resembles an impaled girl from a certain angle) on the back. The show quickly sets up another mystery: Who is sending these and why? Why did only Misty and Nat get them? At any rate the screen paring of Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis proves an exciting one. They contrast one another with vicious brilliance; Lewis is charismatic and edgy; Ricci goes prim and eerie. One seems just as likely to murder the other at any given moment.

But unlike Misty, Nat still has people who care about her and vice versa. She’s determined to find fellow survivor Travis, even if he won’t answer her calls. And her old buddy Kevin appears at the bar, hoping to reconnect, letting us know he’s a detective now with the narrative subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Shauna and Taissa’s respective problems are of the more mundane variety, occupying slow-burn domestic dramas in contrast to the carnage of the flashbacks and Misty and Nat’s cat and mouse game. Shauna and Jeff’s (yes, the Jeff that was Jackie’s boyfriend) marriage is passionless and awkward, nearing the excruciating levels of Misty’s date. Their therapist’s mandate for some fantasy play falls to pieces despite some earnest effort on both their parts, but the dynamic between the two feels off. Lynskey doesn’t seem to be interacting with a man she has grown bored of, but one that she barely knows. There’s no lived-in feeling of a 25-year-old marriage, even an unfulfilling one.

While they do eventually manage to work up some enthusiasm for one another, the joy is cut short by a text from “Bianca”, who we assume is the reason Jeff needs to spend so much time doing inventory. Sparks do fly however with the immediately suspicious Adam, a charming mechanic that Shauna rear-ends. Adam seems to be plucked straight from a rom-com, determined to make their fender bender a swooning meet-cute. But amid all the mysteries and impalements, his charm seems to foreshadow a sinister path for Shauna. That their phone conversation is punctuated by her pulling out the bunny she dispatched last episode and expertly skinning, gutting and butchering it without raising an eyebrow suggests neither party knows exactly what they are in for.

Taissa’s storylines takes mundanity a step too far, still circling around her singular goal of being elected to state senate. The only additional step is Taissa and her wife’s newfound concern for their son Sammy. In the first episode, he seemed a sweet, if slightly shy, presence but something more sinister is afoot. There are plenty of shots of Sammy staring into the middle distance unsettled, like he’s seen a ghost. We eventually see it’s not a ghost he’s haunted by, but a woman, one whose eyes he draws over and over again, papering over his window so “the lady in the tree” will stop watching him at night.

While the flashbacks cover only a few hours, they are the show’s highlight, content in sadistically showing us how Nat, Shauna, Taissa, and Travis ended up so broken. With both pilots dead in the cockpit, one coach unconscious after having had his leg amputated and the other missing, it is a scramble to find leadership. Travis is furious but stagnant, having watched his father fall out of an airplane window, unable to comfort his younger brother or assist the others. He snaps into futile action when his father is finally found, impaled on a tree, with blood dripping onto Laura’s beloved teddybear with heavy-handed symbolism. Shauna, Taissa, and Jackie are all overwhelmed, vacillating between denial and depression.

A small respite comes around the campfire, when the survivors confess their deepest darkest secrets, laughing as they speculated that the crash is divine retribution for using curse words, shoplifting, or pausing a VHS to check out Bruce Willis’ penis. It’s a moment of sweetness that makes them seem like teenage girls again, gathered ’round a campfire, rather than a traumatized group of young survivors, surrounded by fresh corpses. Misty brings them back to reality with the loud hiss and then screams as she cauterizes the coach’s wounds. Where she can’t participate in playful banter, she can distinguish herself in this more mercenary fashion.

Sadly, it is their gratitude towards Misty that dooms the remaining survivors. She overhears two of them saying they would be “fucked” without her as she pees and glimpses the red flashing light of the emergency transmitter. She barely pauses before smashing it to pieces with a rock and pulling out the wires, damning them to 19 months without rescue. Whether the others find out about this or not is unclear. Back in the present day, she plays a similar card by sabotaging Nat’s car, something that Nat seems wholly unsurprised by. She agrees to let Misty tag along on her quest to find Travis, perhaps resigned to make a deal with the devil she knows.

While the episode wasn’t quite balanced, Yellowjackets is still managing to keep things moving while layering new mysteries. Whether that will lead to an overcrowded mess by the midseason point or an intricate tapestry of damaged people and terrible things remains to be seen, but Misty’s story bodes well. The character study in “F Sharp” worked as a grounded but deliciously twisted villain origin story.

Stray Observations

• Misty saying “I have tea, I have coconut Lacroix, I have sherry” was somehow creepier than if she’d offered Nat human blood.
• A moment of spectacular comic delivery from Liv Hewson with “You want to save the corn nuts?”
• Misty’s parrot is called Caligula after the Roman emperor who, and accounts vary, spent the first 6 months of his reign as a moderate principled ruler before becoming a sadistic, perverse tyrant who was murdered by his officers.
• The symbol from the postcard appears on the tree!
• So far we know Shauna, Taissa, Nat, Misty and Travis survived. I am hoping that sweet Laura made it, if only to see if the trauma turned her into Margaret White.