Yellowjackets recap: There will be blood

Has anyone ever faced a more glaring case of hangxiety than Taissa Turner? At the top of Yellowjackets’ third episode, our hungry hungry high-school athletes are finally full, with both a fellow teammate’s corpse and an iceberg of guilt they can’t quite fathom. But whether luckily or unluckily for her, it appears Tai’s alter ego was behind the wheel when the girls tucked in, and the average-teen version of Tai is due for an absolutely horrific realization. The next morning, Van gently breaks the news that it wasn’t a wild animal that ravaged Jackie’s remains, as Taissa suspects: They ate her. It was Taissa, in fact, who ate Jackie’s face. Choking back vomit, Tai screams in agony. Cue opening credits!

Now that the girls aren’t hungry for literal protein anymore (as burgeoning comedienne Mari deadpans the morning after, “I guess no one wants breakfast”), a new type of hunger takes precedence: the desire for some kind of higher purpose to cut through the monotony of what Jackie once aptly deemed “back-to-the-land bullshit.” With Shauna’s pregnancy almost to term—and her terror about motherhood nearly palpable—the girls decide a baby shower is the perfect event to follow up their perverse bacchanal. It’s as much a morale booster as it is a reminder of the traditions and social niceties that defined their lives in New Jersey, which have never felt further away: As Lottie reassures a spiraling Shauna, “You won’t hurt the baby.”

As teen Shauna’s fear of chaos moves towards a fever pitch, adult Shauna is moving in the opposite direction, grabbing a gun from the hands of an attempted carjacker (“Are you Rambo?!” an exasperated Jeff protests) and later, intimidating said carjacker with descriptions of peeling the skin off of a corpse. The more confident Shauna grows in her ability to maintain the appearance of a hum-drum housewife lifestyle, the clearer it becomes that she’s never been that person in the first place.

Shauna’s nose-dive into a life of crime doesn’t exactly bode well for Misty, who is diligently covering Shauna’s tracks while also trying to locate Natalie. Walter, officially angling for the role of Misty’s partner-in-crime, invites her to an interrogation. As Mr. PutsTheSickInForensic tells it, he’s managed to set up a meeting disguised as an FBI interrogation with a witness from Nat’s motel. That witness? The WHS student who puked during “Pump Up The Jam” freshman year, the best friend Jeff has cherished (to Shauna’s chagrin) since high school: It’s the indomitable Randy Walsh. Because Misty and Randy know each other, Misty leads the interrogation via an earpiece Walter wears. When he leans into bad-cop territory, the duo finally get fuzzy details on Lottie’s cult, or as Randy describes them, the purple suited people who drank all the Fantas from the vending machine. It’s not much, but it’s enough to kick Misty’s chase into a higher gear and strap Walter squarely into the passenger seat.

While Shauna and Misty lean into their less-demure personality traits, adult Taissa is also facing her demons head on–literally. After coming to in the hospital next to an unconscious Simone, Tai notices she’s drawn the symbol (which “the bad one” has had a knack for gravitating towards since her wilderness sleepwalking days) on the inside of Simone’s palm. Rushing to the bathroom to clear her head, she comes face to face with her own glaring, autonomous reflection: “the bad one” incarnate. After whispering unintelligibly at her, Tai’s reflection eventually resorts to image-based messaging, placing her fingers across her left eye in a gesture that directly evokes the symbol. That’s reason enough for Tai to immediately hightail it out of the hospital in her assistant’s car, destination unknown. Wherever she goes, she just wants to go fast: the wilderness is always close behind.

If the wilderness has caught up to anyone this episode, however, it’s Coach Ben. After refusing to partake in the Jackie buffet, Coach spends most of the episode in bed, slowly teetering towards starvation. In his weakened state, he finds himself musing on the last few nights he spent with his boyfriend, Paul. Before he left for nationals, Paul encouraged Ben to come out of the closet, move to the city with him, and fully embrace their life together. But Ben wasn’t ready and argued in a crushing moment of irony that if he were to forgo that plane to nationals and commit publicly to Paul, everything in his life would change—a seismic shift Ben just isn’t ready for. In an absolutely prescient read, Paul laments why Ben would want to stay with his team of “vicious little monsters.” Ben agrees, but insists: “They need me.” Poor Ben: If any character is being primed as the survivors’ next meal, it’s him.

Although some important relational strides are made in this episode, the increasingly chaotic nature of both timelines is starting to catch up to Yellowjackets. When the ground is frozen solid outside, laying groundwork is an arduous pursuit, and for the first time, I found myself frustrated at the unevenness of the build. Time jumps didn’t flow as organically (especially given Coach Ben’s flashbacks); more crudely-outlined survivors felt out of place next to their carefully-crafted counterparts; and the growing cast of characters on Lottie’s compound overwhelmed some of the minutiae of Lottie’s belief system. Why did she mount antlers above the door of her locked personal quarters? What’s with the burying alive in episode one? Why the heliotrope?

As it usually is with this series, looking forward requires looking back, and understanding adult Lottie’s mindset requires delving into teen Lottie’s transformation into a certain sort of messiah. Although in episode three, Lottie has managed to draw the devotion of a few survivors—Mari and Akilah most fervently—though Shauna isn’t one of them. In fact, despite the way Lottie supports she’s beginning to sense something utterly sinister about Lottie’s connection with the wilderness and that ever-present symbol, which Lottie sews onto a baby blanket for the child she’s been calling—to Shauna’s discomfort—“him.” In a classic Natalie-Lottie split, Nat insists it’s creepy to put the symbol on a baby’s swaddle, while Lottie argues that cabin guy was using the image as protection. “He died, Lottie!” Natalie shoots back.

It’s at that moment the wilderness decides to settle the beef: Shauna’s nose starts bleeding, dripping onto the embroidered symbol. Almost immediately, clattering noises ring out against the roof. When the girls step outside to see what’s happening, they find dozens of dead birds that have rained down around the cabin, almost as if they fell immobilized from the sky. Although Natalie warns the birds may be diseased, her protestations go unheard: Most of the girls have already begun dropping the birds at Lottie’s feet, after Lottie deemed them “blessings.” When a possessed Lottie insisted “You must spill blood” back in season one, she wasn’t kidding. It would feel like a cheat code, if the implications weren’t so scary. If a few drops of blood can bring in more game than Nat has caught in months, what could a few liters do?

Decades down the line, Nat and Lottie’s at-odds relationship doesn’t look all that different, and Nat still refuses to inhabit Lottie’s world as anything more than an outsider. In a pivotal “we’re not talking about what we’re actually talking about” sequence, adult Lottie shows adult Natalie the assembly of beehives she’s cultivated carefully on her compound, urging her towards more active participation in the cult intentional community. Each ecosystem of bees stems from one original hive, Lottie explains in an eerie coo: In the winter, the bees cluster around their queen, vibrating to keep her warm. But the niceties end once a new queen hatches. Her first act, Lottie explains, is to “sting all the other unborn queens to death.”

“It isn’t brutal. It’s natural,” Lottie tells Nat after she sarcastically comments that it makes sense Lottie would worship a queen like that. “It’s simply what has to be done. Otherwise they starve. We all do.” Wilderness law and the ethics that guide the survivors’ lives–Lottie’s especially–continue to look one and the same.

If episode three accomplishes one thing, it’s bringing the cliff the girls are trudging towards—in Taissa’s case, literally—into sharper view. The man who was once their leader is starving and terrified of them; Shauna’s due date is imminent; and Lottie’s blood magic is proving more frighteningly effective than Natalie specifically is ready to admit. “You’re lucky, you know,” Nat tells the bag of Jackie’s remains she brings for “burial” at the crash site. ”I think shit is gonna get a lot worse out here.” She pauses, then continues: “But you’re already dead, so way to make everyone jealous of you one last time.” Even at the end of all things, girls really will be girls.

Stray observations

• A baby shower? A tearful recited monologue from Steel Magnolias? Coach Ben on death’s door dreaming of his long-lost lover? Welcome to Travis’ least relevant episode yet. (Seriously, we see him for all of thirty seconds.)
• All this talk of beehives and killer queens—not to mention Lottie’s bloody episode-ending vision—certainly makes it seem like Reddit’s “no queens in the deck” theorists are onto something.
• The moment where Natalie follows Lottie to the beehives, dramatically swinging her shoulders after refusing to join in any of the compound activities, conjures this clip from America’s Next Top Model so effectively, I laughed out loud. Sometimes, you just can’t take the pressure of it.
• If Van is going to continue playing detective by following the sleepwalking Taissa, she could really use a pair of, well, Vans. Seriously, nobody wore slip-on shoes on the plane? The ’90s really were a different time.
• “Dude, I don’t even know what socks I put on today”—Randy Walsh, my choice for Wiskayok poet laureate.
• As much as I love Coach Ben, I hope Paul found someone else. He deserves to share his toiled-over clam chowder with someone who appreciates the subtleties of cumin (or a lack thereof!).
• Funniest moment of the episode hands down: when Jeff, distressed at the idea Shauna may be bored in their marriage, tries to take her on a “spontaneous” trip to Colonial Williamsburg, asking his incredulous wife: “I’m taking us out of our comfort zone, baby. You ever churn butter? I haven’t.” As the words leave his mouth, he nearly hits the man who ultimately jacks their car. Oh, Jeff; no one has ever deserved more points for trying.
• Taissa calling Jessica Roberts…get ready to let that line ring, mama!