Yellowjackets recap: One small step, one giant leap

It’s always the fastest friendships that burn out in a blaze of glory. Especially for those of us who survived the minefields of girlhood, a bond that arrives furiously glistening and painfully echoes in the brain long after it’s gone is all too familiar.

For a series that so expansively captures the high-risk, high-reward reality of female friendship, Yellowjackets hasn’t yet leaned into a true crash-and-burn connection. Shauna and Jackie’s ill-fated bestieship, rife with cracks long before Shauna and the other girls feasted on her corpse, was more of an increasingly claustrophobic comfort zone than a place of gleeful refuge. Tai and Van—who as teens, are faring better than ever in episode five—were never really friends in the first place. And as adults, not one of the survivors has a true best girlfriend by their side, a telling indication of just what happens when you spend eighteen months staking your life on girls you may or may not be able to trust.

As Yellowjackets’ second season tiptoes towards its midpoint, the individual relationships between the teenaged girls have become a clear fulcrum for their adult counterparts’ interactions: Shauna’s inability to face reality, the only thing that allows her to brunch with Jackie’s parents; Tai’s fear of opening up to absolutely anyone but Van; Natalie’s well of frustration and jealousy towards Lottie that sometimes, when she lets her guard down, borders on awe.

But with newly-declared “besties” Misty and Crystal (played by mesmerizing newcomer Nuha Jez Isman), Yellowjackets draws one of its clearest lines yet between the teen and adult timelines, providing essential context to Misty herself and her current burgeoning connection with Walter. Gleefully bonding over shared secrets—Misty told everyone she lost her deodorant in the crash but really just tossed it, Crystal’s real name is “Christin,” and both girls think what Jack Kevorkian did was really brave, actually—the duo has been a defiant bright spot this season, genuinely enjoying their time together and proudly calling each other “bestie” while the rest of the survivors spar with each other over Lottie’s burgeoning cult. But you don’t grow up to be an adult woman whose best friend is a bird named after a Roman emperor known for working to consolidate a ruler’s own personal power without some serious falling outs; and on Yellowjackets, absolutely nothing gold can stay.

When episode five starts, however, gold is exactly what we’re awash in: Sun streams through the windows into the cabin, melting icicles and illuminating a groggy Tai, who wakes up to realize she’s finally slept through the night. Since Tai found Javi–who still refuses to speak to anyone, even Travis—she’s been dutifully attending what a very pregnant, very skeptical Shauna refers to as Lottie’s “prayer club.” Still the most wary of Lottie in the young group—even more so than Natalie, who’s more focused on winning back Travis’ affection after the faux bloody shorts debacle than fighting off Lottie’s sway—Shauna doesn’t like how obsessed Lottie has become with her incoming bundle of joy. Lottie’s penchant for creepily referring to the baby as either “him” or a “new life,” not to mention the moment Shauna awakes from a nap to find Lottie whispering to her pregnant belly “You’re going to change everything,” hasn’t helped.

For the rest of the team, however, Lottie’s emphasis on communing with the wilderness has been pretty uniting; after all, it literally involves them holding hands every day. Akilah–who has been allotted an actual storyline this season–perfectly describes the appeal to Tai, likening Lottie’s rudimentary religion to a pre-game ritual she used to love. “It just felt good. Like we could pretend it made a difference,” Akilah recalls. It’s not like we really believed in it, not deep down…but we still did it before every game.” At what point does a habitual superstition turn into genuine zealous belief—or more specifically, under what degree of stress?

For Tai, the appeal of Lottie’s “woo woo bullshit” lies directly in the way it eases her own demons. Years down the line, as she reconnects with adult Van, it’s clear Van is still the only person she really trusts to remain level-headed in the face of “the bad one.” When Van believed in Lottie, Tai believed, too. It’s not just romance goggles, either; in the teen timeline, Van has consistently remained both a stalwart source of reasoning and comedic relief. It’s no wonder that she’s the most well-adjusted adult (save for the leftover stash of Oxycodone in her medicine cabinet that she’s been slowly working through since her mother died of cancer and the growing collection of past due bills she relegated to the trash). Hey, when it comes to handling the time warp that trauma in your formative years can beget, owning and operating a less-than-lucrative VHS store is definitely healthier than chaining up a private investigator, disemboweling your dog in the name of a basement altar, or murdering your lover.

Speaking of that last “coping mechanism”: Shauna, Jeff, and Callie have never been more of a team than in the face of fighting off Kevin Tan’s investigation. When Jay-a.k.a.-Detective Saracusa won’t kiss Callie on a bowling date, she’s suspicious enough to check out the receipt for their bill, which reads “M. Saracusa,” a dead giveaway. A quick Google search—as Callie herself once wisely advised her mom, everyone is on the internet—catches Saracusa absolutely red-handed, participating in a toy drive for the Wiskayok Police Department. Callie doesn’t take this as her cue to hightail it out of the bowling alley, though. Taking right after her über-sneaky mom, Callie diverts Saracusa’s attention by faux-lamenting that she finally discovered who her mom was sleeping with: Randy Walsh.

Once Callie lets her parents in on the situation—the eager smile on her face reflecting how much more aligned she and Shauna are becoming—a plan develops. Shauna will make an obvious visit to a second location with Randy in tow, assuming the cops will stake her out. That way they’ll believe the affair is real. Naturally, Randy is game—this man will pretty much do anything—but when he, erm, fails to deliver after Shauna asks him to masturbate in a condom to provide Shauna with a real-life DNA-based cover, Saracusa and Tan find themselves back in the lead. With every beat, it’s unclear who exactly is the cat and who is the mouse in this scenario. Either way, someone (else) is getting eaten.

The “kill or be killed” dichotomy may be ratcheting up in the adult timeline, but it’s long been a way of life for our stranded teens, despite Tai’s protestations to Shauna that there’s only “one fucking team” out there. If that’s the case, why are numbers dwindling so swiftly, and why are lines being dug so deeply in the snow? Alliances have become one of the only grounding things the girls have left out there, which brings us all the way back around to Misty and Crystal. With the not-so-dynamic duo, Yellowjackets delivers its own pressure-cooked Thelma And Louise…if only Misty were brave enough to drive off the cliff as well. In one of episode five’s (and one of the season’s) strongest scenes, a bestie date to the edge of the cliff where the girls dump out the bucket they use at the “toilet” takes a harrowing turn when Misty finally reveals the one secret Crystal can’t justify for her: On the first night of the crash, Misty found and destroyed the plane’s emergency transmitter. When Crystal turns on her—and dares insult her acting abilities—Misty threatens to “fucking kill” her if she tells anyone, invoking their countless pinky-promises. Just as she utters the threat, Crystal steps backward and tumbles off the edge to her death.

Yet again, Yellowjackets is flexing its ability to gruesomely embody the stakes of female friendship that already exist in the first place. Who hasn’t (metaphorically, at least) felt a little bit like Misty, desperately trying to revive Crystal’s long-gone body after she plummeted off the edge of the cliff and took their friendship with her? And who hasn’t—as adult Misty does when she abruptly shuts of “Stayin’ Alive” in the car with Walter, the same song she hummed as she gave Crystal useless chest compressions—tried to scrub the remnants of that relationship from their mind, because it’s just too painful to talk about?

We see a similar evasiveness in this episode in adult Natalie, who—whether she likes it or not—is slowly opening up to Lottie’s way of life and its opportunities for healing. In a pivotal last scene, Lottie finally works her therapy magic on Natalie, blinking a flashlight in her eyes while asking her to remember the last time she saw Travis. As Natalie begins to recall, the memory merges with the brief glimpses we got of Nat in an oxygen mask earlier in the season; the last time she saw him, it turns out, they did drugs together and Nat overdosed. Toeing the line between this world and the next, Natalie saw a gruesome vision of the crash site without any survivors and the silhouette of that mysterious hooded antler queen wandering down the aisle past their burned bodies. As Natalie lays her head in Lottie’s lap, she becomes her younger self, a direct merging of timelines that’s perhaps her character’s most vulnerable yet. In that same moment, a horrified Lottie sees the shadow of a pair of antlers move closer towards them. They both now know what Travis thought Natalie was right about, as Nat tearfully explains: “The whole time there was something, some darkness out there, with us. Or in us. It still is.”

Whatever that “something” out there was, Javi seems to be its very first victim. The end of episode five—which officially finishes with Shauna screaming in labor pain—finds Javi uttering his first words since he returned to the cabin, which he shares with Coach Ben after Ben finds a drawing Javi sketched of a tree with deep, intertwining roots. “She told me not to come back,” Javi says, “My friend.” She? God only knows what will happen if and when this powerful new figure turns from friend to bestie.

Stray observations

• Some fans have criticized the somewhat abrupt addition of survivors that weren’t introduced in season one into the season two cast. I myself was skeptical at first. But as the season moves on, it’s become one of my favorite winking narrative devices and yet another instance of how Yellowjackets personifies teen girlhood. We already know that we can’t exactly trust what we see in the ’90s timeline, and countless sequences have made the line between what’s truly supernatural and what’s just trauma-based hallucination purposefully ambiguous. So the idea that to some of the self-centered varsity girls, other team members would be absolutely invisible until one day they just aren’t is absolutely true to life. I’ll never forget the varsity player from my high school soccer team who asked my name in math class after weeks of pre-season practicing together. Even when they’re not at risk of cannibalizing each other, girls remain ruthless.
• The best quote of this episode is a close tie between adult Van’s frazzled “I’m mixing my pop culture metaphors because i’m fucking UPSET!” and Detective Saracusa’s vindicated “It’s not splooge, its lotion. FUCK YEAH!”
• Even when he’s officially accusing Misty of murder, Walter is the king of sneaking a flirty compliment in. Softening the blow that you genuinely believe your crush is a murderer by telling her it makes sense because she’s so “charming and impulsive”? This guy should do PR.
• Tawny Cypress is one of the most vivid and terrifying performers on TV right now. From her breakdown when she reveals to Van just how bad things have gotten to the terrifying confrontation between Van and “the bad one” that finds Tai’s alter ego passionately kissing Van, then asserting “We’re not supposed to be here,” Cypress’ flexibility never fails to stun me. Every episode, at this point, feels like a new low for adult Tai and a new victory lap for the actor who so skillfully plays her.
• Changing my pick for “most endangered character” this episode from Coach Ben to Akilah’s adorable little mouse sidekick. I’m calling it: Nothing good is happening to that pet.
• It’s a bummer that Callie finally figured out Saracusa’s game, if only because it means we likely won’t hear him earnestly refer to himself as “The Jay-sus” again.
• If you’re in line for a friend like Randy Walsh, STAY IN LINE! This man proves himself to be more and more of an asset each episode. How many men would agree to jerk off for you, but promise not to think of you, and even struggle to perform because they love their wife Tammy so much? A real gem.
• Jeff and Shauna’s reactions to Callie revealing she’d been going on secret dates with a cop are so perfectly telling of their priorities as parents. Shauna selfishly, immediately worries about herself and exclaims, “A fucking cop?” Meanwhile, Jeff holds the line for the traditional father figure with “How old is he?”