Yellowjackets recap: “It’s you and me against the whole world”

It’s no secret that the state of health education in America’s public schools is pretty dire. But Wiskayok High School—and its sex educator/soccer coach Ben–might deserve a little more sympathy than the average suburban institution: There’s not a health class in the world that can properly prepare its students for welcoming a baby into a haunted cabin, and supporting a mother who has spent months surviving on nothing but tree branch soup and human flesh give birth without forceps, anesthesia, or a doula over the age of 18.

Yellowjackets’ mid-season finale last left our survivors with a primal scream, the ultimate indicator that Shauna’s baby by Jeff is finally about to be born. Set into motion with a season-best needle drop of Blur’s “Song 2” (of “woo hoo!” fame), the makeshift wilderness maternity ward isn’t exactly a new mother’s dream, no matter how efficient this crew has become at teamwork. The group– Travis included–gather rags and set up a bed for Shauna, although each intrepid young woman who dares to peek between her legs has little more to offer than widened eyes and trembling fingertips. Even Misty, usually drunk on the sensation of people looking to her for help, freezes up once Shauna’s blood is on her hands. Even though she eventually does lock back in and deliver the Misty’s self-interested anxieties stop her from actually doing more good than harm, baby, as has become characteristic of her benevolence.

In the face of real live visceral creation, Lottie at first doesn’t have much to offer. Her piddly first idea of “sharing our hopes with each other” almost immediately goes south when Mari blurts out: “Wilderness, I hope Shauna doesn’t die!” Death has been on the table since they first crashed, but invoking the wilderness as the only line between this world and the next is a pretty useless placebo, let alone sedative. Soon enough, however, Lottie falls back into the role she’s most familiar with: intimidating guru with questionable motives. Does Lottie still identify with her team, or does she fully work for the wilderness now? When she urges Misty to help save “our baby,” exactly who–or what–she considers a part of that “us” feels troublingly uncertain.

In a fun wink to the way primal femininity cuts the wheat from the chaff– as Natalie reassures Shauna, women have been having babies for “millions” of years– Coach Ben is even more horrified at Shauna’s bloody, painful labor than he was at the girl’s perverse Jackie picnic, literally covering his ears and putting on “Rescue Me” by Madonna in his brain radio to avoid facing the much-less danceable tune of Shauna’s screams. Fair enough. It does seem genuinely plausible that to a closeted male soccer coach, the only thing more stomach-churning than cannibalism would be the vaginal canal. “I just pressed play on a video,” Ben stammers after Natalie begs him to come help, his defense falling slightly flat given that the other girls have done little more than watch that video.

Ultimately, it’s Akilah and Javi (of all people!) who step up to the plate, Akilah carefully stroking Nugget for good luck and Javi, always in a trance-like state, placing an animal skull by the fire as Travis “spills blood” and the rest of the survivors gather offerings. It’s the last thing Shauna wants, but pallid and barely conscious, she’s far past the point of intervention, especially once the placenta comes out too soon and she starts losing too much blood.

Flash forward decades later, and in many ways, Shauna is still just as unprepared for motherhood as she was in that cabin. She may have a daughter of her own now, but as Jeff consistently–and rightfully–points out, she’s woefully inept at actually protecting Callie from the world. Shauna is much more of a natural at implicating Callie in her crimes and misdemeanors, forging yet another secrecy-based trauma bond to add to the pile. Over the years, Shauna’s become so skilled at justifying her own volatility and manipulation, she’s even able to fault Callie for getting into this mess. Callie may not be the one who bisected Adam with a hacksaw, but she did flirt with a cop at a bar, and that’s basically the same, right?

But Shauna never really wanted to be a mom; not as a teenager and not as an adult, as she tearfully recounts to a needling Detective Saracusa during a tense interrogation. Finally doing some self-analysis (anything to avoid a conviction, right?) Shauna tells Saracusa that she’s never really been able to let herself love Jeff–who she says she married out of “guilt and shame”—or Callie. What she doesn’t say, of course, is what left her so unable to connect: the loss, impermanence, and devastation that defined her youth, which she can never talk about but never push aside. How can you leave behind a past that has become cultural canon, and let go of mistakes you can never quite atone for? That’s not a question any of the survivors–perhaps least of all Shauna, who still lives in her hometown and never quite left behind her teen-hood in the first place–can answer.

While Shauna is finally unpacking decades old trauma as a means to get away with murder, Natalie is leaning into the blame game, becoming more self-detracting than dour as she leans into Lottie’s form of healing, heliotrope Birkenstocks and all. Asserting to Lisa that she “ruins people” and that she and the other Yellowjackets don’t deserve to be alive after what they did to survive, Natalie seems to have replaced suicidality with clear-eyed regret, unsettling Misty and Lottie alike and placing her at true odds–for the first time, maybe–with Tai and Shauna.

As adults, the impromptu reunion between Tai and Van has swiftly lost some of its sweetness, especially on Van’s side. After Van tells Tai about her encounter with the bad one–wherein the disembodied Tai opined “We’re not supposed to be here”—Tai finally uses her split personalities as an opportunity to slide, inquiring whether or not Van thinks that “us” could possibly be, well…them. Van immediately shuts Tai down–she’s still married to Simone, after all–and does so again later on when Tai tries to offer help with the unpaid bills she’s noticed piling up, snapping: “You came here for help with your life. If I need help with mine, I’ll let you know.”

The tension doesn’t last long however, once Tai gets a call from Misty, dialing in from the kitchen at Lottie’s cult to break the news that Lottie is some sort of a small-business owner and not in fact institutionalized in Switzerland. Tai’s mental breakdown and Van’s financial ruin aside, they hop in the car; if Van’s place isn’t where Tai is supposed to be, maybe the answer is at a honey-hawking commune upstate.

The convergence of survivors at Lottie’s cult unsettles no one quite as much as the high priestess herself, who confides in her therapist that the way her former frenemies are gathering around her feels like nothing short of the wilderness’ grand intent. After spending most of her life being told there was something wrong with her–both pre- and post-crash–Lottie has begun to wonder if she was ever really ill at all.

“It’s like it sent them here to show me…To show me that it was real,” Lottie opines, struggling to articulate exactly what “it” she refers to. “The power of that place…the god of that place. We did terrible things in its name. And I thought that when we were rescued that we left it there, but now I realize we brought it back with us.” The last shot of the grown up survivors this episode finds them warily gathering as they make eye contact with Lottie, back together once again and still at the whim of a fearsome higher power.

That power has never been so directly invoked as it is during the eleventh hour of Shauna’s labor, which finds the group–even a desperate and fearful Tai–fervently praying to the wilderness as Shauna pushes. When she finally awakes, happy laughter and proud smiles come sharply into focus, and Misty greets her with her son. Over the next few days, Shauna struggles to soothe the caterwauling child, who won’t latch onto her breast (whether there’s milk to be produced or not). One night, she wakes up horrified to find Lottie feeding the boy; upsetting roadblock aside, she ultimately convinces him to take to her breast, after promising she’ll tell her son about his origin story one day, when he’s older, when they’re rescued, when maybe he’ll understand. “It’s you and me against the whole world,” she whispers.

But none of this is real; not the nursing, not Lottie’s invasion, and not the burbling, breathing baby. Shauna awakes from her prolonged hallucination–which ends with a horrifying vision of the survivors feasting on her son’s body, leaving behind nothing but his bloodstained, symbol-embroidered blanket–not to happy laughter, but remorseful, pitying gazes. Shauna lived, but her son did not. As the episode fades out, we’re left with nothing but the sound of her whimpering voice begging the other survivors to affirm the dream her heart made, that she held him, that he was real, that he was hers: “Can’t you hear him cry? Why can’t you hear him cry?”

Yellowjackets has always built its plot-lines around the convergence between what’s real and what’s not, but that line has rarely looked as devastating as Shauna being ripped from her delusion, the only thing that was really, truly hers. All of a sudden, the trauma of the wilderness takes a different tone. Memories of what did happen may be cruel, but the memories of what could have been are vicious.

Stray observations

• Of course Lottie’s cult is bongo friendly.
• It’s hard not to wonder exactly what song Misty and Crystal were planning on performing once the baby arrived; given her main character arc, my money is squarely on “It Takes Two,” from Into The Woods.
• Well, dear reader: Does Miss Congeniality go in Sandy good or Sandy bad?
• A Van and Tai road trip soundtracked to Sleater-Kinney in an old Jeep Wagoneer…they’re gonna hook up at Lottie’s cult.
• Adult Van’s reaction to seeing Lottie is so visceral and haunting, a series highlight so far for Lauren Ambrose. If Van is still so under Lottie’s spell after decades without her, I sense teenaged Van’s relationship with Lottie is going to become far more intertwined and intense than mere “prayer circle attendee.”
• Yet again, John Paul Reynolds fans are well fed with his bad cop turn. Not to mention, watching this episode with the knowledge that he recently called Melanie Lynskey his favorite actor makes their interrogation room face-off all the sweeter. When you find a perfect match: You know, you know, you know, you know!
• Callie tearfully lying about assault (and opining a jury is sure to believe her when she says Saracusa has “weird-ass balls”) to make her mom proud… Saracusa is a dick, but this is as shady as it gets. Kevin Tan, get off your nice-guy horse, get up, and realize they’re pulling your leg!
• Jeff can’t keep getting away with this, and by this, I mean stealing each episode with adorably sincere comic relief–he literally gets a spit take this time around. Bumping N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” in his minivan while waiting for his family to finish their individual interrogations? He’s so real. No matter how easy it can be to relate to the volatile angst and layered relationships of the core women, realistically, more of us are Jeffs than we’d like to admit.