For the titular girls soccer team of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” there’s no escaping the Wilderness, and no season has exemplified that as much as season three. But fans aren’t necessarily loving the twists and turns the show is taking.
We are far removed from what many online consider the golden age of television. Eight to ten episode seasons releasing every few years can’t exactly hold a candle to the classic format of twenty-two episodes every year like clockwork, nor the sort of fanbases those shows could generate. Still, “Yellowjackets” felt like an outlier: a star-studded cast of talented actors, a compelling mystery, complex and fascinating character dynamics, as well as thoughtful and diverse LGBT representation made the now seven-time Emmy nominated series feel like a dream come true for TV fans.
But now, in the shadow of the season three finale, fans aren’t loving the direction “Yellowjackets” has taken, and it’s easy to see why. The plot was easy to describe in the first and even second seasons: a high school girls’ soccer team went missing in the wilderness, and the terrible things they did to survive come back to haunt them twenty-five years later. Season three starts to shift this a bit.
Now, it seems as though the writers have moved away from the idea of the girls collectively losing their minds, placing the blame of the violence in the wilderness squarely on the shoulders of two of the main characters: Lottie Matthews and Shauna Shipman.
Lottie was always going to take on this role, her delusions and hallucinations serving as the catalyst for the girls’ belief in the Wilderness (capital W this time) as a spiritual force, providing for them in their desperate need, though at a price. Shauna, too, was a complex and morally gray character from the start, someone who clearly wanted to be a good person but was bogged down by jealousy and resentment toward her best friend, Jackie, whom the subtext shows she was clearly in love with.
Here serves your official spoiler warning for all three seasons.
Jackie’s death at the end of season one sends Shauna spiraling, and the more trauma she endures, the larger the gap between her and the rest of the girls becomes. Lottie’s relationship with the Wilderness and her insistence in what the girls owe it is a consistent factor in driving wedges in the rest of the group throughout season two as well.
Grief stirs violence in Shauna, and the girls’ need for survival in the dead of winter and increasing belief in Lottie and the Wilderness stir violence in the rest of them, too. All of them, collectively, participate in a hunt targeting one of their teammates that results in the death of someone completely innocent: their deceased coach’s pre-teen son, Javi. The aftermath of this death is devastating for them all, particularly Shauna, who must butcher Javi to feed the team, and Travis, Javi’s older brother.
Season three opens in summer, the violence and grief simmering low and merely a story to tell in remembrance of all they’d been through—for everyone but Shauna, whose rage has only grown. The violence of season three is not the violence of survival but of vengeance and anger, led in large part by Shauna.
Everything seems to line up perfectly; so where do the problems lie? Quite simply, season three feels as though the slow-burn loss of morality the team was facing throughout the first two seasons has dwindled away in the comfort of summer, and only Shauna and Lottie are left to stew in the crazy. Logically, it makes sense; narratively, it feels unsatisfying, and like a complete departure from the setup of the premise in the first place. If the blame for all of the misfortune and trauma belongs to only two girls, why would the rest of the surviving team defend or protect those two? Why would the guilt of what Shauna and Lottie have done haunt them twenty-five years later?
Placing the blame on two girls doesn’t work for the multi-faceted story they’ve set up—characters who started as interesting and complex are reduced to cartoonishly evil or obnoxiously crazy.
I can’t help but think of all the TikToks ranking fans’ favorite characters in anticipation of the new season, lists that feel more like a moral purity stack up than an interest in the truly interesting and dangerous characters the show has provided thus far. Social media users have ranked comic relief, with mostly unimportant male characters as their favorites just because they aren’t the “evil” women the show chooses to focus on. But is that a problem of the characters or the writers, or of the fans not understanding the material they’re watching?
“Yellowjackets” is a horror show, interested in the specific unraveling of young women when faced with trauma, mental illness, a lack of grounding in society, and the way that trauma manifests years down the line. The fact of the matter is that this show shouldn’t have clear cut morally “good” and “bad” characters. It shouldn’t be bending to the whims of “fans” who don’t seem to be interested in the show for what it truly is. What comes out of that is messy writing.
I don’t think season three is heinous. But I do think it’s lost its footing somewhere along the way. I hope the writers learn from it, and I hope season four lets all of my evil women lose their minds and shine.
