Slap bracelets, Twin Peaks, and creepypasta should have made for a perfectly nostalgic episode, but it was all just too weird.
Recap
Stuck in Coach Scott’s cave, Mari runs the gamut from trying to seduce him (despite Ben hilariously calling out all the times she’s called him a perv pre-Wilderness) to accidentally macing them both with bear spray. Coach’s existential crisis about being a nice suburban guy and not a killer is mostly what compels him to cut Mari’s bonds and let her go. Mari has no such moral compunctions, knocking his leg out from beneath him and kicking his crutch away; then half-assing a lie about how she got out of the trap hole and basically just leading the Yellowjackets to his cave.
But before we talk about what they saw in that cave—dear lordt, what did they see—we’ll recap the present action among a bunch of grown-ass women who act just as erratically. Fresh off last night’s bizarre bathroom visit, Shauna is ready to swallow her pride and have an awkward reconnecting lunch with Lottie. Lottie, however, cannot be arsed to make the time, as she’s supposedly fully booked, which is actually just her and Callie sneaking out to continue their sleepover conversations without boring old Mom listening in.
And so we wind up with two unlikely pairs of errand friends: Lottie and Callie shoplifting a very expensive dress at the mall, while Misty tags along as Shauna buys apology baskets for the Joels. Although the latter two don’t actually make it that far, as Shauna discovers on the increasingly fast drive that her brakes have been cut—Thelma and Louise, but if they didn’t get a say in putting their foot on the gas.
Despite a verging-on-slapstick scene of them screaming their heads off, Shauna manages to direct them onto a grassy hill (so they can lose momentum and eventually come to a stop) near a playground, where no one seems all that worried about this near-accident. Shauna being this amped up has her losing it with both Misty—accusing her of cutting the brakes and kicking her out of the car—and later Lottie—for placing Jackie’s heart necklace around Callie’s neck.
If you really want to stretch it, you could call Taissa and Van’s outing its own errand, if you have Find the Man with No Eyes in a foreclosed ice cream parlor on your to-do list. Watching old VHS tapes of Pee-wee’s Playhouse to celebrate Van’s cancer supposedly going into remission, they come upon an ancient commercial for the long-closed Ozzie’s Ice Cream Shop, with the haunting figure popping in as nonchalantly as if it were, well, Eureeka’s Castle. But when they drive out in the middle of the night, they discover a condemned building and a creepy fox. When Tai asks what it wants, Van—who now seems caught up in the same belief about the Wilderness resurfacing—responds, “It wants more.”
Speaking of “it,” the Yellowjackets descend into the underground cave that Javi showed Ben. It’s Akilah who makes the call to go forward, even as she refused Lottie’s nudging about communing with the Wilderness, even as she lets a single tear fall. They split up into two groups, with Akilah, Van, and Shauna going on what winds up being quite the trip. Each has a complex, specific hallucination before they wind up in a shared one: Van emerges, Narnia-style, back into the cabin, watching the fire until the embers begin to consume her and she can’t escape the chair, which has become the airplane seat from their downed flight. Shauna swims and swims from the middle of the lake, trying to reach the toddler version of her son, but the harder she tries, the more she’s stuck.
Akilah first finds herself communicating with the Wilderness in a cozy sort of way, via a talking llama and some cuddly roots, but then gets pulled down into a classroom with the other two—and Jackie, who’s wielding a slap bracelet. It goes fine on Akilah’s wrist, cuts Van, but then strangles and nearly beheads Shauna, no matter how much they try to free her.
The girls only awaken when Coach drags each of them out of the cave, muttering about the poison gases. And then the other Yellowjackets find them.
Commentary
Up until now, I have been an avid fan of Yellowjackets’ use of hallucinations or other altered states, especially when they’re playing with incongruity: The girls’ mushroom-laced Doomcoming. The Greek goddess-esque revels masking their desperate cannibalism. That excellent episode where they—filthy, ravenous, feral—spent an afternoon at the mall, the kind of place they would never have encountered again if they never got rescued.
What didn’t work with this trio of dreams was how unsubtle their symbols were, and how they didn’t tell us anything new. Van’s return to the cabin didn’t provide any new clues as to its previous inhabitant; Shauna’s grief, though wrenching, didn’t acknowledge any of the bizarre mysteries involving that body of water; and how do you bring back Jackie and not have her acknowledge that they ate her? Though I guess you could argue we already got Shauna’s hallucinations of her from last season.
The episode’s biggest tonal mismatches were in the present portions. Each of the plotlines had a moment where I had to double-take and make sure I was watching the same show, particularly the Man with No Eyes popping up in that retro commercial. Yes, this show has had a vein of the supernatural running through it from the beginning, but it felt more like watching Channel Zero than actually figuring out how this figure from Tai’s childhood trauma might fit into their collective fever-dream about the Wilderness. The characterizations were all over the place, the plot beats erratic. It’s like last season, where the show is trying to send characters off in random directions instead of bringing them together for key scenes like dismantling Adam’s body or striding into their high school reunion.
To that end, what do we think Lottie was trying to tell Shauna about Jackie’s necklace with “it never meant what you thought it meant”? Our first introduction was Pit Girl wearing the necklace, implying that she had been marked for death, especially after we saw it get incorporated into the deck of cards and Nat chosen as the Queen (even if the Wilderness then took Javi). But perhaps it can also mean trust, or elevating someone. Lottie clearly believes that Callie can be brought into the fold, but Shauna is still reluctant to reveal her full self to her daughter. Using an heirloom piece of jewelry is such a lovely way to show that intergenerational attempt at connection.
Back to the Wilderness: I’m curious where Shauna/Melissa is going. We didn’t need to see them conducting some secret moonlight liaisons like Van/Tai, nor does that fit whatever power dynamic is at play here. Shauna’s seeming indifference, keeping Melissa wrong-footed, then slowly offering up the breadcrumb of “you’re not gonna turn out to be boring, are you?” and her little smirk, tell you so much about how she’s relishing being the one in control—being the Jackie to some extent, calling the shots.
Mari’s speech about there being two realities was intriguing but muddled. It sounded deep but clearly came out of the childhood trauma of watching her cousin die while they were doing something as innocuous and comforting as watching Eureeka’s Castle. Of course such an event would make her more aware of the darkness in the world, but that doesn’t necessarily support what she’s saying about a whole separate reality operating underneath.
Then again, Coach’s revelation about the Wilderness gases seems to imply that this is different from the previous hallucinations, due to the direct contact at the source. So it could stand to reason that their visions were just completely unhinged and nightmarish, as opposed to the coping mechanisms we’ve witnessed in their previous bacchanal rituals.
An excellent Reddit theory is that when they drag Coach back to their village, we’re going to discover that it’s not actually as idyllic as initially presented, that their prolonged exposure to the gases has applied something of a twisted filter to their setup. That’s the kind of incongruity that would feel more in line with the show.
Fingers and Ears
- “Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest” is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson and aptly sums up the Yellowjackets’ time in the Wilderness. Those who survived have lost more of their humanity than the bodies turned into meals.
- It’s also worth noting that the two instances of cannibalism were justified to some extent by the people dying via cold or ice, i.e., being taken by the elements. Now that it’s the spring, they won’t be able to use that plausible deniability and will have to actually kill their next meal(s).
- So has Lottie just been holding onto Jackie’s necklace for decades?
Next week! The girls deliberate Coach’s fate, in exactly the kind of ad hoc Wilderness justice I’m excited to see more of.
