You survive the crash. You tend to the injured and mourn the dead. You descend, ravenous, on the burned body of your fallen teammate because you know that’s what you have to do to make it through to another day.
You’ve never felt more alive.
Showtime’s Yellowjackets is well into its third season, and it’s becoming clearer than ever that the girls are doing more than surviving—they’re thriving out there in the woods. The thrill of chasing each other through the woods with spears excites them. The idea of the wilderness as an apathetic god driving their each and every decision comforts them. And the notion that an unlucky pull from a deck of cards is enough to end any one of their lives isn’t terrifying—it’s the law of the land. Things are different now. Better. How the hell did they get here?
These girls were supposed to be national champions. Bright, strong, and ambitious, they had entire lives planned—college, boyfriends, trophies. A single mechanical failure sends all of this tumbling down. But it’s not that the crash causes them to turn into cannibalistic, ritual–sacrifice–performing devotees of the wilderness; it merely catalyzes a metamorphosis that’s been lying dormant in all of them since the very beginning.
So let’s look at how they used to be. Season 1 takes us through their lives before the crash—the newly crowned state soccer champs getting ready for nationals. Our beloved Wiskayok High Yellowjackets have the weight of the world—or, at least, suburban New Jersey—on their shoulders, and they look the part. Perfectly put together with ribbons in their hair, waving for an adoring crowd at a high school pep rally, kicking ass on the field in a scrimmage against the junior varsity team, keeping up the image of a teenage girl with everything figured out. Their high school’s vice principal admits, in a somewhat off–color sort of way: “Some of these kids, eh, no big loss if we’re honest. But those girls were special. They were … they were champions.”
And they were. Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) was set to go to Brown and captain Jackie (Ella Purnell) was set to lead them to victory at nationals—but with expectations of success set so high, so are the tensions that underscore the girls’ interactions with each other. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is so determined to win nationals that she pushes freshman Allie (Pearl Amanda Dickson) too hard and inadvertently breaks her leg. Shauna sleeps with Jackie’s boyfriend in a move that is somehow both overtly jealous and psychosexually obsessive. A blowout fight at a party makes them the center of attention—and it’s clear that there are issues between them that need to be resolved.
Crashing together in the wilderness, however, brings them together. Lottie (Courtney Eaton), freshly off her meds, becomes a sort of religious figurehead in their eyes—able to communicate with the wilderness as a sentient entity in a way that nobody else can, she leads group meditation sessions out in the snow. “The cold … it makes my cheeks burn … but it also makes me feel awake. Like really awake,” one of her acolytes admits. “It makes me feel alive,” Van (Liv Hewson) clarifies. We watch them connect with a part of themselves that’s only accessible because of where they are—and somehow, we’re proud. Shauna comes out of her shell, becoming self–assured and outspoken in a way she never was before. Natalie emerges as a fair and just leader whose empathy, at the end of the day, supersedes her commitment to order. And even as we remain horrified by their occasional dabbles in cannibalism, we can’t look away. We, as the audience, turn them into a spectacle.
Flashbacks and flash–forwards sandwich their time in the wilderness between periods of radical normalcy—adult versions of the girls are a senator, a housewife, a nurse. They’re haunted by their past, sure, but like their teenage versions of themselves, they seem to be perfectly assimilated into society. This contrast makes the show feel like it exists in two separate worlds and highlights the absurdity of their actions in the woods. Their wilderness selves, the ones that worship the ruthlessness of nature like it’s a sentient being, are unrecognizable, but are they really separate? Is it enough for us to forget that the seeds of their violence have been present from the very beginning?
We know they’re cutthroat—they’re too good not to be. But as teenage girls—soccer champs aside—we also know that they’re under a whole lot of pressure and even more scrutiny. Caught between the need to be feminine in their personal lives and fierce on the field, to represent not only their school but their town and their state, they’re fraying at the edges before they even step onto the plane. “When things get tough out there, those girls are gonna need someone to guide them. Can you handle that?” coach Martinez (Carlos Sanz) asks Jackie in the first episode. Their scrimmages are underscored with intense orchestral music that communicates just how much is riding on this for them. Even Shauna’s acceptance letter causes inner turmoil when we find out that Jackie is dead set on them going to Rutgers together. No matter who they are or what they do, there is always someone they’re afraid of disappointing.
When they’re out in the woods, for the first time in their lives, nobody is watching them except each other. They can finally succumb to the ugly parts of themselves that are ordinarily too shameful to acknowledge—the jealousy, the violence, the rage. Years of resentment and built–up hostility—toward each other, toward their coaches, toward themselves—come pouring out, but maybe it’s not that the crash traumatized them to the point of insanity, or that the wilderness leads them to brutality. Maybe it’s that, for the first time in their lives, nobody is there to tell them “no.”
This sort of competition, this constant, underlying fear of not living up to your full potential, is a fear that remains relevant as ever—especially at Penn, where club rejections are many and internship interviews are few. We exist in a pressure cooker, and whether that pressure comes from parents, professors, peers, or ourselves, it’s constant and draining. There’s something in the girls’ terrifying, liberating transformation that relentlessly compels, that begs us to ask: Wouldn’t I do the same if that happened to me? Couldn’t I?
The Yellowjackets find joy in letting go, in communal catharsis, and in embracing the parts of themselves that society deems unacceptable. Nature sets them free to revel in the absence of pressure for the first time in any of their lives—and while their response is an extreme one, it’s not irrational. And it’s certainly not as far away from any of us as we might like to think.
