Resume Crash Positions: Yellowjackets Returns for a Crazy Second Season

 

Last Sunday, arguably the most anticipated drama returned to the network where it has become one of the most talked about and critically acclaimed series in years.  This genre-defying drama had dominated the awards scenes for much of the previous year, had defied easy analysis and kept fans speculating with every episode based on the idea of ‘wtf?” This series has one of the greatest casts in decades, an exceptional writing staff and some of the most radical twists in television, including a season finale that changed the game. It dominated awards shows for years, winning big at the Critics Choice Awards and the HCA TV awards. And when it return, it earned the biggest ratings its network had seen in over a decade. I speak, of course, of Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

Yes, I realize that almost everything I said in that previous article could just have easily been applied to Succession (had you not, you know, known how much I loathe that particular series) but the thing is, the descriptions apply pretty much across the board for both. Indeed, last Sunday night was a big night for peak TV as both the second season premiere of Yellowjackets and the final season of Succession did indeed earn the biggest rating in their respective histories: more than two million people were watching either. But I have to tell it was never a close question as to which series I care about more, and which has already proven itself by far to be the far more fascinating series. Judging by the ratings numbers and all those awards nominations I saw over the past year, I’m not alone in that respect. Along with series like The Gilded Age and Cruel Summer, Yellowjackets demonstrates by far that Peak TV is alive in the 2020s.

There’s a lot I could talk about in what will amount to a rave review of this series. I could argue that this is perhaps the most genre-defying series in TV since Lost ended more than a decade ago, and I wouldn’t be far off: all of the aspect that made that series great – drama, surrealism, bizarre comedy, multiple timelines, endless speculation after every episode – are in full force, complete with a healthy dose of horror, a genre that has been sadly neglected throughout peak TV. I could tell you about the extraordinary performances from the entire cast, including four of Hollywood’s greatest actresses doing superb work as well as a remarkable group of young actresses who are at their level already. I could tell you that this series has by far some of the most disturbing imagery that probably not since the much beloved Hannibal left the screens has ever been seen on television and because it’s on cable TV, it can go even further. (The final scene of last night’s episodes is by far the most shocking scene I can remember on television in memory: it’s hard to believe any wedding in Westeros even topping it.) There’s so much to unpack that it deserves multiple reviews – and I’m more than willing to right them; this is a glorious series deserving all the plaudits. But this review will focus on an aspect I don’t know if it has been fully explored today by columnists about a certain level beneath the surfaces of the characters that reflect both the brilliants of the writers led by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and the four female leads we’ve been following since the start.

As long as I’ve been reading reviews about Succession, there’ve been a certain circle who argue the real reason the Roy children are the way they are is because of the trauma their father has inflicted on them. Fine, if you think that justifies the way they are and why you watch the series, I’ll let you have it. I don’t think anyone would even doubt the idea that all of the women in Yellowjackets are dealing with the aftereffects of childhood trauma: it was all but spelled out in the commercials for the first season. What I have found fascinating is how while all four adult female leads (and the ones we’ve met so far this season) are all suffering aftereffects of their trauma in different ways, they are all essentially suffering versions of it the same way. All of them made the decision (talked about by Shauna and Tamala in the pilot) they would never talk about what happened to them beyond the broadest of strokes, and that clearly has meant not only with the press but with therapists, friends or even family. They’ve all essentially decided to bury it as deep as they can and pretend it didn’t happen. This would be a horrible approach for any sufferers of trauma, much less the kind that clearly involves a paranormal element to it. What I don’t think any of the characters are aware of is that while a quarter of a century has gone by, all of them are still essentially in the same case of arrested development that they were in before the crash.

This is clearest in the case of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey deserves every award ends up getting in the future). In the Pilot, we learned that she had received early acceptance to Brown before the crash and has since lived as a housewife in what is clearly a failed marriage and an unhappy motherhood. At the beginning of the series, a reporter asked her why she was living like this. We spent much of the first season assuming it was out of mourning for the death of her best friend Jackie, but the season finale revealed the deeper truth. Shauna has blamed herself for Jackie freezing to death after a fight in one of the final flashbacks of Season 1. The ghost of Jackie has been following her ever since (as we saw in very creepy flashbacks of Season 2, quite literally) and in essence she has decided to live Jackie’s life for her. She married Jeff, Jackie’s boyfriend, who Shauna had been sleeping with (and was pregnant with his child during the crash) and has essentially married him less out of love but more because she thinks that Jackie would have done. Whether or not Jeff knows this has been an open question; based on what we know of their sex life during the first season, it hasn’t been good for a while. We still don’t know the fate of Shauna’s child, but its likely that Kelsey is essentially a replacement child in that sense, and considering how horrible their relationship is, Kelsey no doubts suspects it. I’m also relatively sure that’s the real reason she began her affair with Adam early in Season 1. It had nothing to do with Jeff’s supposed affair (which as we learned was all in Shauna’s head); more likely it’s because the only time Shauna thought sex was exciting was when she was betraying her best friend and she wanted to get that feeling back.

Taim (Tawny Cypress) is the character who has the most obvious paranormal aspect to her personality; we know she has been seeing visions all her life, that she had moments where she sleepwalked and turned feral. But she clearly spent the entirety of the ordeal denying it and has done so through all her adult life. (I would guess that is at least one of the reasons Van, her girlfriend in the past, is not married to her in the present; Van knew this part of her and she would never been able to lie about it as easily as she had to Simone.) Taim is determined to achieve the goal she had before the crash: get into elected office.  That is the reason she hired the reporter to interrogate her friends at the start of Season 1; at the end of the day she refuses to trust anyone but herself. Because of that determination she spent all of Season 1 in basic denial of the horrors that were unfolding around her family which came to the point where she isolated herself from that even as she won elected office. Taim is still doing everything in her power to pretend that nothing supernatural is wrong with her. She may not have that option much longer.

In a very weird way (which is fitting considering the character) Misty may be the most well-adjusted of the four survivors. She has a stable job as a caretaker, she is trying to do good as a ‘citizen detective’ and she may be the most committed of the four of them to protecting everyone. And just as when she was in high school, nobody wants anything to do with her. Christina Ricci came across as well, the creepy characters she always plays and while that is incredibly justifiable given the lion’s share of her actions, I now find them also incredibly sad. Misty is essentially the same person she was before and during the crash, a pathetic nerd who just wanted to be loved and hang out with the cool kids. And nobody knows what she does, no matter how much she helps her friends, then or now, they will always hate her. They may very well have more reason to in the present than the past, but the fact that they never listen to her, no matter how grounded her advice, shows they will never take her seriously. I almost think she is much the John Locke of Yellowjackets devoting all of her actions to everybody’s best interests and never being appreciated for it. But where as Locke’s interests were based on some form of ‘destiny’ Misty’s interests are genuinely devoted to helping her friends. The very ability she has to be a public nuisance have helped her realize that Nat was kidnapped and that Shauna will need help from the police. Her friends need her help desperately – but they still won’t take her phone calls!

If Misty is Yellowjackets Locke, Nat is clearly the show’s Sawyer: forever angry, self-destructive at every turn, willing to burn any bridge she can to get what she wants, suffering from trauma well before she got on the plane. Juliette Lewis’ work in this series has arguably been some of the best in her more than thirty year career, playing a soul so wounded she thinks herself beyond fixing. Natalie has been in and out of rehab so many times that no one bothers to count any more and when she leaves in the pilot, she says she has ‘a purpose’…that does not include staying sober. The fact she is determined to find out who is blackmailing them is as close as she can get to one; what is clear is that she’s always needed an enemy to function, as much as in the present and the past. In what was the most shocking moment of the season finale, Nat was sticking a shotgun in her mouth before cultists broke in and kidnapped her.

It was revealed eventually that the leader of the cult was Lottie, played by Simone Kessell as an adult, the clearly psychic teenager who has been just as tormented by what happened as everyone else. In the opening to the second season, we saw that she had spent the immediate aftermath of the crash in a kind of mania, undergoing shock therapy until she has emerged the leader of a ‘self-help group.”  Nat is no happier to see Lottie at the start of last week’s season premiere then she is to see, well, anybody. When Lottie points out Nat was going to kill herself, Nat expresses no gratitude and it is only then we realize just how deeply wounded she is by life. She has now focused her rage on ‘bringing down Lottie’ who she clearly holds responsible for everything that has happened in the last quarter of a century but just as Sawyer’s quest for vengeance brought him nothing but grief for decades and no satisfaction when she achieved it, we know there is nothing good coming at the end of it. Nat is so badly broken that she will not accept help no matter who offers it.

It’s worth noting that Lotte, so far, seems in a similar state of arrested development: just as we see at the beginning of Season 2,  she is trying to achieve the same state of bliss that she was at when she had a figure of authority over the survivors and is clearly just as disturbed by the vision that plagued her then and she is now.

The key criteria of this series so far has been, as brilliant as all four leads are, it is rare for even two of them to be in the same scene together. It would never occur to Tam to just ask for her friends silence before her run for office; they are so deeply scarred by what happened in the wilderness that the trauma has driven them even further from each other and that not even the darkest necessity will drive them back towards each other.  The writers say that they have a strategy for how Yellowjackets will play out (it will encompass five seasons and they’ve already been renewed for a third) and while I don’t want to speculate on it, I think at least part of it will have to be accepting the damage that all of this has done to them and trying to find a way to heal with each other.  One can not help but be reminded of one of the most iconic phrases from Lost: “if we don’t live together, we’re going to die alone.” It’s pretty clear that, even if they are married and have families, all of the leads are fine with the idea of the latter because many of them don’t want to live, they’re barely surviving.

Not that I’m waiting for Yellowjackets to end any time soon. As I’ve mentioned already, the performances from all of the female leads in both the present and their younger versions are incredible. The series continues to dazzle with its impressive casting. Lauren Ambrose has yet to appear as the adult version of Van; is there a better suited actress for a series about death and mysticism than the star of Six Feet Under and Servant? Elijah Wood has already graced the stage as an equally creepy citizen-detective whose help Misty needs but who has suspicions about Adam’s death. This is an Ice Storm reunion twenty-five years in the making. And Jason Ritter, Lynskey’s husband is due to make an appearance later this season; one can wonder if the writers will even have his character in the same room with his wife when it happens.

I realize that those who have heard so many mentions of Lost will be  shaking their heads thinking: “another mythology show.” Yes, but unlike Lost in this one the secrets are already known to the characters but not the audience. Of course which characters know which secrets remain to be seen, and just as in the former series, the withholding of information will no doubt be deadly to certain characters at times. And at the end of the day it’s not the crash and aftermath that matters as much as where the characters are now: I have no idea how Yellowjackets will end; I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a point where anyone screams: “We have to go ba—ack!” (Though honestly part of me would love to hear Christina Ricci shout it.)

A series like Yellowjackets is, just like Lost was at its best, the reason we watch TV in the fair place. And there’s another reason to do so. By the end of 2023, Showtime as we know it now will not exist in the same form, and there are already hints that it will begin to shift away from the original programming such as Homeland and Masters of Sex that made it legendary and more into spinoffs of franchises like Billions and Dexter. (Believe I’ll have a lot to say about that when the time comes.) Yellowjackets may very well be the last true Showtime original series. If that’s the case like the crash that starts the series, it’s going to leave one hell of an impact.

My score: 5 stars.