When it comes to
drama I’ve always been a fan of a ‘traditional’ narrative. Whether it be the
procedurals like Homicide, the serialized nature of Breaking Bad &
The Americans, the dynamics of such period pieces as Mad Men, or
the espionage of Homeland, I always have favored them.
But there is a
part of me that will, every so often, embrace the fantastic and surreal. It is
why I’ve been drawn to such masterpieces over the years as The X-Files and
Lost, why I found such kinship with Buffy and Fringe, why
I always had such a place in my heart for the often dreamlike quality of Atlanta
& Barry. But I have rarely seen ever since Fringe ended
in 2012 dramas that completely embrace what should probably be called batshit
when the viewer could watch a series and wonder how far are the writers willing
to take it. Oh it comes up occasionally: The Leftovers was more than
willing to lean into it and it looks like Severance is more than willing
to take up the narrative. But few shows are willing to begin insane and lean
into it hard.
Then in December
of 2021 Showtime brought us Yellowjackets. And if ever there was a
series that was willing to take up the mantle of David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin
Peaks and perhaps go as far he might have been had the networks not forced
its hand, it is this brilliant, utterly insane series which showed a bunch of
teenage girls hunting, killing and eating one of their teammates in
the pilot and has only gotten more bizarre since then.
While most viewers
were watching the final season of Succession in the spring of 2023 I
went all-in on Yellowjackets second season. My readers know what my
opinion of the former series was at the time and while I did do a mea culpa
during that last season there was no point I regretted my decision to fully
watch every insane moment of Yellowjackets. It was at the very top of my
series in 2023 and I suspect even had I been a fan of Succession at the
time and had watched every episode (still not something I’m willing to commit
to, for the record) I hold that Yellowjackets is a masterpiece in its
own right and would match it episode for episode with the last two seasons of Succession
or any of the other dramas it was competing against during that period. The
only drama that was at its level was Better Call Saul and that’s a
different type of masterpiece. Needless to say I’ve been waiting with bated
breath for Season 3 to finally premiere and its been a long cold winter during
that two years. There has been a lot of great television to fill that void, of
course – The Gilded Age, Slow Horses, Will Trent – but none that have
scratched that itch of “how insane can you get?” And then this Sunday, the
first two episodes finally premiered.
When we last left
our rag-tag bunch of fine young cannibals back in 1996, they had just committed
their first ‘hunt’ – telegraphed in many ways since Season 1 – and ended up
killing and devouring Javi, who had no spoken since being found early that
season. Shauna had given birth and her child had died – either still-born or
devoured alive, we have no way of knowing – and they had just elected the
teenage Natalie as the new queen – or should I say the wilderness did. The
season ended with their cabin having been burnt to the ground and it is widely
suspected Coach Scott – who has become understandably terrified of his team –
set the fire out of desperation.
Meanwhile in the
present, the six surviving Yellowjackets (that we know about so far) had
assembled in the cult led by Lottie (Simone Kissell). All of them were reeling
with all the horrible things they done in the first season and a half – most of
which had happened because none of them trust each other or are willing to talk
to each other. And while they were getting drunk Shauna (the incredible Melanie
Lynskey) said she barely remembered what happened out there. That is a lie, of
course; she wrote everything down in her journal which she had on her ever
since they came back. Lottie, in the midst of the insanity that has gripped her
whole life, convinced them they needed to give the wilderness what it wanted.
It was their intention to try and call the hospital, so they started a hunt.
Only it turned real and they went after Shauna. Her daughter showed up and
Lottie shot her. Misty (Christina Ricci, of course) tried to inject her with
phenobarbital but she missed and got Natalie
- the woman she has spent her life convinced was her best friend – in
the heart.
It has been six
weeks since Natalie died. (As with Lost most of the action in the
present has been time compressed: we’re still in 2021 as this third season
begins.) And the remaining survivors are doing – well, what they’ve been doing
for the last twenty-five years. Burying their feelings and denying that
anything bad has ever happened. Shauna is still trying to pretend that she
cares for Cara but her daughter knows that her mother is at the very least a
murderer and her father is a blackmailer. Shauna is continuing her journey of
blowing everything up and pretending she cares about what she’s doing. In the
season premier, she got high on her husband’s pot and didn’t seem to notice
when her daughter was suspended. In the second episode she tried to say she was
getting back to normal but when her
husband needed her for the business she could barely be bothered to pay
attention at the table and basically insulted her husband’s backers. Melanie
Lynskey continues to awe as the adult Shauna someone who wants to bury her head
in the sand but who in her heart embraces chaos.
Tai (Tawny
Cypress) has spent the last few weeks basically continuing to burn her old
life. She’s now rejected both her wife and child and her seat as a state
Senator to take care of Van (Lauren Ambrose) her teenage girlfriend who she
rejected for normalcy and has come back to now to find that she is dying of
cancer. Van is more connected to reality than Tai but she agrees to go out to
dinner at a fancy restaurant. Tai decides to dine and dash and the waiter
chases after them. However because there’s always a darker edge he suffers a
heart attack and dies. Tai knows this but Van doesn’t – yet.
Misty has gone
into complete denial. Rather than face the fact she killed her best friend she
spent the first episode going through Natalie’s storage unit, wearing her
clothes and getting as wasted as she would. She didn’t attend Natalie’s funeral
and when Walter goes after he tells her again that her friends aren’t good for
her. The next day Misty receives a call from Shauna and again thinks that she
is more important to her friends then she is. She doesn’t know they never
called her for the memorial or that they openly mocked her at the wake. The
only reason Shauna called Misty in the first place is because she was going out
for dinner and she needed someone to babysit Lotty who turned up on her front
door unannounced.
All of the adult
performers are brilliant but Ricci reaches new levels in the first two seasons.
One of the great things about Yellowjackets is that in the flashbacks it
reveals how much the characters have changed – or in certain cases, remain in
arrested development – since their time in the wilderness. The writers point
out that Misty has never been able to escape who she was at any time in her
life: she will always considered a loser, always an afterthought and still
desperate for approval from her friends that will never come. Ricci is
heartbreaking in these two seasons as she reveals she’s incapable of accepting
that not even what happened twenty-five years ago has made her any more
popular: she’s still a loser, still unloved, still unwanted and she just can’t
accept it. If she doesn’t get an Emmy nomination this year the Citizen
Detectives need to investigate.
In the past, it is
now the summer and the teenage girls have all fully embraced the delusion.
Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) has taken the role of the leader as the wilderness
and now all are embraced in the idea of the summer festival. Van (Liv Herson)
leads a narrative of the summer festival and is still perfectly happy with Tai
(Jasmin Savoy Brown). They are playing capture the flag, engaging in dining,
and basically in fantasy. Only the teenage Shauna (the incredible Sophie
Nelisse) is still in the world of reality and refuses to acknowledge any part
of their role playing. They are searching for Coach Scott (whose fate in the
present remains unknown) who they all believe is the one who set the fire.
Somehow he continues to survive, having found supplies and is now building
traps to try and keep safe. In the first episode of the season he captured Mari
(who we still don’t know about in the future) and denied setting the fire. But
it is clear he has realized the monsters the girls have become though they are denying
it immensely. It is possible that some of them know where he is but that
remains unknown.
Lottie (Courtney
Eaton) is still attempting to commune with the wilderness and is trying to use
Travis to find a way to do so. By this point we know that this will eventually
drive Travis crazy and possibly to kill himself but he seems to have a conduit
to the wilderness. Of course, it could be a delusion: Lottie has confessed her
psychotic disorder and we know that she may have infected the rest of them as
teenagers.
That may be the
most brilliant thing about Yellowjackets so far: even two full seasons
in Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have not yet revealed whether what is going
on in the woods is supernatural or just a series of horrible events, either
after the crash or in the present. Everything that is going on in the camp may
have a rational explanation and the rest is so much of the disordered minds of
the teenagers. Similarly every strange thing that is going on in the present –
Tai’s visions, Lottie’s delusions – may be some kind of supernatural event or
just the product of decades of trauma. The writers have not tipped their hand
yet.
What they are
willing to do is show that of the survivors (and we’re still not sure how many
of them did come back yet) have spent their entire adult lives denying what
happened to them and trying to bury it. All of them have failed miserably and
it is clear that they would rather die – or kill – then let the truth come out.
Which still begs the question: why? We’ve seen their lives as adults and they’re
all essentially miserable in their own ways. Some of them - Misty and Tai – are functioning adults but
none of them are remotely emotionally healthy. Van is facing death, and she seems
willing to go to her grave not telling a soul. And they are so dead inside that
none of them truly seemed to really be dealing with Natalie’s death, certainly
not at her memorial and none of them bothered to tell Misty, the person who
needed to move on the most. All of them are surviving but none of them are
living.
The writers go out
of their way each season to draw parallels between the past and the present. In
the past, only Shauna has acknowledged the reality of what they are doing; in
the present Lottie is the only one who accepts it, and in both time periods
they are considered buzz-kills. In both time periods the survivors are in
complete denial and they won’t accept their actions either while they are
happen or when rescue comes. And it’s clear none of them are willing to accept
outside help from those would offer it: Shauna refuses to deal with her family;
Misty refuses to accept the affection of Wilbur (please make Elijah Wood a regular!)
and Van clearly thinks her death is all she deserves.
I might have made Yellowjackets
sound depressing and anybody who’s watched it knows its anything but that.
It’s thrilling, it’s hysterical; it’s crazy; it’s heartbreaking and it’s fun in
a way few of the great dramas of Peak TV ever have been. Even if it were merely
an excuse to get some of the greatest teenage actresses together as adults, it
would still be worth the time and energy. And the work of the casting director
to cast teenage girls who both in appearance and personality are almost exactly
like their adult counterparts truly deserves an Emmy. The fact that Samantha
Hanratty and Christina Ricci could very well be mother and child at this point just
shows how brilliant they are.
And the series is
willing to take risks: it was a masterstroke to kill off Juliette Lewis’s
Natalie at the end of Season 2. Lewis was clearly one of the greatest
performers in the cast in a role of a lifetime. Someone was clearly going to
have to die in the present to move the action forward but the fact it was the
most engaging performer is a move I don’t think I’ve seen any series attempt since
Peter Quinn died in Homeland. (And since it looks like Hilary Swank will
be joining the cast this season, the show keeps finding great performers.)
It was almost
certainly a coincidence that Yellowjackets debuted almost exactly thirty
years since Twin Peaks ended its network run in May of 1991. But in all
the years since it disappeared no other drama on any service has been more
willing to embrace the mantle of Lynch’s masterwork than this series. It
refuses to be pinned down and you don’t care because it’s so much fun on the
journey. It has been willing to push the boundaries of acceptability in ways
that you don’t think you’d be willing to (remember how everybody devoured
Jackie in what appeared to be a Roman feast?!) and then continuing to double
down. And no series since Lost has had viewers debating after every
episode what questions the writers need to answer or what new mysteries have
been revealed.
Perhaps Yellowjackets
will flag the closer it gets to the end and there will be outcry that the
solution was ‘disappointing’. I don’t believe that’s possible at this level,
considering we’re not entirely sure what is going on yet but at this point
there’s no logical ending for the show. And even it flags I don’t care.
There’s something going on in those woods we don’t know, but I’m certain whatever
we learn will be wondrous and strange.
My score: 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment