Showtime's Yellowjackets came out of nowhere at the end of 2021 to become one of social media's most beloved new obsessions--and it's not difficult to see why. The weekly episode releases teased a mystery sprawling through two different timelines that involved, among other things, the looming threat of cannibalism, murder, and maybe even vengeful ghosts hiding dark and terrifying secrets. For those of us who lived through the real-time releases of cult classic shows like Lost, it felt like a welcome return to the frantic week-to-week theorizing and puzzle solving that has too frequently been lost in binge-watch friendly releases.
Loosely inspired by William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Yellowjackets Season 1 focused on a tragic plane crash which left a high school girl's soccer team (the titular Yellowjackets, the team mascot) stranded in the Canadian wilderness for over a year back in the mid-'90s. While those events unfolded, the story also zeroed in on the surviving girls, now adults with families and lives of their own, trying to navigate their respective trauma in the present day. The first episode strongly implies that the girls resorted to cannibalism to survive the winter, and also may have formed some sort of tribal or cult-like hierarchy, but the adult survivors have resolutely taken to never talking about their experiences even 25 years later.
The set up makes for plenty of mystery. What could have been a completely forgone conclusion--the adult timeline makes who survives of the teenagers in the wilderness obvious and the early implication of cannibalism means the "secret" the women are avoiding seem inevitable--slowly warps into something else entirely. A present-day murder plot begins to unravel the survivor's fragile sense of normalcy while a possibly supernatural drama plays out back in the '90s, casting doubt on what, exactly, the girls were forced to do to survive.
At its strongest, Yellowjackets uses these two pressure cooker scenarios to build up some fantastic dramatic irony. As the season progresses through its 10 episodes, the flashbacks between the adults and teenagers begin cutting closer and closer to the bone (pun intended), especially as the supporting characters begin making their own assumptions about the survival tactics of the team more obvious. The whole cast excels in these moments with special recognition going to Melanie Lynskey as the adult version of Shauna, the team's perpetual second-in-command who, now as an adult, finds herself unwittingly shoehorned into the niche once carved out by her former best friend. Lynskey anchors the adult timeline with a shockingly funny and subversive take on white-picket-fence families and disaffected motherhood.
Meanwhile, back in the teenage timeline, Sammi Hanratty's young Misty, a bullied girl with a strong sociopathic streak and a dangerous penchant for manipulation, shines alongside Sophie Thatcher's young Natalie, the team's resident burnout. The two characters are mirrored in adulthood by Juliette Lewis and Chistina Ricci, the former having become a struggling addict and the latter having grown into her worst characteristics as a true-crime obsessed nursing home caretaker. Rounding out the survivors is Taissa, played by both Tawny Cypress and Jasmin Savoy Brown, a diplomatic (but cut-throat) leader-turned-politician in adulthood who may or may not be hiding something deadly from her family.
As far as character dynamics are concerned, Yellowjackets has no shortage of interesting ones. Even the characters who (presumably) don't survive and exist only in the '90s timeline manage to bring something unique to the table.
However, despite the veritable goldmine of character drama to be found in the show, Yellowjackets still stumbles relatively frequently when it comes to actually advancing the story forward. Across the 10 episodes of Season 1, the show repeatedly gets sucked into the storm drains of its own mysteries, adding more and more red herrings and misdirection into the mix while offering very little in terms of forward momentum. Characters will find themselves having to repeat the same tasks or cover the same bases multiple times from different angles all to uncover a single breadcrumb or finally be made aware that they're facing a deadend. And yes, some of these narrative cul-de-sacs provide some of the more interesting visual moments; however, by the midway point of the season, they start to lose some of their shine. And, by the end of the season, it feels as though the contents of Season 1 were perhaps conceived to fill 6 or 8 episodes instead of the final count of 10.
Additionally, some of the visual effects--both digital and practical--leave something to be desired. There are a handful of massive set pieces that look incredible--extreme moments of gore and surreal horror that clearly got the lion's share of the budget. Unfortunately, these moments are outnumbered by smaller cast-off moments of suspiciously quick-healing wounds that take place mostly off screen and then are hand-waved with some quickly done theater make-up or wildly out-of-place CGI animals.
Still, this doesn't make Yellowjackets an unworthy or inferior heir to the puzzle box shows of the pre-streaming platform era. It's well performed, largely well written, and, assuming you're willing to play along with the speculation game (and understand that you're in for the long haul here--Season 2 has been greenlit but won't see the light of day until the end of the year at the earliest), Yellowjackets will be worth your while. You'll just need to accept the risk that the mystery here could wind up revealing just about anything--including things you may not be thrilled about in the long run. If that's a source of frustration or anxiety (we see you, fans of Lost who were burnt by the finale) it may be safer to wait until the story has progressed a bit more before allowing yourself any level of investment.
Otherwise, the entirety of Yellowjackets Season 1 is streaming on Showtime right now.
