‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Right Ear, Right Now

Yellowjackets sold something I wasn’t buying. The breakout Showtime hit — not a phrase you hear everyday in this Netflix/HBO dominated landscape, which explains the network renewing it for not one but two additional seasons after its initial run ended — seemed, from its harrowing and horrifying cold open anyway, to be a story of survival horror among a late-‘90s high school girls soccer team stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash. The Terror starring girls who probably have a favorite Smashing Pumpkins song? Now that’s a show I can do business with.

The bifurcated thing we got instead, however, was not really what I was in the market for. Don’t get me wrong, I adore much of the work of the adult cast, whose job it is to chronicle the lives of the survivors in the present day. Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis? The stars of Heavenly Creatures, Speed Racer, and Natural Born Killers, very literally on my ballot for the best movies ever made? How could you possibly go wrong?

Oh gosh, let me count the ways. While the teenage material more or less stayed true to the promise of the concept — increasing desperation, clandestine sexuality, teenage betrayals, drug trips, incredibly disgusting self-administered amateur surgery, the establishment of a folk-horror cannibal cult at some point — the adult segments of the show became bogged down in schtick. Suddenly characters whose journey into murderousness you’re supposed to treat as deadly serious when they’re kids start offing people for black-comedy punchlines, deflating any sense of moral urgency. How are we supposed to take their moral conflict seriously, when the show very literally cracks jokes about them murking people and covering it up in the here-and-now?

Other than a subplot involving the dissociative survivor Taissa (Tawny Cypress) having bizarre psychotic episodes of a possibly supernatural nature, the wacky murder-mystery hijinks and warmed-over Lost-style Questions that dominate the present-day storyline have nothing of interest to offer. It’s a waste of Lewis, Lynskey, Ricci, and frankly the viewer’s time. The over-praised, over-obvious Now That’s What I Call ’90s! needle drops often hurt worse than they help, too.

So in the interest of putting one’s cards on one’s table, that’s where I’m coming from upon tuning into the season premiere of Yellowjackets S2 (cheekily titled “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” for reasons that become apparent to Shakespeare scholars before the end). I want brutal, borderline unwatchable body horror among kids I might have asked to the prom. (I am the exact same age as these characters are supposed to be, even though Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci were both famous as older and younger people than me respectively at the time the teenage material takes place). I do not want Melanie Lynskey’s Shauna saying “This has been fun, but I think I’m gonna go” when Ricci’s Misty is coaching her to get through a murder-case interrogation after she stabbed her adulterous boyfriend to death because he didn’t show up on Google or whatever. 

Dialogue like that undercuts the tension of the whole project, you see? If she doesn’t really care about fucking murdering a guy, why should we? And why should we take seriously whatever psychological trauma was done to her by her experience in the woods if she’s making cutesy little quips about killing her lover in the here and now?

I’ve done all this throat clearing primarily to say that Yellowjackets, based on this second season premiere, apparently means to go on as it started. Back in 1996-1997, shit with the kids is incredibly fucked up. Shauna (here played by the excellent Sophie Nélisse) spends much of her time talking with the literal corpse of her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell), who froze to death after learning she’d been cucked by Shauna and her boyfriend Jeff. By the end of the episode she eats Jackie’s ear, which had frozen and snapped off, which is, y’know, probably not a great sign.

Misty (Sammi Hanratty) is a dangerous outcast, shunned by the others for poisoning their stew with magic mushrooms, which in a roundabout way got Jackie killed and helped them lose Javi, the younger son of their dead soccer coach, completely. 

Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her girlfriend Vanessa (Liv Hewson) have themselves tied together at night to prevent Taissa’s violent somnambulation, a mix of the sinister and the sexual that really works for the setting. 

Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and her boyfriend-of-circumstance Travis (Kevin Alves) spend their days hunting not just for food (no luck), nor for Travis’s missing brother Javi (also no luck), but for the overall topography of their environment, which by now they’ve mapped out for over seven miles in every direction, under the guidance of the team’s surviving assistant coach Ben (Steven Krueger).

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And finally there’s Lottie (Simone Kessell), who will grow up to be a full-fledged cult (or at least self-help group) leader (played by Courtney Eaton). Back in the winter of ’97 she’s just a wackadoodle self-injurer who apparently has the magic power to heal and provoke hallucinations. Hey, it was the alternative years, everyone had someone like that in their circle of friends, believe me.

In the present? Eh, well. Shauna and her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) conspire to cover up her involvement in the murder of her mystery-shrouded artist lover Adam (Peter Gadiot). Raiding his studio for evidence, they discover a cache of intimate portraits, which gets them both hot and bothered, which admittedly got me pretty hot and bothered. (I felt it was undercut by the on-the-nose use of “#1 Crush” by Garbage on the soundtrack, but your mileage may vary; Jeff getting upset about it after the fact and blasting “Last Resort” by Papa Roach in his SUV, though? That’s gold!)

Taissa has won her state senatorial election and bought a new dog for her kid, but she’s kept from seeing him by her estranged ex-wife — estranged because she found the dog’s head and heart on an altar in the cellar of the family home, almost certainly severed and placed there by Taissa during one of her creepy cannibalistic psychogenic fugue states. (Taissa eventually finds all this stuff herself and assures the new dog, Steve, that this time she’ll do better. Very reassuring for the pooch, I’m sure.)

Misty’s on the hunt for Natalie, who went missing last season after Lottie’s purple-clad cult kidnapped her. While Misty manages to figure out that a kidnapping has indeed taken place, Natalie fights to escape her captors, only to be told by the adult Lottie (Courtney Eaton) that she bears a message from Travis, who either killed himself or was murdered by Lottie’s minions last season.

Then there’s Callie (Sarah Desjardins), Shauna and Jeff’s kid, who knows about the affair, knows the other man is dead, and, thanks to the laughably unburned photo ID she finds in the family barbecue grill, knows that her parents are involved in covering up the killing.

I wish I could report that the start of Yellowjackets Season 2 is a qualitative quantum leap over Season 1. This happens more often than you’d think! Billions, The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire — all of them ran circles around themselves when their second outing arrived. But so far, this second outing has all the same strengths and weaknesses as the first one. The teenage segments remain far stronger and scarier than anything in the present, Taissa’s supernatural schizophrenia or whatever it is excepted. The teenage performances are much better than the adult ones too, though I suspect the writing of creators and showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson is at fault here rather than the actual work of Lynksey, Lewis, and Ricci, whom I know to be gifted performers under most circumstances. They’re just doing bad comedy here, sorry!

And in general, I’m much more interested in the story of how the teenagers survived, and what became of them in the process, than I am about some vast mystery-box conspiracy storyline in the present day. I wish I could convince showrunners that one viewing of Lost is enough to scratch that particular itch for a lifetime, instead of sitting through infinite Westworlds for the rest of my life. I don’t get why, when given the option to dig deep into the group dynamics of teenage athletes reduced to subsistence living in a hostile and perhaps paranormal atmosphere, you’d instead choose to show us that Misty grows up to be a murdering redditor. Am I out to lunch here? The former is a million times more interesting than the latter, right?

Well, whatever. Yellowjackets isn’t bad, it isn’t offensive, it doesn’t insult my intelligence for the most part; but the same can be said for Succession and The White Lotus and The Last of Us, three other big late-prestige TV shows of current vintage that attract effusive critical notices while communicating…not a whole lot, from where I’m sitting. I keep hoping that this show will drill deep enough into the horror at its core to offset its other problems. After this episode, I’m still hoping.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.