Yellowjackets Season Two Review: An Absorbing Study of What Gets Lost in the Wilderness

When we parted ways with Wiskayok High School’s girls varsity soccer team at the end of season one of Yellowjackets, we knew a number of things: The team had been stranded deep in the Canadian Rockies after their plane crashed, and they would remain there for 19 months before being rescued. Some of them would make it out alive, including Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Misty (Christina Ricci), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), and Natalie (Juliette Lewis)—and, as we learned in a late-season reveal, Lottie (Simone Kessell).

The remote woods are possibly harboring something otherworldly, something with an interest in the fates of the show’s teenage protagonists. And despite the ominous foreshadowing of the pilot episode, we saw no cannibalism occur in that snowy, breathing wilderness by the end of the first season. In season two of Yellowjackets, the deliciously twisty thriller continues to draw much of its strength from its confident ambiguity and delayed revelations, leading viewers not to Big Answers, but further into the thicket of story and symbolism.

Yellowjackets also continues to lean on its interwoven timelines, cutting back and forth between the main characters immediately post-crash and their lives 25 years later. This allows for a longitudinal look at their traits and psychic wounds, though the present-day sequences never quite deliver the pulsing urgency and stakes that the wilderness scenes do.

When we return to the abandoned cabin where the team has camped out, winter has set in. Seat belts from the plane wreckage are keeping their makeshift coats closed. Chores have become routinized, assembly line-style, with a deck of somewhat foreboding playing cards dictating each person’s daily task. The coach’s son, Javi (Luciano Leroux), is still missing, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is still pregnant, and Jackie (Ella Purnell) is still dead—though, due to the frozen ground, not yet laid to rest. Nat (Sophie Thatcher) and Javi’s older brother, Travis (Kevin Alves), are finding fewer animals on their hunting trips each day, while Van (Liv Hewson) is focused on keeping Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) from sleepwalking off into the night.

Misty (Samantha Hanratty) isn’t much help, as she’s hyper-focused on her new “bestie,” Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman), a theater kid who encourages Misty’s dramatic side. Their gift for Shauna’s baby shower: a scene from Steel Magnolias, performed from memory. (Misty continues to get the best comedic bits in both timelines.)

At the season’s thematic center is Lottie (Courtney Eaton), whose visions are engendering fanaticism and fracturing the team into warring camps. Some of the girls account for seemingly mystical occurrences, like a flock of birds falling dead on and around the cabin at once, with rational explanations (avian flu, iron deposits, etc.). Increasing numbers of them, though, need something else to believe in, much like they did their pre-soccer game rituals: “We’re gonna need more than just food if we’re gonna make it through this winter,” insists Travis.

Lottie herself seems deeply uncertain at times, in a welcome wrinkle to her unshakeable conviction at the end of the show’s first season. But she’s offering faith to the Yellowjackets, a way for her scared teammates to unburden themselves and make a desperate situation coherent. And as the days grow shorter and darker, she’s gaining disciples.

In the present day, the fallout from what was revealed at the end of the last season results in dense plotting and less compelling moments for the otherwise superb adult cast. Shauna leads the cops on a wild goose chase while Misty courts Walter (Elijah Wood), a fellow citizen detective. Taissa’s psychological state worsens, and her terrifying sleepwalking self seems hell-bent on bringing her to some unknowable target. And Natalie, who was last seen being smuggled into a van by a mysterious mob, finds herself on a sprawling commune complex run by Lottie, who’s now a full-blown pseudo-wellness cult leader.

Lottie’s new rituals are ridiculous-looking—her people wear all purple, sit on the floor in a “sharing shack,” and ceremonially cover each other with soil—but there’s something feral and fear-based happening at the commune, including to Lottie herself, whose symbol-laden visions are starting up again. “There is a version of you who knows exactly who you really are…a primal, elemental self,” she tells her followers. “We are the ones making ourselves sick.”

This is new, and yet something we recognize: The viewer navigates this world with the knowledge that everything issues from, or can be traced back to, the woods. In many ways, Yellowjackets is a study of what, over time, is lost and what never goes away, how parts of ourselves get transmuted or truncated because of our traumas, while others cast long shadows. In all senses, these adult women exist in relation to the girls who were stranded, and throughout the show’s second season, this thematic concern remains absorbing.

So, too, does the question of the supernatural. Yellowjackets walks a careful tightrope for much of its second season, leaving open multiple possible explanations for both freaky woods phenomena and horrifying human behavior. “There was something out there with us,” one character reflects to another, before amending: “Or in us.”

Either the girls communed with—or were possessed by?—something malevolent in the woods, or else they really were the only thing out there, driven to animalistic cruelty by their desperate need for a sense-making belief system. And given what we know about the perennial nature of their trauma, either something has followed the survivors home—haunted them, perhaps literally, for 25 years—or the Yellowjackets are their own poltergeists. At some point, the showrunners will have to reveal their cards, which may have a deflating effect. Until then, it’s worth staying on the show’s winding road to find out.