Yellowjackets season 2 finale: What went wrong?

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for season 2 of “yellow jackets”, now airing on Showtime.

Compared to the feverish heights fueled by fan theory from Season 1, the response to “Yellowjackets” has felt more muted the second time around. This reduced volume is due in part to factors beyond the control of the Showtime drama. The network scheduled the new season amid a deluge of Emmy Awards, pitting it squarely against other contenders like the final episode of “Succession.” A confusing release schedule split the new episodes between Fridays, when they were available to stream on a soon-to-be-gone app, and Sundays, when they aired on Showtime’s linear network, spreading the impact of a thriller based on the plot that could otherwise become live-tweeted, TV quotes. Worse yet, Showtime’s standalone app will merge with Paramount+ in a month, but not in time to expose “Yellowjackets” to a broader potential audience.

But the series’ problems haven’t just been with scheduling. They’re also creative, a truth cemented by this week’s finale and its shocking, if clumsily executed, character death. The eponymous soccer team’s fight to survive in the Canadian wilderness is still fascinating to watch; so are, at times, his older self’s attempts to cope with his trauma. But when “Yellowjackets” head to a previously announced Season 3, there is a widening gap between the two timelines. The flashbacks, while not without problems, are much better placed to tell a focused story; the present tense has some inherent drawbacks that have become more obvious as the show progresses, made worse by some unforced errors.

In the 1990s, the Yellowjackets are enduring their first real winter, a stress on their bodies that is even more taxing on their already fragile minds. After team captain Jackie (Ella Purnell) froze to death at the end of last season, Lottie (Courtney Eaton) has reluctantly stepped in as a spiritual leader of sorts. Lottie, diagnosed as schizophrenic, has sporadic visions, but she’s not the only one. Closed-in Coach Ben (Steven Kreuger) sees the boyfriend he left behind; Akilah (Keeya King) tends to a pet mouse that turns out to be a shriveled corpse; In a heartbreaking mid-season scene, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) gives birth to and nurses her newborn son, only to find out that he was stillborn and she has been hallucinating, just like the conversations she had with Jackie’s body earlier. before she and her friends devoured him, the group’s first step on the slippery slope toward ritual cannibalism.

Yellowjackets live in the gray area between the supernatural and the psychological. Whether “the desert” is a sentient, devilish force or a projection of the girls’ inner angst is intentionally left ambiguous, the better to pit the characters against each other. But in the previous timeline, which takes place a year and a half before the team is finally rescued, this question is active and urgent. With everyone crammed into a confined space, the typical tensions between teenage girls escalate with life and death stakes. As an audience, we experience the unraveling of her alongside them: from Shauna (literally) unfreezing her best friend to Misty (Samantha Hanratty) throwing hers off a cliff; from eating Jackie’s dead body for an unplanned chance to letting Javi (Luciano Leroux) drown so they can make it their next meal.

In the XXI century, “Yellowjackets” is more widespread. It has to be: the former teammates are now adults with their own lives, children and careers. In season 1, four of the survivors teamed up against an anonymous blackmailer, but in season 2, that shared threat was resolved. Him (he was Shauna’s husband, though she initially hides him from the rest of the group). The show’s adult leads scattered to their separate corners and didn’t reunite until the penultimate scene of Episode 6, when the action converges on an upstate wellness center. run by an adult Lottie (Simone Kessell), now passing as Charlotte. If the earlier timeline gains strength in numbers, the later one loses momentum by splitting the cast. With so many separate threads to weave together, some were inevitably left unattended. Did you know that Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is a sitting state senator? The show of her does not seem.

When the Yellowjackets are in the same room, they are gagged by constraints that have nothing to do with how they would act organically in their situation. “Yellowjackets,” the show, can’t spoil what happens next in the woods for us, so the Yellowjackets, the women, can’t talk in detail about what they’ve been through. Some of that vagueness relates to repression and memory gaps that can come with PTSD, but the longer “Yellowjackets” goes on, the less credible the lack of detail beyond “what we did” begins to feel. Instead, the show distracts us with shiny objects like Shauna’s attempts to cover up the murder of her lover, or the friendship between Natalie (Juliette Lewis) and Lisa (Nicole Maines), a disciple of Lottie’s who reminds Nat of her me younger.

Lisa has never felt like the strongest addition to the ensemble, and the conclusion of her arc only compounds the unfavorable impression. For reasons unclear, Lisa intrudes on a Yellowjackets gathering, read: sacrificial hunting, with a shotgun. Before Misty (Christina Ricci) can inject her with phenobarbital, her murder weapon of choice, Natalie acts as a human shield and takes the needle on Lisa’s behalf. The self-sacrifice is a callback to her earlier decision to let Javi die in her place, but she still feels abrupt, reducing Lisa to little more than a catalyst for Natalie’s self-discovery. As an outsider, Lisa takes the brunt of this season’s difficulty with the addition of new additions, but the grown-up versions of ex-Van de Lottie and Taissa (Lauren Ambrose) haven’t fared much better. Van, now the owner of a queer-themed video store living with terminal cancer, gets only a handful of scenes to establish her current state of mind. Lottie was teased as a potential antagonist, but she starts from the same place of deep denial as her peers, passing up the opportunity for exciting friction with her former acolytes.

Early in the finale, the Yellowjackets finally turn on each other, arguing over the secrets they’ve been keeping and the rash decisions they’ve made. It’s a welcome dose of the desperate attacks that define flashbacks, and a showcase for how “Yellowjackets” can deliciously undermine tropes like girl power and feminist solidarity. They are selfish, violent and often quite funny people, all the more so since they have several decades of life experience behind them. The later timeline has its highlights, just as the earlier one has its flaws. (Passing the torch from Lottie to Natalie doesn’t quite scan; you can’t exactly transfer a cult of personality.) But by the season 2 finale, the latter is better positioned to give a simplified take on the themes. “Yellowjackets” does it better, from body horror to platonic rivalry. There’s still an appetite for more, if only the show could. adjust your recipe.