Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 On Showtime, Where Things Get Real For Both The Stranded Teens And Their Adult Counterparts

Yellowjackets was a surprise hit in 2021-22, scratching the itch of viewers who wanted a Lost-like story as well as people who wanted a good coming-of-age teen story. It helped that the first season had great performances all around, highlighted by Emmy nominations for Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci. The highly-anticipated second season is finally here; does it improve on the show’s first season formula?

YELLOWJACKETS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A snowy winter night shot. Then a shot of the cabin where the Yellowjackets soccer team has holed up in since shortly after their plane crashed in the Canadian Rockies.

The Gist: In 1996, it’s been about two months since Jackie (Ella Purnell) froze to death outside the cabin after an argument with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse). Winter has set in, and food supplies are low. Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis (Kevin Alves) keep going out to hunt food but find nothing. Travis is also still looking for his little brother Javi (Luciano Leroux), who disappeared after the mushroom-aided bacchanal in the fall.

Shauna mourns her best friend’s death by talking to her frozen body, still clad in the varsity jacket she died in. The rest of the group seems to tolerate it, but their patience is growing thin. A number of the girls are getting spiritual comfort from Lottie (Courtney Eaton), much to the annoyance of Nat and some of the others. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Vanessa (Liv Hewson) are tied together more than ever, literally and emotionally. Misty (Sammi Hanratty) is still being frozen out by the other girls after the shrooms incident. Ben (Steven Krueger), the only adult, continues to be a steadying force, but he knows the girls aren’t going to be calm with each other much longer.

In 1998, we see the remaining girls return to New Jersey after being rescued. Lottie, her schizophrenia left unchecked for the last 19 months, is given electroconvulsive therapy and seems to have kept her healing side, but sees less in the way of visions.

In the present day, Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff (Warren Kole) are trying to to see if they’ve left any stone unturned in covering up her murder of Adam (Peter Gadiot). She finds a key to his art studio, where the couple finds multiple paintings of Shauna. While saddened by it, the two of them are also turned on, and Jeff angrily takes Shauna in full view of the paintings. Their daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) tries to leverage what she knows against her mother, but Shauna tells her that Jeff knows everything about the affair.

Meanwhile, Misty (Christina Ricci) wants to know what happened to Nat (Juliette Lewis), who seemingly disappeared from the no-tell motel where she was living. She uses her citizen investigator skills to see that the door to her room was repaired, leading her to come to the realization that Nat was kidnapped.

Nat is indeed in a cabin somewhere in the middle of the woods, but somehow manages to escape when she outsmarts one of the young members of the cult that kidnapped her. When she runs through the woods, she sees a sacrificial circle of a man getting buried alive. That’s when she sees Lottie (Simone Kessell), who is a “spiritual leader” of her purple-clad followers.

Finally, Taissa (Tawny Cypress), about to take her state senate seat, is wondering why her wife Simone (Rukiya Bernard) angrily tries to keep their son Sammy (Aiden Stoxx) away from her. When she investigates the blood-stained crawlspace Simone opened, she finds out what she’s been doing while she’s been sleepwalking.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In our Season 1 review, we compared Yellowjackets to Gossip Girl meets Lost meets Lord Of The Flies. That comparison still stands, though the Lord Of The Flies influence looks like it’s kicking in this season instead of Season 1.

Our Take: As much as Season 1 of Yellowjackets was a buzzy online sensation, we were disappointed by how it played out, especially during the 1996 story. We felt that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and their writing staff spent way too much time on the “teenage shit” aspect of the story; the girls got along way too well and functioned as a group way too smoothly for too long for that part of the story to connect with us. Their clothes were clean, their skirmishes were minor, their manner too calm.

Now we can chalk it up to Lyle and Nickerson holding the chaotic aspect of the soccer team’s woodland survival until Season 2. We get immediately plunged into winter, and everyone has given their last fuck. At this point, we’ll be seeing people teaming off and some of the extra team members whose names we barely know likely fall victim to a starving horde. It may be morbid to say, but that aspect of their story was always going to be way more interesting than the coming-of-age stuff, and we’re happy that we’ve finally gotten around to it in the second season (though, knowing there’s going to be a third season, we’re not sure how far they’re going to push that narrative).

The adult side of the story is a bit fractured at this point; we certainly enjoy the individual performances, especially those of Lynskey and Ricci, but that side of the story really got cooking when adult Shauna, Misty, Taissa and Nat were together. Here, they’re mostly on their own, and at least two of their stories lose momentum because of it.

We are looking forward to seeing more of Kessell as cult-leader Lottie, a gig she seemed to be pre-ordained to do from those days when she was off her meds in the woods. Lauren Ambrose, playing the adult version of Van, hasn’t shown up yet, but we’re suspecting that she’ll turn Taissa’s world upside down. And then there’s Elijah Wood, showing up at some point as one of Misty’s fellow citizen sleuths; will he help her look for Nat? We also know that the investigation into Adam’s disappearance is going to get closer and closer to Shauna and company, and it’ll be interesting to see how the most ruthless of all the Yellowjackets handles the pressure.

Sex and Skin: The man that Lottie’s followers are burying alive is completely naked, and we… see… everything.

Parting Shot: Teenage Shauna looks at Jackie’s frozen ear, which fell off as Shauna was talking to her friend’s body. She contemplates it, then eats it. It seems like we’re in a new phase now, doesn’t it?

Sleeper Star: We hope Sarah Desjardins gets more time as Callie, who seems to be the only one who calls Shauna out on her bullshit, and is the only one outside of Jeff, Taissa, Misty and Nat who knows that Shauna had something to do with Adam’s disappearance.

Most Pilot-y Line: As in the first season, there’s some logistical and logic flaws that bug us on this show. Nat and Travis find a dead fox (Travis hallucinates that it’s Javi). Why couldn’t they dig up the frozen fox and bring it back for meat? How did adult Shauna know where Adam’s art studio was? Those are the kinds of things that come to mind immediately as we’re watching, and it’s distracting.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While Yellowjackets has its storytelling issues, it does seem that, with everyone settled into the story, that the stakes will be ramped up in Season 2. That should help keep our minds off the show’s glaring flaws.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.