Monday, 31 March 2025
Reading List: March.
Yellowjackets – What are you doing alive?
Yellowjackets: 3x08 A Normal, Boring Life.
Tai: Our futures would be fucked, this will follow us for the rest of our lives. This place will follow us for the rest of our fucking lives.
We’ve spent the last few seasons watching the Yellowjackets divide over questions of faith. Lottie’s followers have waxed and waned, depending on how useful an explanation her mythologising of the wilderness was. A conveniently personified wilderness asking for sacrifices helps dealing with the reality of cannibalism. A belief that It can be called on, its intents interpreted, makes the helplessness of survival and the loss of friends slightly less unbearable. Them’s the Brakes and Croak have removed most of the mystery, the inexplicable that was left for Lottie to interpret as a sign of something greater at play – but what happens in A Normal, Boring Life is the next logical step. The prospect of rescue creates a new dividing line between those who see a return home as a relief, who eagerly embrace the trivial joys of regular, civilised life, and those who have fully transformed in the wilderness and imagine a return home as a potential loss of that new self or at the very least as a problematic process, considering that there are now witnesses to what they have had to do to survive.
The dream that begins the episode shows the trivial: Shauna is working in a grocery store, a menial, boring, repetitive job. Instead of butchering meat with a knife, she’s scanning pre-packed cuts for a customer, who turns out to be Jackie, once again haunting her and taunting her about her lost potential. “You really did not pan out”, she says, indicating that the grocery store is where she ends up instead of going to Brown. When Shauna looks down, the meat turns out to be decisively human cuts: what she’s done out in the wilderness will follow her home. Shauna tells Jackie to stop calling her Shipman, that she has always hated it, but Jackie reminds her that she never said anything about it: a reminder of exactly the kind of inertia that will lead seamlessly to her marrying Jeff and staying in Wiskayok, where she bottles up her rage and uses it on neighbourhood rabbits (the same rabbits that, in porcelain form, amass in her home whenever Jackie’s anniversary comes around). Then she sees moths, trapped in the overhead lights, drawn to the light, a symbol interpreted easily enough: the false promise of escape just leads into another kind of trap. The sequence of the dream indicates that this is adult Shauna, dreaming in front of Alex’ house, but I think that this makes a lot more sense as a dream that teen Shauna had after the prospect of rescue emerged: it’s what’s marinating in her mind as she comes to a decision, with one of the moths reappearing right before she makes the jump.
A Normal, Boring Life is Shauna’s episode. It’s the first time that the Yellowjackets have a genuine chance at getting out and leaving, with nothing but a six-day trip through these woods under Kodi’s guidance dividing them from a return to civilisation. But we know that they spent at least another two or three months out there, that they, or at least some of them, had to make it through another winter before they returned for good. What went wrong? When they are getting ready, later on, to set out, and Lottie makes the call to stay, Natalie is ready to leave her behind. When Tai makes that decision as well, along with Shauna, it looks like the three of them will stay behind together. But then Shauna is the one to make a choice for everyone: she will not let them go. She has been anointed their new leader, and she makes the decision for everyone in that position. We don’t know yet how she has the power to enforce it, but the episode reveals what she is capable of, and how Shauna, driven by the idea that the life she would return to is trivial, boring, decides that the version of her who rose to power in the wilderness isn’t someone she can sacrifice, even if it means that everyone else has to suffer.
When adult Shauna finally gets out of the car with her sharp, sharp knife, she walks into a funhouse mirror of her own life. It’s a beautiful, light-filled house, with tasteful furniture (I can see Jeff nod his head approvingly), children’s drawings on the wall. When she hides, she witnesses a practiced and loving morning routine: Alex packing her child’s lunch before taking her to pre-school, lovingly bickering with her wife. We can see the love, even before Melissa professes it, because it’s clear in how they interact with each other. I’m not sure Shauna picks up on it, because all she sees – shocked – is that reverse cap, that undeniable proof that the house she has walked into belongs to a woman she thought has been dead for years. She jumped to the conclusion so quickly that a stranger she has never met, the daughter of a woman she helped kill, is the one behind all the things she has interpreted as personal attacks, but with Melissa there, it immediately makes so much more sense in her head. The way she arrives at the decision in her head that this is an enemy to confront: how much of it is coloured by having been Jackie’s friend, by having been in this complex, emotionally entangled relationship with her best friend for so long that was defined by being undermined and made small, and by the revenge betrayal of sleeping with her boyfriend? Misty has called her a “bad friend” so many times up to this point, but it’s more that Shauna can’t even imagine a relationship that isn’t potential betrayal, that isn’t just one small step removed from adversity (which is why it’s perfect that this is also the episode in which Jeff, for the first time, throws her under the bus). Shauna is incapable of trust, because Shauna can never be trusted. And Melissa – honed by the same experiences – knows there’s an intruder in the house, and picks up a knife straight away, and she immediately recognises Shauna, regardless of how many years have passed.
I’m so glad that we get to see this play out, because after last episode, I thought we wouldn’t. It’s perfect that the first time they see each other again, they both have knives, because, as Melissa points out straight away, there is no way that she is going to talk to her with a knife in her hand and no knife in hers. Remember the first time they talked (first time because Shauna was so surprised that Melissa could even speak) Shauna also had a knife in her hand, and used it straight away to threaten Melissa, and Melissa reacted to that with desire and admiration. It’s a beautiful symmetry, and all those 25 years have added is that Melissa, in her new life that she has literally died to get to, recognises that she needs to wield a knife to make things even. The entire teenage Yellowjackets timeline this episode is about how they will return to civilisation without all the things they did hanging over their head, and here’s a woman who faked her own suicide to get rid of her history, only to then end up marrying the daughter of a woman they killed, who has no idea. Even with her new name, her old pattern of problematic trauma bonding - even if it has led to a normal, beautiful life of love – is still right there. To be fair, Melissa admits that this might be the case, but I don’t think it diminishes the reality of her life in any way. She has done exactly what teen Melissa, with such hope and excitement, said she would do once she got back, even if it took some extra steps.
Let’s catch up with what is happening back in the wilderness. Travis has an interesting arc in the episode that I think ties in perfectly with everything that’s happened since he’s escaped Lottie’s grasp and watched what happened to Coach. It’s not said explicitly, because we haven’t really seen any of his interactions beyond trying to his best to look after Akilah (it’s sad that his relationship with Nat doesn’t exist anymore), but something has definitely been simmering. His visions may have never been real, but he definitely has a premonition of what would happen if he staid out there much longer under Shauna’s leadership, and it’s not good. He makes the decision to trek out with Kodi and Akilah, and without the others, but Akilah is leaving breadcrumbs for the girls to find, and they end up capturing Kodi and taking him back to camp before making a decision about what to do. Misty finds her glasses again and is also one of the drivers behind the concerns about what Hannah and Kodi will tell everyone once they get rescued. She suggests they kill them, and the suggestion must be pertinent enough that someone else takes her up on it eventually (Shauna, in the driver’s seat, wouldn’t hesitate). Natalie tells everyone to pack for the trip, and they go off to have wildly different experiences with the prospect of rescue. Misty, Mari and Van have vivid daydreams about the creature comforts of civilisation – a toilet, a slushie, a feather bed that mirrors adult Van’s hallucination of her hospital bed in the woods eerily. They discuss what their first meal will be once they’re back. On the other side, there’s Akilah with a sad and haunting vision of her plants and animals dead – she’s been a guardian of sorts of this tamed wilderness, and she has a deep connection to nature. She’s also been primed by Lottie to believe that these visions mean something (which makes it interesting that she doesn’t join Tai, Shauna and Lottie when they decide to stay, and also opens the question of what ends up happening to her in the end, since she doesn’t seem to have made it out). Travis insists that it’s not real – he admits that he only served her up to Lottie to escape her himself – but it’s hard to deny that her vision of Coach being the bridge came true to an extent, and her vision of her animals dying is so viscerally upsetting that they must affect her deeply. Tai has a conversation with Van about what a return to civilisation would mean for their relationship, because regardless of how long the time they have spent away may feel, the world probably hasn’t changed enough for them to live openly. The haunting thing is that she’s right: 1997 was not a great time to be queer in New Jersey, and it wouldn’t be a marginally better time for a long while, and they did end up breaking up. As much as they have had to do unimaginable things out there to survive, in the sense of being able to live openly within a community that didn’t judge them, the wilderness has been a better place. Along with what happens in the adult timeline here: Tai struggling to bring a sacrifice to save Van, something she believes to be necessary but can’t go through with, shows that Dark Tai shows up whenever Tai deeply wants something but can’t cross a moral threshold to achieve. I think that’s enough to come to the conclusion that the Tai who steps up next to Lottie and Shauna is not entirely herself, it’s Dark Tai taking over to do what she thinks needs to done (a vision of Tai next to the Man With No Eyes all but confirms it). Lottie – who nobody has really talked to since she’s killed Edwin, who still hasn’t even washed off his blood – was always going to stay behind, because she has become someone who can only meaningfully exist out in the wilderness. Back in civilisation, she would be medicated again, her condition interpreted as mental illness rather than visionary (until adult Lottie finds a way to exist as a cult leader in the context of the wellness industry, which has always been one of the great ironic twists of the show).
Lottie: If I go back, nothing will be well. I won’t be well. I won’t be me. The me that was made out here. And that unwellness that I feel, I feel it so deeply in my bones. We’re safer here.
These three (well, four) characters haven’t thought about what they will do once they return, because all they can see is what they would lose: power (“are you the captain, of the team?), the ability to live and love openly, being a spiritual leader. The wilderness has provided for them in ways that it hasn’t for the others (and it’s interesting to think about the fact that Misty would always have turned out to be exactly herself, regardless the circumstances – she can go back and continue without a break, there’s no conflict, as long as the issue of Hannah and Kodi dabbing them in is removed). The most interesting one among them is Nat though: who sees something in the plane, when she says a final goodbye to Ben Scott, but denies that it has any power over her. “We are leaving whatever you are behind” she says, a statement all the more tragic because she no longer has a mirror image in the present time. Nat may have been removed as leader but she is still responsible for everyone, and wants to make sure that they’re safe.
The verbal showdown between Melissa and Shauna is a little like a fucked-up therapy session in which Melissa diagnoses Shauna, and summarises what has been happening ever since they all reconnected after Travis’ death. Melissa is living the boring life that Shauna was so fearful of, but like the fully realised version of it that doesn’t look like a sad approximation of normalcy, but the real thing. “I have a good life. I have a decent job, I have a great kid. I go to church.” Melissa faked her suicide because she was scared of what it meant to no longer be “one of them”, scared of what Shauna would end up doing. This makes it even more bewildering that she chose to send Shauna that tape in the end, a tape that Hannah asked her to give to Alex, but that she had to hide because it would have blown up her life: even with the explanatory note attached that has gotten lost (Callie? Lottie?), it’s hard to see how Shauna would have interpreted as anything but a threat. Melissa explains that it was an attempt to exorcise a haunting, but she also seems to have a solid grasp on Shauna and what she is willing to do. It’s a small kernel of doubt in the whole beautiful symmetry of their confrontation (a kernel of doubt that allows Shauna to continue believing that Melissa was responsible for all the things that could be more easily explained as anything other than an attack on her, but also one that maybe allows the viewers to retain a measure of doubt about Melissa’s intentions here, and her truthfulness).
Shauna: We can make all the pacts, and vows of silence that we want, but if you really think about it, the only way to truly be safe, to be 100% fucking certain that nobody is ever going to spill your darkest secrets is to be the only one left.
What is that, if not a declaration of intent by the character whose most natural instinct, in any situation where she perceives a threat, is to go for the jugular? There’s a version of the story where this is exactly what happens in however many more years of Yellowjackets we have left. Shauna is desperate for control, and suspicious of everyone. Adam is the best example: he had nothing to do with anything, he was entirely harmless, but she created a version of reality in which he was threatening her, and killed him for it. Melissa tells her that she creates her own problems, stirs the pot just to feel alive. “You hate to be alone, you hate yourself, and you want everyone else to feel just as miserable as you are. You want your life to explode. It’s fun for you. It lights you up. You want to burn it all down just to watch.”
It's this that makes Shauna snaps, not even the moment when Melissa taunts her by telling her that she is lying about Callie loving her. Shauna lunges at her, they struggle, and then Shauna takes a bite out of Melissa’s shoulder and asks her to eat it, or else she will tell her family who she is. The only way to be truly safe is either if everyone is equally implicated, or if everyone else is dead. The beautiful voice of Corin Tucker provides the coda with Dig Me Out.
Random notes:
We love a double bluff! I’ve been thinking about how it works, on the meta level, because it would have never been a bluff in the first place if we hadn’t known, in advance, that Hilary Swank was going to show up eventually (which makes it even more perfect that the thing that proves it, even before the subtitles spoil it, is that cap).
Sophie Nélisse and Melanie Lynskey perfectly adjusting their characters to match each other as current Shauna begins aligning with past Shauna - these two performances deserve all the recognition.
Van’s “Did Mulder and Scully get together” as the first question she asked Hannah was perfect. I too would have a small section of my brain exclusively dedicated to all the television I was missing out on if I was in a survival situation. How did she end up feeling about Agent Reyes?
Jeff finally losing it in this episode has been a long time coming. He is, in a way, practising what his life would look like without Shauna in the episode, in his two attempts to make up for the failed meeting with “The Joels”. It coincides with Callie coming to her own conclusions about Shauna.
I’m getting emotionally invested in the idea that Akilah somehow made it out alive. Nia Sondaya shines in this expanded role, and whatever bad things that will eventually and inevitably happen will be heartbreaking.
Tai’s little hopeful “Does that count”. UGH. I think it’s clear where we’re going with Van this season and it’s heartbreaking, and Tawny Cypress is really delivering in this episode.
Melissa mentions in the conversation with Shauna that she started having daydreams, visions, after reading about all that was happening with the Yellowjackets and Lottie’s cult (“it was more of an intentional community”) and Natalie’s death: but instead of assigning some kind of mystical value to it, she talked about it with her therapist and came to the conclusion that it was mental baggage that she was holding on and had to process, the way a well-adjusted person would do. A lot of the catalyst for everything that happened in the past is, I think, the fact that the Yellowjackets connected with each other again, that it turned into a mutually-enforced shared delusion with nobody to reality-check. Melissa was insulated from it all, and so her path was radically different.
I think as much as it is difficult to take anything that Shauna in this super-heightened state does or says at face-value, it did make me firmly believe that she didn’t kill Lottie – and there’s a tiny moment between Jeff and Callie in the motel room that gave me a spark of suspicion that Jeff may have done something (but hard to really rely on it, since he was in meltdown – a great performance by Warren Kole, by the way).
“Freaky little four-eyed mushroom.”
This is the first Sleater-Kinney song used on the show, and fittingly, because it was released in 1997, it’s the titular track from Dig Me Out – a whole album about a break-up that miraculously didn’t lead to a band break-up, and also added drummer Janet Weiss to the mix, like all the puzzle pieces falling into place finally. There couldn’t have been a better choice for the end of the episode.
Saturday, 29 March 2025
random mixtape - he cast his gaze towards the sea.
pj harvey | teclo. japanese breakfast | orlando in love. sharon van etten & the attachment theory | idiot box. zzzahara | it didn't mean nothing. greentea peng | nowhere man. alley cat feat. johnette napolitano | walk around. heartworms | warplane. fka twigs | drums of death.
Monday, 24 March 2025
Yellowjackets – It doesn’t want them here.
Yellowjackets: 3x07 Croak.
We just need to find these people so we can go home.
Three seasons into Yellowjackets and it looks like the show is completely committing to the idea that what is haunting our survivors isn’t in fact a spiritual emptiness, isn’t the personified wilderness, but a combination of natural phenomena that they haven’t fully understood and mental health problems that have escalated out there, for a variety of reasons. What gets me the most about Croak is the proximity of everything – the fact that these bumbling, excited scientists under the guidance of their “mountain man”, who may be good at his job but doesn’t seem like an outstanding survivalist with any particularly impressive skill, have made it to just a few kilometres away from the village armed with nothing more complex than a map and a compass, and an emergency sat phone that they’re passé enough about that they break it in a tussle while high. The wilderness, over these past twelve or so months, has felt so remote, so inescapable, but it turns out that civilisation has never been quite that far away, and could have been reached if there had been a concerted effort. Instead, the two groups – and all the accrued histories and prejudices and baggage that come with them – clash. One group is a scientific team – successful in an attempt to record the Arctic banshee frog, a (entirely fictional) species of frog that goes into hibernation for seven years to emerge for a mating event that explains the screams and screeches. The other has succeeded in surviving horrible ordeals, has built a village out there, has organised around a shared religion. It’s a culture clash, in which one side comes armed with all the skills of seasoned hunters, and the other with one guy and a crossbow.
I like the opening of the episode, which follow one cute little frog like a Planet Earth episode. It seems like nothing, too small to have much of an impact, until it begins to scream, and joins hundreds of other frogs in a chorus. There is something infectious about Hannah and Edwin’s excitement to have captured them on their DAT recorder, to be the first to have done it, after dedicating their academic career to them. They’re in love with each other, and they love the same thing. Kodi watches, disaffected, like he’s watching a nature documentary about two weird humans, and he’s ready to demonstrate his survival skills (killing a rabbit with a crossbow) but reluctant to share anything else substantial about himself, making him suspicious to Edwin, who also doesn’t like Hannah’s attraction to his rugged manliness. In any other story, a character like Kodi would be associated with potential danger – the stranger who doesn’t provide details about his backstory, who is the only one bearing weapons and who is the only one who can get them out. In this story, we know that there are much more dangerous things lurking in these woods, and that this danger hunts in packs.
The proximity goes beyond the presumed closeness of a way out that must have been there this whole time, it’s also the moment when the three enter the camp, attracted by the scent of barbecue (oh Ben), to find something so overwhelmingly strange that they have no clue how to react. It’s the closeness to safety and home summarised by Van’s hopeful “we’re going home”. Ben’s head is right there on a table but if everyone stayed calm, they could probably just go home from here by following Kodi out of these woods. They’d have a lot to explain, and what would follow them around after the return from the wilderness would be much worse than the rumours that the surviving Yellowjackets have had to deal with, but all of them would have made it out alive at this point. It’s so close – but then there’s Lottie, screaming “no”, burying an axe in Edwin’s head. “They don’t belong. It doesn’t want them here” she says, after months of nothing but silence from the wilderness, after having had to use Travis and Akilah as a conduit because her own perceived connection to it was severed. I don’t think that there can be much doubt here that this is a psychotic break, the result of her meds running out all these months ago and something upsetting her balance so much that this violence that diminished any chance of all of them just walking out of there is inevitable. Kodi and Hannah run, and the girls immediately give chase, because even their harmless games have been practice for the hunt. Kodi gets one bolt away and hits Melissa. Instead of staying behind with her, Shauna tells Mari to look after her or else. Instead of staying behind as the group’s designated medical expert, Misty joins the chase.
It goes on for a while. Everyone splits up. Van and Tai stumble over the tent and Van has a heartbreaking, immediate instinct to call her mother from the sat phone before realising that it’s broken. Tai says that at least these provisions will help the village, and Van, again, heartbreakingly, pleads that they don’t need it because they can go home now. There is an immediate and obvious split in terms of what everyone thinks is happening going forward, a divide between considering the village home and trying to still get back to their actual home. They’re such obvious ideological splits that I kind of wish they had carried through more strongly into the adult timeline.
Misty loses her glasses in the chase but directs Akilah and Travis to try and push Kodi towards the cliff where, if he did fall, he would join the still missing Crystal – but they end up pulling him up instead, which, considering that with the sat phone broken he is the only tenuous link to the outside, is the correct decision here, but maybe not one that will work out, considering their rescue is still three months out. Hannah gives herself up, and Shauna seems to very much consider killing her, before Hannah mentions that she knows where some first aid supplies are stashed (and with Mari and Gen eventually realising that the only way to remove the bolt from Melissa is to push it all the way through, some antibiotics would definitely help).
In the present timeline, Shauna listens to the DAT again on her own and focuses on the part we haven’t quite witnessed yet, Hannah’s very personal spoken letter to a child, trying to explain herself, like someone who knows she is going to die. She has already put the pieces together in her head, and she is about to do something drastic about it, but then Misty, Tai and Van join her in her mission. Tai evades questions about why she went to see Lottie on the day she died, but Van’s concerns are visibly growing. Once they’re all in a car together, Shauna explains that Hannah had a daughter when she was a teenager, a daughter Shauna has managed to track down (that she does this in the short span of time she is given here is one of the least believable things that have happened on the show). That daughter, Shauna is convinced, is the one who sent her the tape, meaning that someone must have brought it back from the wilderness, because as we learn later from Callie’s snooping, none of the three strangers ever made it back alive. They’re headed for Richmond, Virginia, but before they can make it, Misty gets a phone call from Walter telling her that the DNA under Lottie’s fingernails matches Shauna’s. There’s a hilarious sequences of everyone in the car frantically texting each other while Shauna drives, but it’s cut short by Van coughing up blood!
They drive Van to the hospital and it is not looking good. While Misty confronts Shauna about the DNA, leading to Shauna just driving away on her own (not beating the bad friend allegations), Van begins hallucinating in the hospital bed: first she sees herself in the bed transported back to the wilderness, and her younger self sets the bed on fire (poor Van, with the fire), telling her that every time she survived the impossible, it was an even trade. That very much plays into what Tai has been telling her this whole time, becoming more and more insistent that they need to bring more sacrifices – and in a second hallucination, Van tells a fully Dark Tai that she wants to speak to the real Tai, that she needs her instead, even though Dark Tai keeps insisting she is the one who can help her. It’s not looking good for the annoying patient in the next bed over.
And back at the motel room, Callie talks to her father, telling him she has found a record of the disappeared scientists online, that they disappeared very close to where Shauna was lost, and that maybe Shauna isn’t a good person that bad things happened to, but straight up a bad person. Jeff is scratching and scratching, because the walls are closing in and it’s all too much. Shauna reunites with her knife and brings it to her calm and reasonable conversation, so I’m sure this will all end well.
Random notes:
RIP Melissa theories. I think I’m a little bit sad that we don’t get to see that particular reunion play out, because I for one would have very much liked to see the version of Shauna confronted with it.
This episode is full of little bits of information: the stash that Ben came across was from an earlier scientific team, Melissa and Gen never made it out alive.
Very in-character for Jeff to complain about their “poorly furnished” motel room! Also, “I appreciate that secrecy is your love language”.
Misty: I’m not family but we have a very intense trauma bond.
Lottie after killing Edwin has fully descended into herself, smearing herself with his blood, trying to commune with the wilderness. It’s horrifying – but Mari’s “go fuck your blood dirt, Lottie” still made me chuckle. With all of that, having Blood Bitch by the Cocteau Twins in the end credits is certainly a choice.
A bunch of options here for the DNA reveal: Walter could be straight-up lying, it could be one of those things where it’s familial DNA and this was actually Callie, Shauna may have fought with her but not killed her. Melanie Lynskey plays Shauna’s reaction as completely inscrutable, so very hard to tell.
Sunday, 23 March 2025
Das Lied zum Sonntag
Japanese Breakfast - Be Sweet (on Jubilee)
I wanna believe in you, I wanna believe in something
Tuesday, 18 March 2025
Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.
Monday, 17 March 2025
Yellowjackets - Someone is trying to kill us.
Yellowjackets: 3x06 Thanksgiving (Canada).
We’re at the halfway point of the season, so it’s only fitting that the episode ends in a shock, a complete turn of events. This is also a point where, as emotionally wrecking as events in the past are, things in the present begin to coalesce into a more cohesive narrative – and they do with a change in dynamics, where Tai and Van’s story begins to intersect with Shauna’s.
Thanksgiving (Canada) is written by Libby Hill and TV critic royalty Emily St. James, and the title opens up a few questions about the timeline for our stranded Yellowjackets. I had previously thought that we were somewhere between late Spring or Summer, but either that’s incorrect, or poor Coach Ben spends a lot more time in captivity than is shown on screen. His first days after Melissa’s cruel act of cutting his heel begin Natalie’s daily ordeal of delivering food and being asked, over and over, to kill him. He pleads and begs, he tries to get under her skin by saying he laid the fire to make them suffer, which Natalie reads as the desperate lie that it likely is. It’s horrifying, both the despair on his face and the effect it has on Natalie. It’s one of the greatest acting showcase – both Steven Krueger and Sophie Thatcher – that she show has provided, and the repetition wears Natalie down, the prospect that they will have to continue doing this for however long it takes until Akilah’s vision eventuates (a vision that Natalie, ever the pragmatist, doesn’t believe in – she appreciates it because it gives everyone hope, but I don’t think she derives any hope from it herself). I wonder if the task has been assigned to her, as a kind of punishment for having kept his secrets for him, or if she volunteered because taking on burdens, even the heaviest and most unbearable ones, is what Natalie has always done, and would feel to her as part of her responsibility as leader. In any case, in the end she cracks and resigns, putting “feeding Coach” back on the chore wheel for someone else to take on.
Van and Tai talk about how the nights are getting colder, and how that means they will probably spend another winter out here, with all that implies. Tai is hopeful that they are better prepared this time (it’s interesting how they talk around the idea of having to resort to cannibalism, how neither of them directly addresses it), but there is also a sense of resignation here, as if the group collectively has decided that the wilderness may save them if everything falls in place but that beyond extracting visions from Akilah, and trusting that her vision about Coach is accurate, there is nothing much else they can do to affect their own rescue. We know that last time they tried, so early on in their ordeal, it was almost like a curse descended on them for it – Van still bears the scars – but it’s an odd dynamic for a group that feels so changed since they managed to survive the last winter. They are better resourced and knowledgeable about the wild, they have structures in place that utilise their skills. They could try, by themselves – before the weather changes – but they don’t. Beyond the title of the episode, there’s nothing definite here about enough time passing to bring them into early October, but if that is in fact where they end up – the time to get themselves out of the woods has definitely passed. What’s staggering about this passage of time is to think that Ben suffers, mostly alone, filthy, without any kind of comfort, for so many weeks.
After Natalie passes on the job, Mari realises that Ben hasn’t been eating his meals. He is trying to starve himself to death. There is no way that any of this can end well, or that the inevitably won’t happen one way or another. Misty delays it by organising a team to force-feed him, a scene that is almost as cruel and violent as those that show the Yellowjackets actually hunting someone, and worse somehow because in Misty’s mind, she’s saving Ben again. Akilah forcefully tries to induce more visions, which feels like her version of trying to find an out: maybe, if there’s something more concrete, they’ll at least know when, or how, they’ll be able to tell Ben and give him hope, but all she comes away with is memories from before, and a weird, almost comic version of a bear. It’s clear that everything amounts to Natalie making a decision, once again something terrible that she will have to bear, both in terms of what she actually has to do and what the fall-out will be from taking away the only hope that the group has found. She takes a knife to the animal pen, where Ben is suffering. When she hesitates, he guides her hand. There’s no doubt here that he wants to die, or blames Natalie for what she does, but the amount of psychological suffering Natalie is going through – what it does to her, to have to do this – explains why Natalie was the most broken among them in the future. I think it explains it more than Travis’ death – but Travis (who comes very close to telling Nat that he served Akilah up to Lottie out of self-preservation) is the one who understands her reasons, and keeps a look-out while she kills Ben.
The fall-out of Natalie’s choice feels like the final puzzle pieces falling into place for what we know will happen in these woods before some of them (but who else, except the ones we know?) are rescued. Natalie was a rational, pragmatic leader, capable and always weighing different options and making the best decision. After killing Ben, some of the girls suggest just getting rid of her outright as vengeance. Tai proposes another trial. Instead, Lottie decides that Shauna should now lead them – Shauna, who has changed in these months too, as observed by Tai and Van, as if her relationship with Melissa has crystalised something in her. Shauna decides that they will give the wilderness what it wants, and it isn’t a trial or a murder: instead, they will have a feast to honour Coach Ben. There is a dividing line between survival and ritualistic cannibalism, and at this stage, there is no reason to carve up and consume the body for food. This is a purely ritualistic act, disguised as a connection to the wilderness, but also in a deeply fucked-up ironic way the exact thing that drove Ben away from them in the first place. Instead of punishing Natalie physically, Shauna assigns her the task of butchering Ben – and Natalie can’t exactly refuse, both because her options have run out and because Shauna isn’t asking her to do anything that she herself hasn’t done for the group before. It’s always been clear that having to carve up Javi has damaged her, and inflicting the same cruelty on Natalie now is probably what Shauna would comprehend as justice. She isn’t even particularly cruel about it, instead teaching Natalie what to do and how to make it more bearable, in a first act of leader as the group that almost feels measured if it weren’t about the consumption of Ben.
So much about the decisions that have been made by the young Yellowjackets has been about moving the boundaries of what is thinkable, and this feels like the final transgression before the hunt begins again. They eat, together, but not at a banquet table like they did for Jackie. Lottie begins to evoke the wilderness, to scream at it for a response, and finally, there is one: as they all scream together, there’s rustling in the woods, and two strangers (I think it’s two, although it’s difficult to make out) walk into camp. The first thing they see is Ben’s head. Oh boy!
In the adult timeline, Shauna returns home at night after her day of detective work. Jeff is up and quizzes her about where she was, and then Shauna remembers that he doesn’t know yet. Callie overhears that Lottie is dead, and is devastated and horrified – and remembers the intercepted tape that was addressed to her mother, and hands it over. For all the suspicions about cut break lines and the phone that was left for her at the bar, this is the first piece of concrete evidence that someone is following her. Shauna decides to evacuate the house and move her family to a motel, and she contacts Taissa to talk to Van, the only person conceivably able to play obscure and obsolete media. The phone call finds Tai and Van in a luxurious hotel room, receiving a massage, awaiting a many-coursed room service meal, and it also falls right into a crisis of conscience for Van, who realises that this is not a normal or healthy way to cope with what has been happening (“Lottie’s dead and Shauna is melting down, and you don’t seem to give a shit about anything but self-care!”). As she tries to retrieve the DAT player buried deep in the boxes of belonging she packed when she moved in with Tai, she has further doubts – a mysterious, ancient and very much disconnected phone rings in one of the boxes and she seems to hear Tai’s desperate voice through it, asking for help, and later that night, Tai wakes up from a nightmare screaming for help, and then visibly and horrifyingly changes back to the calm, collected Tai we’ve seen most of this season. The implication here is that Dark Tai has fully taken over and violently suppresses actual Tai – but it’s even more horrible to think that Van has deluded herself this whole time about who she is in this new and blossoming relationship with. Shauna secretly meets Tai and Van in their car to listen to the tape (it’s much longer than what we get to hear), and it’s someone testing the tape, and then girls screaming at the end. “The only people that even know about this are either us or dead.” All we have to explain this now are theories.
Meanwhile Misty is still on her own and still reeling from Walter and Shauna teaming up on her to take the investigation away. She gets someone to analyse the samples from under Lottie’s fingernails (DNA results that are worthless without something to compare it to – but we know that Walter has a sample from Shauna, at least). Walter has a limousine deliver the two bin bags from Lottie’s apartment to her and some kind of making-up gift, which yield a Chinese food container from a place that Lottie wouldn’t have been caught dead eating at. In casing the place, Misty discovers that – Lisa! – is doing delivers for them (I was so excited to see the great Nicole Maines again)! Lisa, who we last saw when she narrowly escaped the syringe of fentanyl that ended up in Natalie. In character, Lisa agrees to have a chat with Misty, in spite of the fact that she tried to kill her (she was also very forgiving of Natalie stabbing her). This solves one mystery: she was the recipient of the $50,000, along with a “sorry” note from Lottie, presumably for having taken her money and recruiting her into a cult. It’s the kind of gesture you would expect from someone who is trying to right her past wrongs, but doesn’t answer if Lottie’s fall was accidental or not – but Lisa does tell Misty that Natalie was meeting with Taissa that day, the same Taissa who is now very clearly no longer herself.
Random notes:
Emily St. James debut novel Woodworking was just released, and sounds amazing. Reading her television reviews at the A.V. Club was a formative experience for me, and I’m excited to see her make the jump to writing for one of my favourite TV shows.
Vulture interviewed Steven Krueger about Ben's character arc here.
I think this episode was another great showcase of how closely Lauren Ambrose’s performance mirrors Liv Hewson’s. This has been such perfect casting!
Another shout-out to Sam Hanratty, who also achieves a small beat of perfection with Misty this episode. She grieves Ben deeply, steals a final kiss from him (that is very much in character inasmuch as it’s good nobody watches her do it), but then has a moment where she very consciously composes herself, almost becoming the Misty that we know, the version of her that Christina Ricci plays so perfectly. It probably didn’t come down to just one moment, but it’s still awesome.
Callie has learned so much from her mother. She hugs her, which surprises Shauna, but only to put a recording phone in her bag before the meeting with Van and Taissa, a recording that Shauna doesn’t bother to delete before returning the phone back to her. Callie says she is doing these things to understand Shauna, and this would also fit in well with what has been established about their dynamic – the only way to get close to Shauna is to adapt her strategies of deceit.
So… that Digital Audio Tape. It’s a format that would have been a great technological advance on analogue cassette tapes in terms of audio quality but then obviously never went anywhere in popular uptake because it was overtaken by CDs. Narratively, it feels like it was convenient to have an obscure format in there because it ties Van into the story and it means that Callie definitely had no way of figuring out how to play it for herself (I think at a pinch she would have figured out a simple cassette tape). My wild theory about this is that it feels like the kind of medium that, say, someone who goes into the wilderness to investigate birds or other animals may use to record them at a high quality, the same kind of someone who may stumble across a group of teenagers lost there. If that is the case, it doesn’t look good for these two strangers. I can’t quite work out the timelines here (are we at the 19 month mark yet? I think we’re still at least 3 out), as in, is this the rescue rescue, considering that pit girl hasn’t happened yet? And what exactly did they record on there, what part of their experience out there did they want to document? Or is this simply a recording that the strangers made as they approached the camp, documenting what we did actually see on screen, but not really incriminating them in any real way? That would open all kinds of other questions, like, maybe someone from that research team is the mystery person following them around, and it’s not Melissa after all. The Hilary Swank mystery continues.
As a side-note, this little plot about obscure recording formats made me sad that we never got a second season of Archive 81. I could watch hours of seeing tape lovingly restored by someone extremely capable.