Yellowjackets – How the fuck is any of this real?

Yellowjackets: 3x03 Them's the Brakes.

 

 

Mari: I think maybe there are two versions of reality. Most of the time, the other one, the bad one is just hiding or waiting, but it’s all real.  

For a show that constantly walks the edge between embracing the mythological and yet leaving the possibility open that there are always rational explanations for what is happening, Them’s the Brakes is one of those episodes that seem to more fully embrace the idea of the latter. It’s not just that the excursion into hallucinations that bookends the episode – a sequence that is deeply reminiscent of Buffy’s Restless – is explained scientifically through a buildup of a gas (perhaps carbon dioxide) in the cave system that the girls are exploring. There is also the opening of the episode, in which Mari and Coach Ben discuss the surreality of their situation. It’s a great exhibit for Mari as a character, who may be widely hated because of how annoying she is, and yet has found a way of coping with the situation that feels more well-adjusted than most of the others. She’s tied up in the cave, with an injured knee, at the mercy of Ben, who seems on the edge of a breakdown, and yet she’s singing “Too sexy for this cave too sexy for this cave. I’m too sexy for this rope, to sexy for these ropes, too sexy to be murdered” to the tune of the Right Said Fred song. She tries to flirt with Coach, claiming a long-held crush (that she expressed with passive-aggressiveness in the past), ironically revealing that she must be one of the few remaining girls who hasn’t realised that he’s gay, or never bothered to think about that he might be. They’re eating bat (Coach says tastes like if a Cornish hen had a baby with a demon, and I find deeply uncomfortable, considering the bat virome). Ben darkly jokes that the others are now used to more substantial fare. Ben has an existential crisis about how he, a regular guy who became a TA to pay off his student debt after an ACL injury, ended up there, and Mari responds with a deeply surprising personal story about losing her baby cousin to cancer, and how in spite of the horror of it, the world just continued on without a break. It’s a very well worded story that does apply here: horrible things happen to regular people, and they create a break in reality, but only for those people specifically, while the outside continues on as if nothing had happened. Trauma changes, but rarely everything, all the time, and the contrast of the horrors with the mundanity of the normal is another source of disorientation and alienation. It’s a surprisingly insightful thing for a teenage girl to share, much less Mari, who has never appeared to have much care about how other people feel (beyond the joys of mocking them, or using sarcasm and cynicism to hurt them).

Coach lets Mari go, who promises that she will keep quiet about his continued survival, a promise that lasts about a second once the girls ask her in detail about her suffering and point out inconsistencies. Mari knows she’s a bad liar, and so she doesn’t even attempt it, and it also feels like she enjoys telling a secret and being at the centre of attention. The hunt for Coach that ensues reveals the power struggles within the group, with Shauna taking the lead when Natalie – who is eager to protect Ben – is hesitant to do so (and it’s interesting that Tai, who has claimed that she thinks she’s a better leader, stays in the back). Natalie is willing to defer to a majority opinion, but it’s becoming clearer that her control is slipping.

In the present, Shauna’s attempts at information control with Callie continue to fail, and Callie proves to be endlessly drawn to and fascinated by Lottie, who is all too capable of manipulating her feelings. She flatters her by telling her that she’s able to know herself deeper than others, exactly the kind of thing that a teenager so eager to be different and to be recognised by an adult for her coolness would lap up. Lottie gets her to partake in her favourite past-time, shoplifting (a nice tie in with what Lottie revealed as a teen). There’s a very dark edge to all of this, with Lottie being fully aware of the power she has and using it discriminately to manipulate Callie into doing her bidding. It’s unclear what she is grooming her for exactly, because we haven’t reached the point yet in the teen timeline to really know – is she like Travis and Akilah, with the ability to potentially commune with the wilderness where Lottie can’t anymore? In that case, Lottie would be very interested in what Tai and Van are up to these days. In any case, she overplays her hand when she puts Jackie’s heart necklace on Callie and Shauna sees – we know that at some point the pit girl wore it, that it has been handed around a lot. Before Shauna finally and furiously kicks her out of the house, Lottie tells her that “it never meant what you thought it meant” – as in, likely, that it designates a future victim of the ritual.

Tai and Van go on their own journey in this episode. Van finds out that her cancer is possibly in remission and Tai tells her about the dead waiter. It’s a harrowing scene, because it should be about Van getting a new lease on life, and instead Tai immediately interprets this as a sign that the wilderness has given them a gift in exchange for the sacrifice of Nat and the waiter, a soul for a soul. It’s not an interpretation that Van is fond off, who doesn’t seem eager to sacrifice anyone for her own survival, and also looks at Tai as if there is something about her that scares her. Also, this version of Tai seems different (Tawny Cypress has hinted that we are seeing more of dark Tai than we realise): Teen Tai was always hesitant to buy into Lottie’s spirituality, and it was Van who was a loyal follower. It’s probably safe to assume that whenever Adult Tai is shown to believe, it’s dark Tai who we’re seeing: and this Tai immediately lights a candle (always with the fire) and begins chanting “we hear the wilderness and it hears us”. Later, they watch old videotapes of Pee-wee's Playhouse and Tai sees an ad for an ice cream parlor that includes a comic version of the man with no eyes that she guesses she saw as a kid and then turned into the man she has been seeing after losing her grandma. It’s a rational explanation for her hallucinations, but Tai thinks it’s some kind of sign that she must follow, and so they go off to the closed and abandoned ice cream parlour in the middle of the night (these were the most Pretty Little Liars vibes the show has ever indulged). Through a broken window, they see a fox (always an animal with a lot of mythological baggage) with a rabbit in its mouth. It’s Van who interprets the scene: “You know what it wants. It wants more”. She’s endlessly terrified. 

 

 
In the caves, the girls split up in two groups. Van, Akilah and Shauna go off on their own and navigate the narrow passages, even though it should be obvious to all three of them that this isn’t the right way. Akilah and Shauna lose their light, and in a big opening, Van’s flickers ominously. Then she’s all on her own, suddenly – she stumbles down a hallway, finds a red door, goes through it. It’s obvious that she has left the realm of reality at this point, even before she finds a cabin behind the door. She sits down on a rocking chair in front of the fire – maybe a comfortable spot for a storyteller to be in, a moment of rest. Akilah finds her way into a beautiful, flourishing wilderness, gorging herself on blackberries before she finds an enclosure of animals. A talking llama warns her that the sheep bite, that “everything with teeth bites. Everything will defend itself.” It tells her that the woods are calling her, and the screeching that has been haunting all of them starts up again. Shauna finds herself in a lake, peacefully floating in a white dress. A boy on the shore calls out to her – mommy – and she looks more happy and luminous than we have ever seen her, in either timeline. She tries to swim to shore but can’t. Van’s cabin begins to burn, arms emerge from the rocking chair to pin her in place. The soil around Akilah’s feet begins absorbing her. Shauna goes under the water. The three elements are perfectly chosen for the characters (and they all represent rebirth of a kind). All three of them, unsure whose dream it is or if they are all sharing the same one, find themselves in a classroom, wearing their soccer uniforms again. Lottie is at the front at the blackboard, which says “Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest” (a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote). The man with no eyes walks past the classroom. And next to them is Jackie, snapping a wrist snap band around her arm. She dares Akilah to try, and nothing happens. Van does, and it cuts her. Then she snaps it around Shauna’s neck (“you’re so jealous, you can hardly breathe”) and it begins cutting into her, killing her. Akilah can’t take it off, even though Lottie tells her that she has to safe Shauna, or else they’ll all die. And then the hallucinations end when Coach Ben pulls them all to safety, only to find himself facing the end of Natalie’s gun. No good deed!

Random notes:

Lottie tries to convince Akilah to talk to the wilderness but Akilah, queen of boundaries, just says that she’s good and doesn’t buy into it. Good for her. We’ll see how her approach changes after the vision.

The opening scene was just lols all around. Coach repeating the insults that Mari has levelled at him, Mari’s harebrained decision to mace him in an enclosed space, only to be maced in turn, Coach’s exasperated “you did this, you idiot”.

Misty sets out to prove Walter wrong about his claim that her friends aren’t faithful or true but obviously, in reaching out to Shauna to hang out, she’s chosen exactly the wrong person to humour her. They’re in Shauna’s minivan when her brakes stop working (a lot of people could have manipulated them, but I guess the show wants us to think, at this point, that it was a returned Melissa or whoever freaked Shauna out in the previous episode). Shauna goes off on Misty, and Misty ends up burning a picture that she has held on to at home. It doesn’t sound like a great idea for Misty to be set on revenge against you, considering how far she is willing to go.

It doesn’t even really matter if Ben gives such a reasonable explanation for the hallucinations (and maybe he too has wandered into the depths of the caves and that’s why he has been talking to someone) – these hallucinations will change the characters and how they perceive their situation. The hallucinations put each of them in a place of perceived happiness in safety, only to then undermine the feeling – Shauna will never see her baby grow up, Akilah’s dream of a pacified and peaceful wilderness is a fantasy, Van will never fully escape the fire, regardless of how many times she tries. The classroom scene is thornier, and I’m not sure what it means that Akilah goes through the ritual unscathed while it hurts Van and nearly kills Shauna (maybe that’s foreshadowing?). It does correspond with how complicit in Jackie’s death they each were. We’ll see where they go from here: within the episode, I think the closest direct connection is between how we see Van react to Tai’s insistence that this is the wilderness once again demanding a sacrifice and giving a gift in return. In Buffy, Restless worked both as an insight into where the characters were at that moment (unfortunately for us, we weren’t spared an insight into Xander) and hints at what was to come (Dawn).

Emerson was a “leader of the transcendentalist movement, believing in the inherent goodness of both people and nature.” It’s an approach that feels in opposition to the experience of the woods as a dangerous entity with demands, and the llama’s statement that everything with teeth will fight to survive – plus there’s the fox and all it represents, with a rabbit in its teeth. Once again, more questions than answers.