Yellowjackets: 3x04 12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis.
I think this is the first week where I’m genuinely fascinated by the structure of the episode, but can’t judge how successful it is, because there are more questions than answers yet again and if it all works out, so to speak, in a symmetrically satisfying way, depends on how future episodes unfold. We have a straight-forward trial here, a court thriller that follows all the dramatic up and downs that viewers may be used to from other court dramas (my guess is that the girls know about them from Law and Order, but I’m not entirely familiar with early- to mid-90s television – sorry, Nurse Dana from The Pitt – to judge). We have a less-than-straight-forward murder-mystery in the present timeline, not a who-dunnit as much as a “who will end up dead” that is only resolved in the final minutes of the episode.
Let’s begin with the present first. There is a jarring contrast between the cohesiveness of the past, especially with everyone engaged in the same undertaking of a trial, and the individual storylines of the adults, but if there is a glue that holds them together it’s the idea of mysterious forces being at work. Jeff and Shauna once again take on the lighter load – Jeff is convinced that the brake failure, which was an accident, according to the mechanic, not sabotage – is a result of a “karmic deficit”, that he’s convinced he can fix by “racking up karma points”. It’s a glaring but funny example of what happens when simple people adapt concepts they don’t fully understand into a pre-existing worldview, and it means that the Shipmans will donate some hilariously useless items (like burned copies of Rush Hour), and do some volunteering hours at a local nursing home (which obviously turns out to be Misty’s workplace). Callie is out, and still fuming because Shauna threw out Lottie. At the nursing home, Jeff emerges as the easygoing, charming guy that all the residents immediately take to, and generally has a great time (even though Randy, here on court-order, once again gets outshone). Shauna has a much more difficult time because Misty is trying to extract a genuine apology from her that she is unwilling to give, in great part because she doesn’t believe she’s done anything wrong, and she’s never the kind of person that just does it because it would make everyone’s life so much easier. She ends up trapped in the freezer (previously narrowly avoiding death when Misty fantasises about stabbing her with a knife – a rare show of restraint) – an unsolved whodunnit – and hallucinates Jackie.
Jackie taunts Shauna – she’s the most interesting thing about her, she never turned into the person she wanted to be. The irony is, of course, that the Shauna that emerges during the trial is a lot closer to that person than the Shauna who is making tapioca pudding in a nursing home to make Jeff feel that their karma is improving, and that Shauna is terrifying and the reason that everyone is so afraid of her. Randy frees her, and Shauna ends up finding a shelter cat, adopting it, and comes up with a plan to pass it off as a long-lost cat she’s seen on a neighbourhood flyer, like a short-cut to what Jeff is trying to accomplish by doing actual good. It’s a hint that she won’t tolerate this feeling of someone coming after her for much longer – but also, it leaves her with an unaccounted period of time for when Lottie must have died.
Tai and Van are on their own horrifying journey, now kind of on the same page that the wilderness is still asking them to feed it sacrifices. They steal a pack of cards and place the Queen of Hearts on the ground for a random stranger to find – and when someone actually pockets it, Tai feels confirmed in her zeal, but Van gets more and more agitated as they trail the man, and come one unlocked door away from actually killing him. The whole thing is a reminder of how the belief system of the wilderness looks removed from the context of being stranded there – unhinged, insane – and also maybe further confirmation that the Tai who believes enough to be willing to kill for it is not the Tai that we know, but the other one. Van stops them from going through with it because she doesn’t want to live on the lives of strangers, and Tai instead takes her out for the romantic date that she described in detail all that time ago. But again, it leaves a gap, an unaccounted period of time, in which Tai may have done something to Lottie, who she conveniently called earlier and was dismissed by.
We don’t know much about Lottie’s movements before Misty opens the link to a police photo of her dead body at the bottom of some basement stairs, with candles everywhere: after leaving Shauna’s house, she picked up some money from the bank, fervently and desperately practiced an apology in the mirror, and then presumably met whoever ended up killing her (Misty is the third person who left the nursing home early and isn’t accounted for). The episode served us up two people who could have easily died – Tai and Van’s rando, Shauna – but in the end, Lottie’s the one whose time is finally up.
Ben returns to camp with his captors. The only ones who have stayed behind are Travis and Lottie. Akilah is already pondering what the shared dream means, and she is vulnerable right now because Lottie wants to debrief her, and this might have just changed her mind on the wilderness. Natalie is the one who decides that there will be a trial, the only reasonable and fair way to resolve the conundrum, and she also decides that any verdict will require a two-thirds majority, because everyone – including Ben – is well aware what a guilty verdict would mean. They won’t keep Ben locked up for the duration of his sentence in the duck pen. A guilty verdict means death, which considering what they all did to survive the harsher winter times, is a less shocking certainty than it otherwise might be. Past actions and decisions always determine what remains thinkable and doable in the present.
Tai is eager to be the prosecutor, because we already know that she wants more power, that as much as the episode presents Shauna as the one who should have been upset about Nat’s elevation to leader, she is the one who really wants it, and feels entitled to it. Considering all of that, it’s surprising that she does a fairly poor job at it in my opinion. Misty, who initially is very hesitant to take up her role in the defence because of what she perceives as Ben’s betrayal, grows into it quickly and competently. If it weren’t for Shauna’s ability to compel people, which partly derives from both the fear they all have of her and her suffering, it’s likely that she would have won the case for Ben. Misty, who has been sidelined for a while now, cut out off the leadership council and maybe no longer required as much as she used to be now that they are living through the safer seasons of spring and summer, shines. Nat compels her into the role because it means that she may save his life, but more importantly, Misty believes in his innocence.
Let’s begin with the present first. There is a jarring contrast between the cohesiveness of the past, especially with everyone engaged in the same undertaking of a trial, and the individual storylines of the adults, but if there is a glue that holds them together it’s the idea of mysterious forces being at work. Jeff and Shauna once again take on the lighter load – Jeff is convinced that the brake failure, which was an accident, according to the mechanic, not sabotage – is a result of a “karmic deficit”, that he’s convinced he can fix by “racking up karma points”. It’s a glaring but funny example of what happens when simple people adapt concepts they don’t fully understand into a pre-existing worldview, and it means that the Shipmans will donate some hilariously useless items (like burned copies of Rush Hour), and do some volunteering hours at a local nursing home (which obviously turns out to be Misty’s workplace). Callie is out, and still fuming because Shauna threw out Lottie. At the nursing home, Jeff emerges as the easygoing, charming guy that all the residents immediately take to, and generally has a great time (even though Randy, here on court-order, once again gets outshone). Shauna has a much more difficult time because Misty is trying to extract a genuine apology from her that she is unwilling to give, in great part because she doesn’t believe she’s done anything wrong, and she’s never the kind of person that just does it because it would make everyone’s life so much easier. She ends up trapped in the freezer (previously narrowly avoiding death when Misty fantasises about stabbing her with a knife – a rare show of restraint) – an unsolved whodunnit – and hallucinates Jackie.
Jackie: Maybe this is how it’s always going to end for you. Frozen and left for dead. Just like me.
Jackie taunts Shauna – she’s the most interesting thing about her, she never turned into the person she wanted to be. The irony is, of course, that the Shauna that emerges during the trial is a lot closer to that person than the Shauna who is making tapioca pudding in a nursing home to make Jeff feel that their karma is improving, and that Shauna is terrifying and the reason that everyone is so afraid of her. Randy frees her, and Shauna ends up finding a shelter cat, adopting it, and comes up with a plan to pass it off as a long-lost cat she’s seen on a neighbourhood flyer, like a short-cut to what Jeff is trying to accomplish by doing actual good. It’s a hint that she won’t tolerate this feeling of someone coming after her for much longer – but also, it leaves her with an unaccounted period of time for when Lottie must have died.
Tai and Van are on their own horrifying journey, now kind of on the same page that the wilderness is still asking them to feed it sacrifices. They steal a pack of cards and place the Queen of Hearts on the ground for a random stranger to find – and when someone actually pockets it, Tai feels confirmed in her zeal, but Van gets more and more agitated as they trail the man, and come one unlocked door away from actually killing him. The whole thing is a reminder of how the belief system of the wilderness looks removed from the context of being stranded there – unhinged, insane – and also maybe further confirmation that the Tai who believes enough to be willing to kill for it is not the Tai that we know, but the other one. Van stops them from going through with it because she doesn’t want to live on the lives of strangers, and Tai instead takes her out for the romantic date that she described in detail all that time ago. But again, it leaves a gap, an unaccounted period of time, in which Tai may have done something to Lottie, who she conveniently called earlier and was dismissed by.
We don’t know much about Lottie’s movements before Misty opens the link to a police photo of her dead body at the bottom of some basement stairs, with candles everywhere: after leaving Shauna’s house, she picked up some money from the bank, fervently and desperately practiced an apology in the mirror, and then presumably met whoever ended up killing her (Misty is the third person who left the nursing home early and isn’t accounted for). The episode served us up two people who could have easily died – Tai and Van’s rando, Shauna – but in the end, Lottie’s the one whose time is finally up.
Ben returns to camp with his captors. The only ones who have stayed behind are Travis and Lottie. Akilah is already pondering what the shared dream means, and she is vulnerable right now because Lottie wants to debrief her, and this might have just changed her mind on the wilderness. Natalie is the one who decides that there will be a trial, the only reasonable and fair way to resolve the conundrum, and she also decides that any verdict will require a two-thirds majority, because everyone – including Ben – is well aware what a guilty verdict would mean. They won’t keep Ben locked up for the duration of his sentence in the duck pen. A guilty verdict means death, which considering what they all did to survive the harsher winter times, is a less shocking certainty than it otherwise might be. Past actions and decisions always determine what remains thinkable and doable in the present.
Tai is eager to be the prosecutor, because we already know that she wants more power, that as much as the episode presents Shauna as the one who should have been upset about Nat’s elevation to leader, she is the one who really wants it, and feels entitled to it. Considering all of that, it’s surprising that she does a fairly poor job at it in my opinion. Misty, who initially is very hesitant to take up her role in the defence because of what she perceives as Ben’s betrayal, grows into it quickly and competently. If it weren’t for Shauna’s ability to compel people, which partly derives from both the fear they all have of her and her suffering, it’s likely that she would have won the case for Ben. Misty, who has been sidelined for a while now, cut out off the leadership council and maybe no longer required as much as she used to be now that they are living through the safer seasons of spring and summer, shines. Nat compels her into the role because it means that she may save his life, but more importantly, Misty believes in his innocence.
The trial itself is a very instructive state-building exercise that serves as a reminder of how different these girls have become. Creating institutions for a court trial feels like the kind of thing you’d do in a place that has become a home. It’s far removed from sheer survival. Doling out the roles is reminiscent of how they’ve shared power and assigned responsibility previously, and there’s the ominous emergence of Natalie’s judge robes: the antlers, the white clothes, both of which we have seen in the infamous sacrifice scene before. But maybe the fact that Natalie loses the robes when she turns from judge to witness is just as potent a reminder that clothes, like roles, are currently switched: the girls have been wearing each other’s clothes for months, they have rotated responsibilities. Just as much as we have no way of knowing who ends up wearing Jackie’s necklace in the pit, we don’t know who will wear the antler crown come the time for her sacrifice.
The trial lacks one thing that most trials have: evidence. There are no forensics, no traces to be examined. It’s a trial that is entirely about the question of whether the girls believe that Coach did it, and if there is enough reasonable doubt that someone else could have done it. In the context of their community, the more important fact is that they need him to have done it, because if he didn’t, any of the people that Misty, in her defence, suggests as alternate perpetrators, could have. For the already precarious unity (the trial also reminds us again that they are divided on matters of faith) of the group, Coach must be responsible. He’s the outsider, with no viable connections left, as much as Natalie covered up for him and Misty still loves him. It’s much more scary to believe Misty when she suggests that Shauna may have done it because Nat was chosen leader, or that any of the non-believers may have done it because they didn’t buy into Lottie’s cult (her saying about Melissa that she “could go either way probably” made me laugh out loud).
The crux of the trial is maybe not really the question of who set the fire, but that it is a judgement on Coach Ben as someone who has failed them in other ways (ways that he is deeply ashamed and embarrassed about – which I think is why he barely pleads for his innocence). He didn’t step up as the obvious leader when he was the only adult in a group of teenagers. He left when Shauna was giving birth because he didn’t feel cut out to face what it would mean to help her and fail. He’s stood on the sidelines, for the majority of time, increasingly horrified by how far the group was willing to go to survive, but equally amazed and awed at their resilience without him. The climax of the trial, when Misty calls on Ben to testify, is deeply emotional and sad – it begins with Ben reluctant to partake, reluctant to try and win sympathy. He says he never wanted to be a teacher or a coach, that he doesn’t even like teenagers. In her expert questioning (I think Misty has always been scarily impressive with her medical knowledge, but she truly shines here, considering what we’ve seen of her social skills previously), she gets him to tell his own story of having grown up as an underdog, without support, discovering that he wanted to support and help the team when they too were underdogs (he mentions covering up their party before the away game and also having seen Van and Taissa and not ratted them out). He seems resigned to his fate – and I don’t think he ever has any hope that the trial will go his way – because he is so ashamed of ultimately having let them down in precisely the way that he was let down in his youth. The statement makes the ultimate result of the trial even sadder – because initially, he has a simple majority in his favour that doesn’t suffice to save his life, but then Shauna, who was never going to change her mind through any kind of process, goes to work. When she starts, the woods appear to be in concert with her, demanding another sacrifice. One by one, they fall, until there’s a majority for his guilt. Melissa whispers into Shauna’s ear – “that’s fucking power”. And it’s fucking terrifying.
Random notes:
To start off with, I have to do this, and I think it should be done whenever television or film uses music by Ace of Base, which fits timewise but should categorically no longer pop up – here’s a Vice article from 2013 on why. One of the founding members “started his career as a neo-Nazi skinhead”. The Eels and the Cranberries were very good choices though.
The really sad thing for Coach Ben is that the two only people he has built a kind of relationship with, who would have voted for his innocence, aren’t even allowed to cast their vote.
I think there’s also a very quick note in there about how the trial changes the course in the future, by setting a precedent. One of the alternate theories that Misty presents is that Crystal has done it – Crystal, who Misty knows died well before the fire, but everyone else still considers missing. It would have been a convenient explanation that could have saved them all from having to convict Coach, but nobody jumped on the opportunity.
The trial lacks one thing that most trials have: evidence. There are no forensics, no traces to be examined. It’s a trial that is entirely about the question of whether the girls believe that Coach did it, and if there is enough reasonable doubt that someone else could have done it. In the context of their community, the more important fact is that they need him to have done it, because if he didn’t, any of the people that Misty, in her defence, suggests as alternate perpetrators, could have. For the already precarious unity (the trial also reminds us again that they are divided on matters of faith) of the group, Coach must be responsible. He’s the outsider, with no viable connections left, as much as Natalie covered up for him and Misty still loves him. It’s much more scary to believe Misty when she suggests that Shauna may have done it because Nat was chosen leader, or that any of the non-believers may have done it because they didn’t buy into Lottie’s cult (her saying about Melissa that she “could go either way probably” made me laugh out loud).
The crux of the trial is maybe not really the question of who set the fire, but that it is a judgement on Coach Ben as someone who has failed them in other ways (ways that he is deeply ashamed and embarrassed about – which I think is why he barely pleads for his innocence). He didn’t step up as the obvious leader when he was the only adult in a group of teenagers. He left when Shauna was giving birth because he didn’t feel cut out to face what it would mean to help her and fail. He’s stood on the sidelines, for the majority of time, increasingly horrified by how far the group was willing to go to survive, but equally amazed and awed at their resilience without him. The climax of the trial, when Misty calls on Ben to testify, is deeply emotional and sad – it begins with Ben reluctant to partake, reluctant to try and win sympathy. He says he never wanted to be a teacher or a coach, that he doesn’t even like teenagers. In her expert questioning (I think Misty has always been scarily impressive with her medical knowledge, but she truly shines here, considering what we’ve seen of her social skills previously), she gets him to tell his own story of having grown up as an underdog, without support, discovering that he wanted to support and help the team when they too were underdogs (he mentions covering up their party before the away game and also having seen Van and Taissa and not ratted them out). He seems resigned to his fate – and I don’t think he ever has any hope that the trial will go his way – because he is so ashamed of ultimately having let them down in precisely the way that he was let down in his youth. The statement makes the ultimate result of the trial even sadder – because initially, he has a simple majority in his favour that doesn’t suffice to save his life, but then Shauna, who was never going to change her mind through any kind of process, goes to work. When she starts, the woods appear to be in concert with her, demanding another sacrifice. One by one, they fall, until there’s a majority for his guilt. Melissa whispers into Shauna’s ear – “that’s fucking power”. And it’s fucking terrifying.
Random notes:
To start off with, I have to do this, and I think it should be done whenever television or film uses music by Ace of Base, which fits timewise but should categorically no longer pop up – here’s a Vice article from 2013 on why. One of the founding members “started his career as a neo-Nazi skinhead”. The Eels and the Cranberries were very good choices though.
The really sad thing for Coach Ben is that the two only people he has built a kind of relationship with, who would have voted for his innocence, aren’t even allowed to cast their vote.
I think there’s also a very quick note in there about how the trial changes the course in the future, by setting a precedent. One of the alternate theories that Misty presents is that Crystal has done it – Crystal, who Misty knows died well before the fire, but everyone else still considers missing. It would have been a convenient explanation that could have saved them all from having to convict Coach, but nobody jumped on the opportunity.
I also found it interesting that the girls adopt the language of court dramas perfectly, in exactly the way that viewers of television learn about things that for most of us have little do with our daily lives and yet give us the illusion of competence, but there are moments where it's broken up by their specific relationship with the wilderness creeping in - most obviously with the robes, but also when Lottie begins with a re-worded swearing in for the witnesses that Nat cuts short by resorting to what she remembers from TV.
Most of the outstanding acting moments in the episode happen in the past (especially Misty and Ben), but I also wanted to shout out Lauren Ambrose’s performance in the episode: from her deep ambivalence and increasing horror at what Tai is willing to do to get more time with her, to the genuine moment of giddiness and happiness of their date. There’s an ominous moment when her hand shakes as she buys the pretzels that would confirm Tai’s conviction that they are buying more time with each sacrifice they make.
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