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.