Yellowjackets 3

 

Misty Meaner

Yellowjackets
USA February - April 2025
Series 3 Ten episodes

Warning: Spoilers below.

After the second series of Yellowjackets (reviewed here)... when one of my favourites of the adult characters of the two parallel stories, as played by Juliette Lewis, was accidentally killed by the adult version of Misty (played by Christina Ricci)... I didn’t think it had much story left to tell, to be honest. At least not enough to hold my attention.

However, as it happens, Yellowjackets Series 3 was a pretty cool one and maybe a little better than that second batch, to be fair. However, as gripped as I still am by the show, I do think the writers are maybe now spinning the story on a little longer than it has to go to naturally play out. The story once again progresses with the adult versions of the survivors of the Yellowjackets and their teen counterparts, still stuck in the wilderness in their Lord Of The Flies kind of existence, cross cutting and informing each other.

To help them with sustaining this, the writers have gone to picking on another of the teens who has actually been in it since season two (okay... I guess the survivors didn’t notice they’d grown another person or two) and once again brought the adult version of them into the story. 

This one had Melanie Lynskey once more trying to survive the ridiculous plots she gets into as an adult Shauna, trying to keep things together and de-escalate the effect of her daughter witnessing the death at the end of series two... but by the end of the series, she is much more reverting to the angry, strict and ruthless survivor version of her teenage self (played by Sophie Nélisse) as she pursues a ‘normal life’. Meanwhile, the others are also pitching in to try and find out who killed adult Lottie (played by Simone Kessell)... the second of three big adult character deaths in this series.

The third big adult death (but there are more), after gaining a sacrificial reprieve from her cancer, is the adult version of Van (played by Lauren Ambrose). Unlike last season, though, this actually happens in the penultimate episode, rather than act as the season finale, which goes in its own direction. As for the first adult death, this time around... I’ll leave you to discover it for yourself.

Okay, so one of my theories about either the teen or adult versions of the story line being a little fictional and spawned from the other is, I suspect, beginning to see the light of day here. For starters, the ghosts of the dead that show up don’t always have to be somebody else. It gets kind of complicated but, for instance, Van starts having visitations from her teen self and, when she is finally dead, she ends up on the same ethereal aircraft as some of the previous victims did when they died. 

Furthermore, when the teen version of Lotte somehow crosses time and wakes up her corpse version from the slab of the morgue, she takes her to the place where she meets that very death which got her there... which is a time conundrum but I’m not really sure the temporal mechanics of that kind of bootstrap paradox are necessarily something which needs to be taken into account here. I think a more obvious clue lays in what teen Travis (Kevin Alves) says about experiencing the action through different people’s versions of reality, which would make more sense with the dead people suddenly finding themselves turning up on an airplane watching events play out on some kind of TV. And especially since some of the characters have been experiencing interpenetrating dreams (or something like a dream) together when under the influence of a gas found in a cave.

I think this one does have a very specific endgame to it but what worries me is that the creators are planning for this one to end on series five. Which seems way too long for me but, even so, the fourth season hasn’t even started filming (the show was only renewed back in May of this year) so what we have here is the prospect of this next series not airing until late 2026 or perhaps even 2027 (ample time to forget everything again, then). And in the case of some of the ‘teens’ in the show, well... some of them will be nearer to, or even past, 30 years old when the show is finally over. Let’s see what happens next, I guess.