Yellowjackets - Series 2

 

Wilderness Things

Yellowjackets - Series 2
USA March - May 2023
Series 2 Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets Series Two  is... mostly pretty good I’d have to say. Continuing from the point it left off, where one of the major grown up versions of a character was kidnapped on the point of suicide, this one details just what happened to her and the attempts of grown up Misty to find out who has kidnapped her and why. Meanwhile Shauna, her husband (played brilliantly by Warren Kole) and her daughter (Callie Sadecki) are trying to throw the cops off the scent of Shauna’s murder of her ‘fling’ in series one. Also, we have Taissa dealing with the fallout from her somewhat violent sleepwalking stints (as her reflection gazes back at her before doing its own thing, in some nicely chilling moments)... with symptoms of that being hallucinating a visitation from her son and putting her wife in a coma from a car crash in an early episode.

Of course, we also have the teen versions and various other ‘probably mostly expendable teen versions’ trapped in the wilderness with their now one legged coach, dealing with Shauna’s pregnancy and also, quite accidentally, getting into a taste for cannibalism... while they embrace the ideas and teachings of the teenage version of Lotte (Courtney Eaton).

And it’s pretty riveting stuff with all the cast from the first series back for the second, including Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Teen Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Teen Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), Misty (Christina Ricci) and Teen Misty (Samantha Hanratty). There are also a couple of new members of the team. Firstly, the grown up version of Lotte (who has apparently spent at least ten years in a Swiss psychiatric hospital) is played by Simone Kessell. She’s now running a kind of cult retreat for troubled souls, which is a bit of a bad idea for that character when you think about it.

Also, we finally get to see who Teen Taissa’s red headed girlfriend, Van (performed wonderfully by Liv Hewson) is played by when she’s grown up. As Taissa somehow manages to drive to her VHS video store ‘While You Were Streaming’, we find that she’s played by the brilliant Lauren Ambrose.

Meanwhile, Misty gets some, at first unwanted, help from a fellow amateur but somehow millionaire crime sleuth... who is also probably a serial killer (I reckon)... played by Elijah Wood. All I can say is... they make a cute couple. And the song and dance stuff they do when Misty is availing herself of Lotte’s sensory deprivation tank is pretty silly (which means it’s cool, in my book).

And, yeah, it hurtles along at a pace with some nice momenta such as, when teen Shauna is talking to the frozen body of her dead best friend, it transitions from living actress to corpse version and back again between the cuts. When the two get in a tussle, Jackie’s frozen ear falls off and Shauna is mortified... except, by the end of the episode, she casually slips it into her mouth and eats it. Nice touch.

And everything hurtles towards the inevitable double cliffhanger ending for the girls in the ‘end of season finale’ episode... this season is an episode shorter than the first, for some reason. So in the back story, the girls barely escape their cabin burning down. While in the modern story, all the characters converge (including those pesky cops) in Lotte’s retreat where, things get fairly dramatic and a regular character dies (yeah... she’ll be back in some form, I reckon). Although, I’d have to say that, after a great lead in, I kinda found the last episode a little anti-climactic, truth be told.

Here’s the thing though... I think I’m getting a sense of where this might be going. Although... I kinda hope I’m wrong and this show manages to surprise me instead. There have been little clues, quite subtly hidden (or else I’m imagining them) that things from the present are kinda, maybe, bleeding back into the past. So I’ve got two theories where this might be going... especially since we now know how easy it is for any of the characters to be hallucinating and we also know, especially due to the episode dealing with Shauna’s first pregnancy, that the camera eye doesn’t always tell the truth. Furthermore, we also know the grown up versions of the characters have hazy memories about certain aspects of their past.

One idea I have is that, maybe the girls didn’t get out of the wilderness and have grown up there without realising they didn’t escape and have been collectively (or even singly) imagining their modern life. Which would be interesting, for sure. Or... the girls never escaped but they are still in that time and just imagining their future (which would be a bit of a cop out, truth be told). So, I kinda hope it’s not one of those things but... well, time will tell I guess.

Ether way, series two of Yellowjackets didn’t overly disappoint and I can’t wait for season three to arrive. Hopefully they’ll finish the story off with that one, maybe?

Yellowjackets

The Eat Is On

Yellowjackets
USA November 2021 - January 2022
Series 1 Ten episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets is a fairly recent American TV show (if streaming can be considered television) in which a group of teenage girls comprising the high school champion soccer team, Yellowjackets, are heading off to an event when their plane crashes somewhere very remote, midst some forests in Canada. The first episode hits the audience right away with how things are going to go, with a scene which, I guess, we’ll eventually catch up to sometime in an upcoming season (if the show doesn’t get cancelled... that’s a big drawback of television these days, shows getting cancelled before their story has finished playing out, thus rendering watching all that’s gone before a waste of time).

The opening scene involves one of the teen girls (we don’t know which one and I had two best guesses, at least one of which was proved to be totally wrong before the end of the first season), being chased by something through the forest... presumably the other teens, who are all obscured by animal skins and seem to have taken the mantle of some kind of witchcraft coven. The girl is killed and then hung upside down, bled out, cooked and eaten by the others.

Then, the back story of the girls (plus three guys) leading up to (for the first episode) the crash and then how they attempted to survive their fate, is crosscut with a new story involving the lives of the four survivors in modern times... Taissa the senator (played by Tawny Cypress), Shauna the housewife (played by Melanie Lynskey) , Natalie the cool one, in and out of drug rehab (played by Juliette Lewis) and Misty, the psychopathic one (played by Christina Ricci). The teenage equivalents of these four characters are played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Nélisse, Sophie Thatcher and Samantha Hanratty respectively.

And it’s a wild but very drawn out ride. As we see the girls trying to survive the wilderness with some quite brutal conditions, it’s ironic that it’s the quiet, unpopular girl Misty who is the one who shows them best how to survive. She makes the snap judgements like chopping off what’s left of the coaches leg with an axe and cauterising it so he can live etc. The coach can then, in turn, show two of the party how to hunt with a rifle. Meanwhile, in the modern day, there’s a blackmailer threatening the survivors and all kinds of things from their secret past suddenly coming back to haunt them... there’s also a nice subplot (which is neatly resolved although, I think it needs going back to in terms of a certain person’s real identity) where Shauna... Melanie Lynskey, gives an absolutely stand out performance in this and it’s the reason I kept watching, her comic timing is amazing... starts having an affair with a much younger man, after she rear ends him in the street. Meanwhile, one of the other survivors, Travis, has been murdered in a ritualistic killing similar to ‘the old days in the wilderness’ and the four of them have to pool their resources to find out what is going on.

And it’s a grim tale with some quite brutal blood letting, both in the past and present... and with enough slightly different twists as it goes to keep you interested. This is not like, say, From, where each twist is capitalised and screams at you from the rafters (which, to be fair, is very effective in that show)... this is a much slower burn of a tale. One of the things I really appreciated is that, while it’s building the personalities of the kids in the back story... it really takes its time to flesh out their adult selves with little adventures and the ways in which they relate to those closest to each other. There’s a wonderful moment in the... I think it’s in the first episode... where a marriage counsellor Shauna and her husband are seeing gives them some role play homework to get their sex lives back on track. They give it two goes where, to Shauna’s amusement, her husband's sex fantasy is just a customer coming in to his furniture shop to pick up some new equipment. Seeing these two twice try and act out an improvised role play on this stuff is pretty funny, I have to say. Meanwhile, the senator is sleepwalking, ending up in trees, eating dirt and getting up to all kinds of stuff (she suspects). Much like she did just after the plane crash when one such event was responsible for her girlfriend coming out the worst after an encounter with a pack of wolves.

Another thing is... I’ve no idea where this is going. At first I thought the ‘popular’ girl who was the team captain, Jackie (played by Ella Purnell) was the one who would be chased through the woods and eaten. Well, the story doesn’t develop that far into things by the time of the last episode of the first season but, it’s made pretty clear at one point that she definitely wasn’t the one. My other suspect, a girl called Lottie who has prophetic visions( played by Courtney Eaton), is also possibly not the one if the last few seconds of the last episode is anything to go by... although that’s not necessarily the case. The good thing, however, is that the show doesn’t ever do what you expect it’s going to do... when I figure out the next thing to happen, it either does something completely different or does a similar thing but focused on an entirely different person. So I do appreciate the writing on this one and, yeah, the performances and chemistry between the actors is brilliant.

So, yeah, loved Yellowjackets and would recommend it to people, for sure... my only caveat being that, from the third episode in, they bring in a title sequence and song and, yeah, it’s a truly terrible title sequence, like someone is trying to be really edgy but executed it with all the sensibilities of a child. Maybe that’s the point though but, either way, it’s a pretty good show and I’d get on it if you like horror themed TV.