Graphic by Mari Al Tayb ’26
By Sarah Berger ’27
Arts and Entertainment editor
This article contains spoilers for seasons one and two of Yellowjackets, as well as episodes one, two and three of season three.
Season three of “Yellowjackets” begins with a scene that echoes episodes past: A teenage girl runs through the woods, feverishly pursued by other teenage girls with the intensity and anger of a pack of wolves. Thankfully, this time they’re actually playing a spirited game of “capture the bone.” It ends in excited chants from the winners and disappointment from the losers, but not mutilation or death. The experienced “Yellowjackets” viewer knows how rare this is.
In the first season, after the plane of a New Jersey girls’ soccer team goes down in the Canadian Rockies on their way to nationals, the team immediately breaks away from their suburban roots. The show takes place in two timelines, one immediately after the crash and one twenty-five years later, as the survivors begin to reckon with their pasts and futures. The show lured viewers in with promises of cannibalism, then proceeded to deliver not only cannibalism but adultery, murder, suicide, addiction, implied posession and various other lurid evils.
If that sounds like a lot to digest, it absolutely is. By the time season three starts, the viewer has seen it all, and the girls have done, if not all of it, most of it. “Yellowjackets” frequently teeters on the edge of darkness, but never quite fully descends until the final episodes of season two. The youngest, most innocent character is killed and cooked, the shelter the team has found is burned to the ground, and in the final moments of the last episode, one of the four original surviving Yellowjackets — a nickname based off of their soccer team’s mascot — dies at the hands of another.
With all of that baggage, season three needs a palate cleanser. Thankfully, spring has come. At least for the moment, the girls don’t have to worry about eating. The first scenes of season three are promising, with floral motifs and dialogue between the girls that reminds you that they’re ultimately still just kids. Sadly, the appeal doesn’t last long, as the show cuts at breakneck speed back to a present timeline that ultimately doesn’t serve the plot. The past timeline is by far the most compelling thing about the show, but it seems to take up almost no time next to the present timeline, which increasingly relies on silly twists and melodrama in place of actual character development. “Yellowjackets” can’t decide if it wants to be a horror comedy or not, and that leads to some incredibly uncomfortable scenes where a character’s alcoholic breakdown is half-played for laughs, half-taken seriously.
Midway through the second episode of the season, two characters in the present timeline kill a waiter by inducing a heart attack after a dine-and-dash pursuit. Part of the appeal of “Yellowjackets” certainly lies in unrelenting misery, but come on. Give them a break. One of the characters is already dying of cancer and another has lost her family and regularly hallucinates an evil, “bad” version of herself. If you’re not a “Yellowjackets” watcher, you might be rolling your eyes at the melodrama. As a seasoned “Yellowjackets” watcher, it’s hard for me not to join you. Don’t worry, though. The waiter’s death has a happy outcome: The cancer has stopped metastasizing, a miracle that likely occurred due to their service to the ambiguous entity that’s followed them since the woods.
It was never going to be a happy show, but at a certain point, there’s a limit to the bad things that can happen to the girls before their characters are fully defined by their tragedies. That’s not to say that their reactions to their experiences are unrealistic, but that their experiences, at a certain point, become a constant onslaught of trauma with various light moments in between. It feels as though the showrunners are watching the audience wince at the sociopathy of the characters and asking, “Well, don’t they have a right to do that?” The answer is, of course, yes. However, they might also do well to ask why anyone would want to watch.
Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.