Season 2 of Showtime’s “Lord of the Flies”-inspired survival drama, “Yellowjackets,” ended with a shocking death in the present timeline and a cabin fire in the 1990s one. But now that nearly two years have passed, you may be a little fuzzy on the details.
Who burned down the cabin? How did Natalie die? What was going on with Taissa? And wasn’t there something about eating a raw human heart?
Here’s what to remember about where we left the members of the cannibal soccer team from hell. Season 3 premieres on Friday.
Misty, accidental serial killer
Back in the ’90s, in the Canadian wilderness, Young Misty (Samantha Hanratty) had already demonstrated a dint for the psychotic in Season 1, when she smashed the plane’s emergency transmitter because she liked feeling essential. About midway through Season 2, she told her friend Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) what she did, and Crystal was horrified. Misty threatened her, and Crystal backtracked — right off a cliff to her death. It wouldn’t be Misty’s last accidental kill.
Shauna’s baby
Tired and exhausted, Young Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) went into labor late in Season 2, but let’s be honest: This baby was never going to make it. Shauna was barely ingesting enough calories to sustain one person, let alone grow another. Her baby was stillborn.
Shauna hallucinated that her son was born alive only to be eaten by her teammates. In reality, they haven’t become that savage. (Yet?) Shauna buried his body in a makeshift grave. She also beat Young Lottie (Courtney Eaton), who had become the leader of the group, to a pulp. Lottie let her do it, knowing Shauna needed someone to blame for her baby’s death.
Poor good-hearted Javi
After going missing for a few months, Travis’s little brother, Javi (Luciano Leroux), returned to the group midway through Season 2, alive but unable — or unwilling — to talk. It turned out he had been hiding in a cavern for at least some of that time.
Back at the cabin, Lottie, whose authority owed largely to her increasingly intense visions and seemingly mystic connection to the forest, convinced the girls that the “wilderness” was “hungry” and required a sacrifice to ensure their survival. She came up with a ritual: They would all draw cards from a deck, and whoever drew the Queen of Hearts would become the next feast.
Bad news for Young Natalie (Sophie Thatcher): Her number was up. Just as it looked like the end for her — Shauna, the team’s de facto butcher, held a hunting knife to her throat — Travis (Kevin Alves), knocked Shauna down and told Natalie to run.
Natalie ran into Javi, who told her he knew a place she could hide that no one else knew about. As they ran across the frozen lake, the ice cracked, and Javi fell in. Natalie at first moved to save him, but Misty persuaded her to reconsider. “If you save him, the others will get you,” she said.
Soon enough, Shauna was carving up poor Javi’s body. In his grief, Travis took a bite of Javi’s heart — raw! — before putting it in a pan to fry with the rest of the meat.
Queen Natalie
Lottie, who by now was feeling pretty bad, declared that she had never wanted to be in charge — “it” had chosen her, she said, whatever “it” was, because she “was the only one who knew how to listen.” A new Antler Queen was named: Natalie. Though Natalie didn’t believe in Lottie’s woo-woo, she certainly seemed to want the role.
Natalie told Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), who was appalled by the girls’ cannibalism, to flee to Javi’s hiding place. He later witnessed Natalie’s coronation while sneaking around outside, gathering supplies. He appeared alarmed — and betrayed — by how readily she welcomed the devotion.
Burn, baby, burn
Season 2 ended with the Yellowjackets’ precious cabin aflame in the freezing Canadian winter. Coach Ben seemed a likely culprit: Not only had he made no secret of his disgust at the others’ decision to eat Javi; he was also the only person not with them when the cabin burned.
He and the girls probably haven’t seen the last of each other. The Yellowjackets are in need of shelter now. And Natalie, who knows about Javi’s den, is in control.
Shauna gets away with murder (for now)
Jumping ahead to the current timeline, we find Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) more estranged than ever from her teenage daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins). There are many ways a mother might try to close that gap, but enlisting your child to help cover up a murder is typically not one of them.
And yet that’s just what happened after Callie, tipped off by a news report that her mother’s ex-lover, Adam (Peter Gadiot), had gone missing, found the charred remains of his ID in the grill after her parents held a cookout in the middle of November.
Callie confronted her mother, forcing Shauna to admit to having killed Adam — the curly-haired artist who Shauna had believed was blackmailing the Yellowjackets. But — plot twist! — Callie learned that her father, Jeff (Warren Kole), was the blackmailer. Clearly, he wasn’t the oblivious victim she thought he was.
Callie not only promised her mother not to reveal any of this; she also tried to help lead the police officers investigating Adam’s murder down a red herring trail. Unfortunately when that backfired, another innocent man, Detective Kevyn Tan (Alex Wyndham), wound up dead — poisoned by Misty’s citizen detective friend (or boyfriend?) Walter (Elijah Wood). Walter sealed the deal by blackmailing the dead detective’s partner, Detective Matt Saracusa (John Reynolds), into posthumously framing Tan for Adam’s murder.
Who is Walter, really?
Misty’s wide-eyed, mystery solving, not-quite boyfriend is just a little too good to be true: An unswervingly loyal multimillionaire — he got $6 million from a wrongful injury suit — he is every bit the schemer Misty (Christina Ricci) is. He even, at times, outwits her.
There was clearly more to him than met the eye last season, though: The way he made the Adam problem disappear hardly seemed like the work of a first-time cleanup man.
‘The bad one’
Taissa’s wife of 15 years, Simone (Rukiya Bernard), moved out of their house and took their young son, Sammy (Aiden Stoxx), with her after Taissa (Tawny Cypress) started hallucinating and refused to get help. Shortly afterward, Taissa’s teenage flame, Van (Lauren Ambrose), re-entered her life. But there was a twist: Van had terminal cancer and had been given only months to live.
It’s unclear how much Van knows about the disassociated personality of her former lover — the fugue-state version Sammy calls “the bad one.” That version of Taissa climbs trees, kills and beheads the family dog and who knows what else.
Lottie cracks up (again)
A flashback in the Season 2 premiere showed that after her traumatic experience in the wilderness, the already vision-afflicted teenage Lottie was nearly catatonic. Her parents took her to see a psychologist, and she was subsequently committed to a mental institution. There, she underwent electroconvulsive therapy treatments.
A few decades later, we find the grown-up Lottie (Simone Kessell) leading Camp Green Pine. Her mission, she explained, was to turn suffering into strength. She exercised rigid control over the lives of the inhabitants even if the center was not, as she maintained, a cult. Although she had been free of her visions for years, they returned around the same time Natalie (Juliette Lewis), the crusty heart of the band of adult survivors, arrived at the camp, having been kidnapped by Lottie’s minions. The visions grew stronger throughout Season 2.
By Episode 6, her fellow survivors had each made the pilgrimage to Lottie’s camp for various reasons — to rescue Natalie, to escape the police, to find answers — and things spiraled downward quickly.
Lottie soon proposed another sacrifice — echoes of the Queen of Hearts ritual — arguing that the “wilderness” would help them survive their various travails if they made an offering. The other women agreed, while secretly plotting to call in a crisis team to come and recommit Lottie. When the time came for the ritual, Shauna drew the queen, though unbeknown to her, the others had since called off the crisis team. A chase ensued, and they all seemed crazed and ready to kill Shauna after all.
Then Shauna’s daughter, Callie, showed up firing a gun, which wounded Lottie’s arm and brought the “hunt” to a halt.
Natalie’s last dose
Callie wasn’t the only one with a gun. A troubled young cult member named Lisa (Nicole Maines), whom Natalie had befriended at the camp, showed up with one, too. Seeing Lottie hurt and feeling betrayed, she threatened Natalie, prompting Misty to rush Lisa with a syringe — presumably filled with phenobarbital.
That’s when Natalie, still haunted by her guilt over Javi from all those years before, suddenly stepped in front of Misty’s syringe, sacrificing herself to save Lisa. The season ended with Lottie on her way to a mental institution.
The post The Yellowjackets Are Back. Here’s Where We Left Off. appeared first on New York Times.
