Season 3, Episode 3: ‘Them’s the Brakes’
In the third episode of this season of “Yellowjackets,” the Wilderness is playing mind games, but so are the girls. Which is worse? The fever dreams involving talking llamas and dangerous slap bracelets? Or the back-stabbing that comes with psychological manipulation? Honestly, it’s a toss up.
This week’s episode highlights what has always been the strong suit of “Yellowjackets” — the ways in which being a teenage girl, or an emotionally stunted grown woman, dovetail with fantastical horror. The fights based on interpersonal drama can feel just as operatic as any hallucinogenic nightmare brought on by a mysterious woodland entity.
Mari, perhaps the nastiest of the current Teen Yellowjackets, sums it up well when she is trapped in the cave with Ben. In Mari’s attempt to escape, they both were sprayed with mace, leaving them equally in pain and defeated. Ben starts lamenting his current situation, explaining how he only started being a high school substitute after tearing his ACL. He’s just a “normal guy” who goes to Dave Matthews Band concerts even though he doesn’t like them very much, he moans. The Wilderness wails.
Mari responds with a story about when, as a 12-year-old, she watched her younger cousin die of cancer. It’s an oddly earnest tale from the usually sarcastic Mari. But she has a point. “I think maybe there are two versions of reality,” she says. “Most of the time the other one, the bad one, is just hiding or waiting, but it’s all real.” For Mari, it’s all one in the same: the supernatural horror they are facing and the cruelty of one another. Perhaps that’s why she herself is so cruel.
Still, after what seems to be a shared moment of tenderness, she convinces Ben to let her go, promising to keep his secret. But Mari can’t discard her cynicism. As soon as she gets back to camp, her story falls apart. The other girls catch her in a lie, and she immediately spills Ben’s whereabouts.
She invites her bad reality back to Ben. Shauna, furious, leads a witch hunt into the woods to find him with Mari as guide. They may as well be carrying torches and pitchforks. They do eventually find Ben, but they also encounter another terror.
Shauna, Van, and Akilah break free from the rest of the group and end up in a tunnel permeated by some sort of poisonous gas. At first their visions are serene. Van sits in an armchair by a warm fire. Akilah eats berries. Shauna swims.
But quickly those images become perverted. Van is trapped in a blaze. A talking llama with a man’s voice tells Akilah, “Either way, it’s going to get what it wants.” And Shauna sees her grown son on the shoreline but can’t swim to him.
Eventually they all end up together in a classroom, wearing their soccer uniforms. The instructor is Lottie, and one of the other students is Jackie — welcome back, Ella Purnell — who plays with a slap bracelet. The toy looks like a bit of simple ’90s ephemera. But this bracelet, emblazoned with the Wilderness’s mysterious symbol, is murderous. When it goes around Shauna’s neck, it chokes her, blood spilling out of her throat.
And that’s when they wake up, rescued by Ben, who instead of being celebrated, finds himself looking down the barrel of a gun.
The visions are a clever mix of the really silly — the slap bracelet, for instance — and the genuinely terrifying. That’s a mode that also works when you’re talking about the proclivities of teenage girls, whether they are metaphorically or literally cut throat.
The adult plotlines in this episode also carry on this mash-up of tones. The grown-up Yellowjackets are acting more and more childish, which is great for comedy but perhaps bad for everyone around them. Lottie, for instance, is getting close to Callie, taking her on a shopping trip where the shopping is just shoplifting. Although Callie’s mission was to get close to Lottie to ply her for information, Callie seems to be falling under Lottie’s spell. Suspended from school, Callie needs friends, and Lottie is the fun older sister she never had.
This, of course, is maddening to Shauna, who reaches out to Misty to figure out what happened during the sleepover gone awry. Misty, desperately, wants to hang, so she invites Shauna out for scones and then announces she is going to tag along on whatever errands Shauna has to run. Misty thinks they’re having a girls’ day; Shauna just wants to get rid of her. Luckily for Shauna, the outing is cut short when her minivan’s brakes give out and she and Misty are sent careening through New Jersey to the sounds of Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie,” an absolutely incredible music cue for the moment.
When they finally come to a stop, Shauna’s mean girl comes out. She calls Misty a “verified psycho,” hurting her feelings in the way only people who have known each other as teen girls can.
Adult Tai and Adult Van, meanwhile, find themselves regressing in different ways. Yes, they are sitting on the couch watching VHS tapes of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” but they are also leaning into the beliefs they picked up in the forest. Van learns her cancer has stopped spreading, and Tai reveals to her that the waiter who chased them when they dined and dashed has died.
Both Tai and Van have been through too much to think this is mere coincidence. The Wilderness, they assume, is giving Van life while taking it from others. Instead of being terrified, they are shockingly chill, almost excited that it’s happening again.
What they are not chill with is Tai seeing her old friend, the man with no eyes, pop up in a commercial for a local ice cream shop in the “Pee-wee” VHS. Tai, disturbed, demands they go investigate. They don’t find the man in the abandoned building, but they do find a coyote with a rabbit in its mouth. Tai asks, “What do you want?” Van responds confidently that they know what it wants: “It wants more.”
Adult Tai and Van should probably know better than to give whatever it is what it wants, but their teenage brains are taking hold.
More to chew on:
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One more shout out for the “Nookie” drop. Too funny.
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Misty’s description of “The Princess Bride” is great: “It’s a double bluff, like that scene in that movie with the two guys.”
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I’m frustrated that this episode didn’t pick up anything with the Melissa story line. What a tease!
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There may be too many Yellowjackets to keep track of in the woods, which means key players from previous scenes like Teen Natalie and Teen Tai are falling by the wayside.
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Where did Lottie even find Jackie’s necklace to give to Callie?
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