‘Yellowjackets S2’ Review: Winter is Here
Showtime's horror hit about a girls' soccer team who survive a plane crash is back, with a bigger and more terrifying bite.
Few shows have aired in the last couple of years that have truly dragged us into its darkness like Yellowjackets (★★★★★). From season one’s opening moments depicting what may have been teenage girl cannibalism to its inciting plane crash, Yellowjackets had big shoes to fill. Luckily for all of us, season one managed to hold back just enough while giving us the ride of a lifetime.
By the end of the season, we barely scratched the surface of what really happened out in those woods. While the Emmy-nominated show captivated the world with its horrors, the scariest thing for Yellowjackets fans is the sophomore slumps.
Picking up from last season, winter has firmly set in the remote wilderness where the remnants of the Yellowjackets struggle to keep from starving and killing each other. Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is still reeling from the untimely death of her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell) while getting close to having her baby. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is still struggling with her violent sleepwalking, while Van (Liv Hewson) aimlessly tries to help and find meaning in her episodes.
Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) struggles to help Travis (Kevin Alves) find his brother, Javi (Luciano Leroux), who is still missing after a mushroom-induced incident scared him away.
As tensions run high, the girls closeted coach Ben (Steven Krueger), the perennially shunned (for doping the soup with mushrooms) Misty (Sammi Hanratty), Akilah (Nia Sondaya), and Lottie (Courtney Eaton), who is firmly off her schizophrenia medication and diving head first into her visions, all try to play their parts in keeping the group alive through an intensifying winter.
In the present day, the adult versions of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) are trying to remain calm as the police, and their daughter (Sarah Desjardins), close in on what happened to Shauna’s affair with a now missing artist. Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is struggling to keep her family together in the midst of a sleepwalking relapse, while Natalie (Juliette Lewis) learns that Lottie (Simone Kessell) is the one who kidnapped her and is hiding some secrets of her own.
Still shunned Misty (Christina Ricci) is undeterred by her friends ghosting her, and sets out with an internet sleuth turned partner in crime (Elijah Wood) to find them.
Despite picking up where it left off, Yellowjackets takes a couple of episodes for things to return to form, at least partially. The second season puts a larger focus on the past storyline, which, while thrilling, does lead to the present storyline suffering.
The adult versions of Shauna, Tai, and Nat stall for time in the first two episodes, not only a waste of great talent, but a noticeable problem early on.
This stalling, like Natalie mostly wandering around trying to find info about Lottie, ends up being counterproductive to what the characters and actors can do. When things heat up, especially as the cops close in on Shauna’s bloody extramarital affairs, and the adult Yellowjackets begin coming together once again, their stories get back into fine form.
The defining feature of season two is the teens, where Yellowjackets delivers on the horrifying promises it’s hinted at since the opening moments of the pilot. What makes the show more astounding is how the alluded horrors are only just the tip of the trauma the group experiences in a tough winter. Characters like Ben get more focus this time, furthering the stranded survivors backstory and setting up more stakes for their survival, because we still only know that six of the almost two dozen are still alive.
This season doubles down on the queerness, further endearing and frightening us even more for the characters. There is an overall sense of delirium with the starving group, but characters like Lottie, who last season seemed like a one-note crazy person, feels much more whole, especially as she takes on a spiritual leader role for the group.
Around the midway point of the season, Yellowjackets reignites the spark that made the first season jaw-droppingly good. The adult counterparts find their footing by showing their cracks, with performances from Lewis and Kessell soaring when the two finally let down their defenses and open up to their trauma from the woods. Lynskey and Nélisse, however, once again proved that they are the extraordinary standouts in a show full of standouts as the narrative once again narrows its focus on them. Both actors get to show just how strong they are in one of the most harrowing depictions of trauma and tragedy ever on television that should book both of them Emmy nominations.
Yellowjackets is one of the best displays of trauma on television, both in the ways it shows the past and present trauma of the women and how it refuses to take an easy road. It doesn’t start off with the grace it had in season one, but finds the heart-pounding thrills that made it stand out and makes it even more horrifyingly captivating television.
The show inevitably surpasses the highs of season one and sets up an even more explosive circumstance you will not expect. The survivors in the woods are struggling to not starve, but we end up dining on their drama better than ever.
New episodes of Yellowjackets air weekly on Showtime on Fridays. Visit www.show.com/yellowjackets.
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