Yellowjackets season one spoilers below
Yellowjackets, Showtime’s popular survival thriller, returned to our screens last week.
While the show’s name makes it sound like a docuseries on the French gilet jaunes protestors, Yellowjackets is in fact a fictional thriller drama about a group of female high school football (soccer) players whose plane crash in the Canadian wilderness.
The Standard loved the first series, which stars Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Melanie Lynskey, saying: “The word-of-mouth hit is like a feminist Lord of the Flies with football, what more do you want?”
If this sounds like your cup of tea, let’s bring you up to speed so you can dive straight into the second series.
What’s it about?
In 1996, disaster strikes when a girl’s high school football team are on a plane which crashes in the Canadian wilderness. The story quickly changes from high school drama into an all-out survival thriller, as the team must work out how to stay alive. But over the 19 months that they remain stranded in the middle of nowhere, the girls turn to more savage behaviour as their survival instinct kicks in.
There’s also a parallel plotline, which focuses on the characters in the modern day. The events that took place in the woods are still causing reverberations across their lives. In both timelines, there are also strange happenings, including a dead body in a cabin, a secret room in a basement, geometric symbols which keep appearing in the wild and back home, and deadly traps.
But the tension-filled show isn’t just about human beings going feral: one of the reasons it’s become such a success is because it explores friendships, trauma, growing up and coming to terms with one’s past.
“At its core, Yellowjackets is really about the raw experience of being human, and what happens in the face of an unthinkable trauma,” said psychiatrist Jessie Gold in InStyle. “A storyline like this is particularly magnetic as we are nearly two years into surviving our own collective trauma.”
Speaking on The Hollywood Reporter’s podcast TV’s Top 5, co-creator Ashley Lyle said: “Lord of the Flies is about how socialisation falls away and how society is a façade. We thought, ‘Who is more socialised than women?’ As girls, you learn early on how to make people like you and what the social hierarchies are. It’s a more interesting way of having things fall away. The mask is even thicker. It’s a more layered amount of preconceived notions of how to behave and act.”
What happened last season?
Season one opens with a young woman sprinting through a wood as she’s being chased by an unseen predator. There are strange carvings in the trees she runs past and stick figures hang from the branches. Seconds later she falls into a trap that has been laid for her: she is impaled on stakes that had been hidden in a hole in the ground. This sets the show up for what is to come by provoking dozens of questions – have the teammates turned to cannibalism? Who is this young woman?
Over the ten-episode first season, the plot only thickens. The survivors search for shelter and food; they experience hallucinations and visions; and there’s a strange figure that lingers in the woods, watching them.
In the present day, the adult versions of the survivors are grappling with their lives, although their actions in the Canadian wilderness continue to haunt them.
What can you expect from season two?
If you thought the anger and gore had reached their peak in season one, you might be surprised by season two which promises to take its character to an even darker place.
“Now we’re really exploring female rage,” said executive producer Jonathan Lisco to Empire.
“In the past, it’s about the falling away of social constructs, even more than last season... In the present, I think each of these women is being forced to reckon with who they really are, which they’ve been able to deny most of their adult lives.”
Who is in it?
Because there are two parallel plotlines, in many cases there are two actors playing one character (one plays the teenage version, while the other plays the adult version). For example, Melanie Lynskey (Don’t Look Up, The Last of Us) and Sophie Nélisse (The Book Thief, The Rest of Us) both play Shauna Shipman, one of the girls on the plane.
Then Tawny Cypress (House of Cards, Unforgettable) and Jasmin Savoy Brown (The Leftovers) both play fellow teammate Taissa Turner; Christina Ricci and Sammi Hanratty (Shameless) both play another teammate Misty Quigley; and Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher (Chicago Med) both play fellow student Natalie “Nat” Scatorccio.
Also part of the cast is Ella Purnell (Never Let Me Go) who plays the captain of the soccer team Jackie Taylor and Steven Krueger (Pretty Little Liars) who plays Ben Scott, assistant coach of the soccer team. Warren Kole (Stalker) plays high school student Jeff Sadecki and Kevin Alves (Chicago Fire) plays Travis Martinez, the son of head coach Bill Martinez, who is played by Carlos Sanz.
Liv Hewson (Dramaworld 2) plays teammate Vanessa Palmer, and Lauren Ambrose (The X-Files) joins season two as the adult version of the high schooler. Similarly, Courtney Eaton (Line of Duty) plays member of the soccer football team Lottie Matthews, while Simone Kessell (Terra Nova) joins season two playing her older self.
Who is joining the cast?
✔️Gnarly
— Yellowjackets (@yellowjackets96) February 9, 2023
✔️Scary
✔️Dark
✔️Fucking twisted.
Sign us up, @elijahwood. #Yellowjackets pic.twitter.com/jnjQYH8fIF
As well as Ambrose and Kessell, Elijah Wood will be joining season two as Walter, an amateur detective. Speaking to Empire about Walter, co-creator Ashley Lyle and producer Lisco said he will act as a buffer to Ricci’s character Misty, who is known for being a little bit weird. “You basically try to out-weird her,” said Lisco to Lyle, who replied, “There’s a really magical chemistry between them, and I don’t necessarily mean that in the traditional way.”
“There’s some really wonderful surprises and it gets gnarly and scary and dark... and f**king twisted,” Wood teased in a short interview released by Showtime.
Who is the team behind it?
The show has been created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, two American writers whose previous credits include episodes of Narcos, horror-fantasy The Originals, and the American drama Dispatches from Elsewhere.
The show’s pilot was has been composed by Theodore Shapiro, who composed scores for films including Marley & Me (2008), Jennifer’s Body (2009), We’re the Millers (2013) and Bombshell (2019). For the rest of the series, the show’s score was composed by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker. Wedren composed the music for Role Models (2008), School of Rock (2003); Waronker is a singer-songwriter and composer who composed the score for the TV show Clueless (1996–1999) and Hulu’s Shrill (2019).
Was season one well reviewed?
Yes, on the whole, the show was praised when it was released in November 2021, though there were a few reviews that found that its many twisting narratives failed to properly land. The Independent described the show as “Desperate Housewives with feral youths and cannibalism”, giving it four stars; The Telegraph called it a “deliciously dark thriller” with “pitch black humour... mixed with genuine scares”; The critic at The Times said, “I’m hooked”.
The Guardian was less complimentary, however, saying, “There’s a thicket of alluring storylines here, but it’s hard to see how Yellowjackets will stick the landing”, meanwhile The New Yorker said: “Yellowjackets” is a riot, but I can’t deny that it’s a queasy watch.”
Will there be a third season?
Yes, it was announced in December that the show is being renewed for a third season, which means there’s plenty more drama in the works, and plenty of time to work out some of the bigger questions that are hanging over the show.
In fact, in the interview on TV’s Top 5, Nickerson said he pitched Yellowjackets as a “five-season idea”, meaning there may very well be four more seasons of the show to look forward to.
But, when speaking to Collider Lyle said: “We did pitch a five-season plan, but the best-laid plans always... There’s always a chance that the show gets canceled. In our ideal world, the story will tell us how long it wants to be. As long as we and our writers are really excited about it and feel like there’s just depths to be mined, then we really hope to have the opportunity to keep telling it.”
