Spoilers below for anyone who isn’t caught up on Yellowjackets, so be warned!
As things stand here in the first half of Yellowjackets’ pulse-jarring second season, few characters have fallen off the deep end quite as steadily and severely as the meat-weary somnambulist Taissa, whose ever-deepening story has only become more disturbing across both of the cable hit’s timelines. On the more firmly corporeal side of things, Tai has been coping with crumbling relationships as a significant other (with partners who have now both faced life-threatening injuries), and Tawny Cypress’ adult character is becoming increasingly unfit as a mother for the already trauma-stricken Sam. And then there’s everything supernatural, from her evil mirror self to the Man with No Eyes, with the presumption that it’s all connected somewhere.
Just don’t expect those connections to be fully uncovered and explored during the current season, at least according to Yellowjackets’ Cypress, who confirmed viewers will have to be content with waiting a bit longer for some of those specific questions to be answered. Speaking with TVLine about Tai’s struggles in Season 2, she was asked how much the eyeless ghoul that’s plagued her family will factor into upcoming installments, and gave this somewhat surprising answer:
He’s not going to figure a lot in Season 2. In fact, Taissa’s whole story doesn’t figure a lot in Season 2. You’re going to have to wait at least until Season 3 to get some real answers on what’s going on with her. But you know, there’s plenty of fun shenanigans to be had this season between the girls. But yeah. The man with no eyes, he’s a mystery to all of us at this point.
It’s almost like Tawny Cypress herself hasn’t been privy to all the chaos that’s happening with Taissa in Season 2, though I do get her point. Fans will be able to watch Tai making her way through plot twists in the past and present, but we won’t be watching with the full context of how it’s all webbed together through the character’s story outside of what she’s experiencing with her fellow survivors. Who needs context when there’s still much head-scratching confusion and stomach-churning nastiness to come?
And though part of me is kind of bugged in the way that it’s never a 100% joy to be told information you seek won’t exist for another year or so, I can’t take for granted the fact that Season 3 is a locked-in certainty, and that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson are so confident in this particular slice of the narrative pie that they’re comfortable stringing viewers along for the extended haul. I mean, it could indicate that they’re not yet entirely sure themselves where Tai’s vision-impaired ghoul came from, but their five-season plan for Yellowjackets’ story likely means the answers are already set in moldable stone.
According to Cypress, Taissa likely wouldn't be too bothered by the current lack of clarification, because she's less interested in the "why" and more focused on "what do we do about it?" (Which could be the wrong mode to embrace, since learning about our faults only helps to avoid them in the future, but still.) Here, the actress explains why Tai isn't overtly inquisitive about her inherent problems at this point in the story:
I think she wants to shut it down and get back to her life. She’s been in repair mode, you know? She’s trying to repair her life, she wants to get back to her life and her kid, and you know, why can’t it be perfect again? So, I definitely don’t think she cares about like, figuring out who she is. She just wants to get rid of this other Tai. So far, what we’ve seen is that young Taissa isn’t a part of the [Lottie] group. But you know, there’s five seasons so, it could change. Everything could change.
The surviving teens and Coach Ben are so firmly aware of the concept that "everything could change," since the bulk of the group went from prospective athletic champs to traumatized cannibals in less than two years' time. So there's no doubt Yellowjackets could change in myriad ways during the rest of Season 2, perhaps by introducing another 15 mysteries that will completely change up the context of what we learn about Tai's past.
It's not like audiences aren't already busy with lots of the show's other anti-delectable mysteries, from who the unidentified Pit Girl victim is/was/will be, how this season's new main characters will affect the overall story, whether Jackie's surprising return will be further explored through Shauna's inner monologues, whether Lottie was telling the truth about Travis' death, and what happened to Shauna and Jeff's first baby. And that's really just skimming the top of the obvious pile, with plenty of other oddities and seemingly random details that deserve obsessing over.
Yellowjackets airs new episodes Sunday nights on Showtime at 9:00 p.m. ET, though they stream three days early for Showtime customers with Paramount+ subscriptions or other ways of streaming.
