Welcome to the Yellowjackets 202 recap, where we will be talking all things “Edible Complex” (someone is having a LOT of fun with the episode titles this season). The episode was written by Jonathan Lisco and directed by Ben Semanoff. Catch up on past recaps, and as always, please join me in the comments for discussion, citizen detective work, and jokes!
We’ve all been waiting to see what might be done with Jackie’s body. It has felt inevitable that she would be eaten, but how, under what circumstances? Shauna got the party started last week when she bit into a chewy bit of detached ear. She got a taste for flesh; would others so easily follow suit? Would Shauna start stretching the bear meat by subsidizing it with Jackie jerky? In one of its scariest episodes to date, Yellowjackets gives us some answers.
But first: Things really escalate between Teen Shauna and Dead Jackie in the meat shed post-ear snack. They taunt each other in the episode’s opening scene, Shauna’s hunger and mortification about what she did likely making both her and Jackie’s ghost especially irritable, as Jackie’s ghost is really just an extension of Shauna’s inner monologue. Shauna attempts to lie to Jackie — so really, attempts to lie to herself — about what really happened to the ear. It feels like an impossible thing to admit to.
Jackie asks Shauna to braid her hair — to cover the missing ear, of course. She does. It’s a scene we see a lot in film and television, young girl besties braiding each other’s hair, an instant signal of intimacy and maybe a little homoeroticism with just the slightest whiff of pain play. I used to give the most popular cheerleader in middle school the best assignments for yearbook class (anyone who knows me will be 0% surprised to learn I was editor in chief of my middle school yearbook) in exchange for her French-braiding my hair in pigtails at the end of every school day. There’s a brief moment during the hair braiding where the two reminisce on the last time they did this together, at freshman homecoming. Even though we know Shauna is just remembering this by herself, alone in this shed, the way they’re sitting so close and laughing with their faces pressed together, it’s almost possible to forget none of it is real. The line between reality and fantasy is flexible throughout the episode.
“remember when I was alive and not haunting you?” “haha, yeah, good times tbt”
I’ve seen a lot of fans theorize that perhaps Jackie and Shauna would have had something more than friendship going on if not for the compulsory heterosexuality bearing down on them, and I’m inclined to believe that. Regardless, a lot of times ultra-tethered best friendship between teen girls is almost indistinguishable from dating or obsessive crushing, even when sex isn’t involved. But when it comes to Jackie and Shauna, there is a physical component to their relationship. Jackie’s corpse convinces Shauna to put makeup on her — another way it’s socially acceptable and easy for young girls to have an excuse to touch each other’s faces, lips, etc. Jackie tells Shauna Jeff only had sex with her because Jackie made Shauna into someone else by doing her makeup, telling her how to dress. (Again, this would just be Shauna’s subconscious/deep-rooted insecurities telling her this, not actual Jackie who is dead.) “You only had sex with him because you wanted to imagine being me,” Jackie says. And maybe part of that is possible or maybe Shauna having sex with Jeff is the closest thing to having sex with Jackie. And you can’t tell me that eating Jackie’s ear doesn’t have an undercurrent of physical intimacy to it either.
Speaking of, the braiding and makeup sesh quickly takes a devilish turn when Jackie offers up a piece of her flesh to Shauna. “You’re hungry,” Jackie says, holding a knife to her arm. Shauna says Mari’s making stew. “That’s not what you’re hungry for,” Jackie adds, and it must be said that Ella Purnell is really nailing the horror performance this year in a way she didn’t really get to do last season, but hey, playing the imagined ghost of a dead girl interlocutor against the living girl who’s imagining her is going to indeed require some edge. She’s definitely rising to the occasion. She cuts a chunk of her arm away, despite Shauna’s protests, and then says, quietly and emphatically, “You’re the one holding the knife.”
It’s really perfect fractured-reality horror. We know as viewers that Shauna is the one cutting into Jackie, but it’s still affecting to see it revealed to Shauna as we cut to her and indeed see her holding the knife, her butcher talents newly applied to her dead best friend’s forearm.
Some teen girls are angsty because they’re talking to their dead best friend in a shed in the wilderness, and some teen girls are angsty because they’re pretty sure their parents are murderers. Shauna’s daughter Callie is choosing to intentionally fracture her reality by hitting the vape. “What if I wanna vape until my head falls off?” she asks her boyfriend dramatically. She’s mad that her parents are liars, that they only care about themselves, that she no longer has any real way to manipulate either of them into getting what she wants. She moodily breaks up with her boyfriend, and the poor guy just wanted to eat some pancakes with her!
Shauna is trying with Callie. She asks her to go to the mall, to go on a walk, anything for them to spend time together, she’s growing up fast. Callie wants nothing to do with her, because she refuses to accept that having a mom who has impulsive affairs and also impulsively murders as something Cool and Hot and instead sees it as Boring and Bad (I’m jk).
Later, when Kevin Tan shows up on Shauna’s doorstep, Callie eavesdrops as Kevin interrogates her mother. It’s casual, at first, Kevin asking if Shauna knows of Adam Martin, a local artist who has been missing. She feigns ignorance until he shows her a picture and she says, oh yes, she does remember him, because they got in a fender bender together. The tension ramps up when Kevin notes that there are records of a lot of texts between the two of them. Callie swoops in and says it’s time to go to the mall, effectively saving Shauna from things getting worse. But once he’s gone, Callie asks her mother why she lied to the police, and Shauna says cops are sexist in this town and would never have believed it was just an affair. “So you lied to be feminist?” Callie asks, with perfect delivery. No, Shauna corrects, she did it so that everyone in town doesn’t find out she cheated on Jeff. She says she’s protecting him. Which is a little bit true, but Shauna’s also just protecting herself. “Callie? Cals?” she says just as Callie is about to do one of her stompy teenage exits. Callie turns, perhaps hoping that her mother will finally say something she can believe or something that indicates she’s thinking about her in all of this. “At least go out the back in case he’s still out there.”
the only reason I’m including this screencap is because this whole scene I kept shouting WHY???? @ Shauna spending so much time shaping a burger patty with a spatula. I think Shauna really only excels at cooking when it’s uhhhh let’s go with…gamier.
Shauna is failing at parenthood and at murder cover-up these days. It must be said that she and Jeff are wildly bad at being inconspicuous. Shauna, for all her other questionable qualities, has never been good at lying. We saw this time after time in season one (who can forget that call to Pratt?!). Shauna and Jeff had sex in a potential crime scene. They’re not good at this! Mainly because they’re more focused on repairing their marriage than on covering up the murder, and it’s creating domestic chaos to the point where their teen daughter’s angst might become their undoing. Callie goes to a bar with her friend and ends up flirting with a much older man, who not only has questionable midday drink choices (Fireball?!) but who is also an undercover cop. He’s Kevin’s new partner, and he’s extremely not supposed to be undercover or buying alcohol for a high school girl, but he pretty easily gets it out of Callie that Shauna was indeed having an affair. It’s sad, because Callie’s initial motive is just trying to rebel against her parents by engaging in risky behavior but then she genuinely feels a point of connection with this guy about family shit. Little does she know he’s just some stupid cop who’s fucking with her to get to her mother, a fact Callie would surely hate.
The sleepwalking is getting more dangerous for Taissa in both timelines. Van wakes up to find Teen Tai missing, somehow cutting free of her rope. When she tracks her down, Tai is walking urgently through the freezing woods, following something. It’s the return of the eyeless man, one of several terrifying images that briefly pops up in the episode. We see him from behind at first, and then he turns. WHO THE FUCK IS THE EYELESS MAN AND WHAT DOES HE REPRESENT?
The eyeless man technically predates the plane crash. We learned back in season one that Taissa’s grandmother perhaps envisioned an eyeless man when she was on her death bed, hauntingly screaming “don’t take my eyes!” during an episode Tiny Taissa was there to witness. I do think it’s possible that the trauma of the plane crash has made Teen Taissa start seeing a version of what was easily her earliest major fright. I myself have had some of my childhood recurring nightmares resurface during stressful times as an adult. Running for public office often entails a lot of sleep deprivation and skipping meals due to hectic schedules, and it’s possible the campaign activated the part of Taissa’s subconscious tethered to her time in the wilderness, thereby resurrecting the eyeless man in her adulthood (by my memory, we’ve only seen Adult Tai see him once, when she was supposed to be announcing she was quitting the campaign but instead didn’t in season one).
That’s my attempt at trying to logically explain what might be inexplicable. Van thinks Tai should talk to Lottie about what’s going on, and we see a continuation of the conflict between them at the end of last season: Van is a believer, and Tai is not. This’ll likely be their undoing as a couple, but it makes sense that they’re both making compromises in what they do or don’t believe when it comes to Lottie’s visions and rituals, because I think the thought of having to go through all this without the other is the scariest option.
The divides between Teen Lottie’s followers and her skeptics are deepening. Nat watches from the cabin as Travis talks to Lottie, getting closer to her. When they head out to hunt, Travis notes that Nat missed the blessing. “That tea is just a symbol,” Travis says, adding “Everyone has their role.” He could be right. Lottie’s blood tea and her rituals do seem to serve a purpose for some of them, Van included. It’s something to latch onto. But as with a lot of religion, this could be a dangerous loyalty that’s forming between Lottie and the others. If Travis and Van place Lottie on too high of a pedestal, things will slip quickly into cult power structures. And my guess is that they’re going to need to act more like a collective than a cult if they’re going to get out of here intact. But, as we well know, the ones who do get out of the wilderness eventually are indeed not totally intact.
On that note, Adult Taissa is unraveling, her symptoms worsening. She chugs endless Nespressos in an attempt to stay awake, but we know this isn’t sustainable and, if anything, is just going to again bring her closer to that headspace of being back in the wilderness, being exhausted and overstressed and out of control. That’s a surefire recipe to actually conjure the eyeless man, not banish him. I’m convinced what Taissa needs is sleep. A sequence of her throwing back espressos, working out, and generally trying to punch her way out of this ends with her exhausted in front of a mirror, her reflection moving on its own to stare her down. Again, this episode is scary as hell! That moment is so subtle but so good, just the tiniest fracture to reality that sends a shiver down the spine.
Another haunting image comes later, after Sammy shows up at Taissa’s house claiming to have walked all the way from school. Taissa calls Simone right away to let her know he’s there, but when Simone shows up, Sammy’s gone, his bedroom window open. They search for him, but as they’re driving, they get a call from his school saying they need to come pick him up. He has been there all day. The scenes between Taissa and Sammy from earlier in the episode play again in montage, this time without Sammy there. It’s another example of how just the slightest shift can unnerve, much like the moment in the mirror. Sometimes, horror takes the form of a presence, a monster, a loud sound, a disturbance, a man without eyes. Sometimes, horror takes the form of absence. What isn’t there can disturb as viscerally as what is. Sammy’s absence in these repeated scenes is so evocative, so destabilizing. This show constantly fucks with the realities and perceptions of its characters, and this episode does it strikingly well.
Shortly after the reveal that Sammy was never with her, something shifts in Taissa. It’s quick, subtle. But before we can get a grasp on what exactly is happening — Has she fallen asleep at the wheel and become her possessed self? Is she just sleep deprived and not paying attention? — a truck slams into their car on Simone’s side. Now, I’ve gone back and watched this moment a few times, and to me it does indeed look like Taissa is possessed and purposefully got hit by the truck. She seems to notice the oncoming vehicle, accelerate, and then smirk, as if to say oh you think something’s wrong with me? Well I’ll show you just how wrong. It definitely seems like something much more disquieting than just exhaustion-derived inattention is happening here. It seems like whoever or whatever is possessing Taissa wants to hurt Simone.
“maybe I would be less UPSET if our million dollar townhouse had BETTER LIGHTING”
Over on the commune, Adult Lottie and Adult Nat’s plotline also delivers an incredible horror sequence. In a bit of exposition, we learn that the last Nat heard of Lottie, she was still institutionalized. This might explain why no one suspected Lottie of sending the postcards in season one, but it still seems a stretch she wouldn’t be mentioned at all — all in service of the finale mic drop of “who the fuck is Lottie Matthews.” In any case, perhaps Shauna, Nat, and Taissa all wrote Lottie off in their minds the second she was taken to a psych ward, an unfortunately all too real thing people do to their mentally unwell friends!
Lottie explains to Nat that what she witnessed in the woods at the end of last episode wasn’t some demonic ritual of burying a man alive but rather a therapeutic treatment, one of many offered at the commune, where Lottie also specifies everyone is wearing heliotrope, not purple. Indeed, Lottie seems to be detached from reality in the sense that she’s a wealthy and powerful cult leader masquerading as a healer. Nat clocks her Rolex. When Lisa (Nicole Maines!) approaches Lottie with a smoothie, she’s deferential, eager to please. Lottie rejects the smoothie on the basis of it containing maca root. Simone Kessell nails these comedic flourishes, but for now I’m having a little bit of difficult reconciling this version of Lottie with the past.
Lottie says she sent her people to keep an eye on Nat after Travis died, worried something might happen to her. Later in the episode, Lottie tells Nat that Travis called her on the night he died. Is it possible Lottie is still having visions that foretell death, the way she did as a teen with Laura Lee (and Van, who didn’t die completely but was unconscious for some time after the wolf attack). She doesn’t indicate if so, but given Nat’s continued skepticism of her, I doubt she’d tell Nat the reason her people kicked down that door and the reason she knew Travis was in trouble was actually because she had one of her visions.
In any case, according to Lottie, Travis told her the wilderness had come back to haunt him and that the only way to defeat it would be to find out what it wants. He was convinced the only way to do that was to have a near-death experience. Lottie says she talked him down from this but that she fell asleep. When she woke up, he was gone, had left instructions for how to get into his bank account and the note for Nat from last season that said TELL NAT SHE WAS RIGHT. Lottie tracked Travis down at the barn, finding him rigged by his neck to the crane. His plan was to just lose consciousness for a few seconds. Lottie tells him she’ll help, taking the remote. But after he raises himself, the buttons get stuck. She can’t get him down.
“Travis fucking died because the buttons got stuck?” Nat says.
She adds: “I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”
And indeed, we see the full extent of the terror of that night, the ghost Lottie leaves out in her retelling to Nat. As Travis is suspended in the air, lifeless, someone stumbles barefoot toward them. It’s Laura Lee, in her nightgown, clutching her teddy bear Leonard. Lottie is frozen in horror, and this version of Laura Lee opens her mouth in a scream, her face crumbling, the sound emanating from her inhuman and indelible. It reminds me of the moment from The Haunting of Hill House when Hugh’s mouth stretches open too long and releases a droning sound. It’s classic haunting horror, something familiar and perhaps even comforting distorted with monstrous details. The past doesn’t just come back to haunt Lottie here, but to hurt her.
“HAS ANYONE SEEN MY LOTION?”
“Every time that you try to save someone, bad shit happens,” Nat says. I have to imagine we have yet to see the full extent of that play out in the past timeline.
Teen Nat also tries to take matters into her own hands when she feels Teen Lottie is leading people astray. She’s frustrated with Lottie for giving Travis hope about Javi, whose likelihood of survival is so very slim. So when Nat and Travis go their separate ways during a hunt, Nat pulls out the shorts she stole out of Javi’s suitcase earlier, cuts her own leg so she can mark them with blood, tears them, and holds them up for Travis to see when they reunite. When they return to the cabin, Lottie says she can still feel that Javi is alive, but Nat shuts her down. She believes she’s doing what’s ultimately best for Travis, giving him some semblance of closure, when in reality there might not ever be real closure. We might not ever see Javi’s body.
But meanwhile, a lantern has gone missing, and someone, as Tai eloquently puts it “took a shit in the pee bucket” (I do love that we’re continuing to explore some of the grosser realities of wilderness survival). Is Javi somehow managing to live among them but unseen? And I don’t mean that in a supernatural way, though a part of me does indeed have Haunting of Hill House on the brain thanks to that Laura Lee demon-ghost moment, and the episode where young Nell disappears in plain sight comes to mind. Is there a cellar or some other space the group isn’t aware of that Javi could be holing up in? Could he have seen what happened at the Doomcoming-gone-wrong last season even though Shauna told him to run and it made him too scared of the girls to show his face around them? How devastating it would be for Travis if Javi has been right under his nose all this time. If Javi does manage to survive, then it’s going to absolutely fuck up his relationship with Nat.
For now though, the release of knowing Javi’s fate — as devastating as it might be — does unlock something between Travis and Nat again. The two have sex in the cabin, but as we dip into Travis’ perspective, things quickly take a turn for the strange and surreal. He keeps imagining Nat as Lottie and then Lottie as a second presence alongside Nat. Bursts of images puncture their sex, pockets of light also erupt through, much like Travis’ vision last episode of the hollowed-out tree trunk. Do Travis and Lottie have some sort of psychic connection? While it begins tenderly and Nat seems oblivious to any corporeal or psychic intervention, it’s difficult not to place this sex scene in conversation with the scene from “Doomcoming” in which the girls all swirl around Travis seductively and then quickly devolve into violence, hunting him. The eerie, quick movement of a body in a nightgown departing the room at the end of the sequence ranks among the many skin-crawling frights in the episode, brief and quiet as it may be.
“hey, me and my mind’s eye telepathically saw you from across the cabin and really dig your vibe. can we buy you a blood tea?”
And now it is time for us to sink our teeth into the most grisly parts of this intense, horror-packed episode. There is the issue of Jackie’s body, still frozen like a snapshot in the clothes she wore when she died. Now, she’s also made up with braids and lip gloss. The girls have been moving in a wide berth around Shauna, letting her have her imagined conversations with Jackie, giving her space. But when Tai discovers Jackie’s body, she freaks out.
“And you’ve been posing her, right? Adjusting her limbs like some fucked up doll?” Tai hurls at Shauna, whose embarrassment, guilt, and devastation here is so difficult to watch. Lottie attempts to defend Shauna: “She was her best friend, Tai.” But Taissa says it has to stop, for the good of Shauna and for the good of the baby, prompting Shauna to scream: “Like any of you know what’s good for the baby.” She’s right. No one out here knows the first fucking thing about pregnancy, about childbirth. Shauna is alone in this experience, and when she clings to the memory of Jackie, she’s clinging to not just that formative friendship but to do a time when she did not have something growing inside her.
The ground is frozen solid, so Taissa proposes they cremate Jackie. The girls assemble a pyre. When Jackie’s placed upon it, Akilah wonders if they should keep her clothes. The thought of stripping Jackie naked feels gauche, but they could use her jacket. Shauna swoops in to shut it down though; no one is taking Jackie’s clothes. “Now you’re her protector?” Mari asks. “Too little too late.” It’s a low blow, but Mari is the resident mean girl in the woods.
In truth, Shauna only doesn’t want them to remove Jackie’s clothes because then they’ll see she cleaved a piece of Jackie’s arm, a gash that Lottie notices but says nothing about, removing Jackie’s necklace and placing it around Shauna’s neck. And so the necklace moves once more. It’s an important artifact, because we know that the girl hunted in the series’ opening scene was wearing it.
Shauna lights the pyre after a brief eulogy: “Jackie, I’ll never have another friend like you. I just don’t even know where you end and I begin. I’m sorry, and I love you.”
While Nat and Travis have sex, Jackie is burning. But some unseen force extinguishes the candles around them, and then we’re outside, high in the air, in the perspective of some sort of other invisible force, a strong wind perhaps, or something more mystical. We’ve seen this point of view before, in season one when a gust of wind blew into the attic and extinguished the flames during the seance, something seemingly entering Lottie. This time, the gust knocks over a bunch of frozen branches and snow, falling onto Jackie’s body. Suddenly, she isn’t being burned; she’s being barbecued, the flames beneath her becoming coals.
A really great piece about the recurring themes of Greek and Roman myths and literature came out this week, and I highly recommend giving it a read, especially as it relates to this episode’s final scene. In it, Sakhi Thirani breaks down the images and sequences that evoke Dionysian rites throughout season one. In my recap of “Doomcoming” last season, I wrote a bit about the girls’ resemblance of maenads, the wild women who performed erotic and wicked rituals to worship Dionysus, and this piece delves into that much further. It’s a great read, one that connects the show’s internal and external expressions of horror and brutality.
In addition to a tongue-in-cheek play on Greek mythology in this episode’s title — “Edible Complex” — this final sequence is overt in its evocations of ancient literature and religious rites. Everyone wakes up to the smell of Jackie’s cooking corpse. They wanted outside. Shauna approaches first, the others looking at her, as if for a cue. “She wants us to,” Shauna says.
We dip then into a fantasy sequence of everyone sitting at an elaborate table, preparing for a feast. Everyone is adorned in white tunics, in gold crowns. Their chalices overflow with wine. When Shauna reaches for a juicy strawberry, it’s the cue everyone has been looking for. Everyone eats ravenously, peeling flesh from bone in the reality-based scenes, and stuffing their faces with fruit and roasted meat in the fantasy scenes, which are spliced together to great effect. It means we don’t have to sit inside of the horror of the cannibalism the whole time, the fantasy offering reprieve but also, in some ways, an even more macabre way of ingesting this scene. Again, there’s that fractured reality, that sense that for as lavish and lovely as the Greek feast looks, it’s deceptively wicked. In a particularly gruesome aerial shot, we see them all picking at the body and know well that there will be nothing of Jackie left.
Coach Ben ends up being our audience surrogate here, not only not participating in the act but also fearful of it. He backs away slowly. He missed the bacchanalian chaos of Doomcoming night; he hasn’t yet seen the girls at their wildest. He slams the door on the horror, but it’s not like he can ever unsee it — neither can we.
Something that that piece on Greek mythology x Yellowjackets captures so well is the fact that a lot of behavior on the show is uncategorizable and difficult to make sense of. Thirani writes of the show: “It discomforts viewers through its intense intertextual layers and defiance of the rigid parameters that typically prevail in remakes. Here, the remake is of a Greek myth whose very essence centers on rule-breaking and abandon.” The splicing together of reality and fantasy, the invoking of a Greek feast of glutton and indulgence discomforts indeed. And while structured and coherent in its storytelling, Yellowjackets doesn’t follow strict rules. Do the girls eat Jackie in a moment of intense hunger and desperation? I don’t really think so. It isn’t that simple; it isn’t that logical. There’s hive mind at play, the team looking to Shauna in this moment, her status as pregnant almost giving her this maternal role. According to her, they eat Jackie because Jackie wants them to.
The teen versions of Shauna, Lottie, Nat, and Taissa are all hypercritical of each other’s methods and beliefs in the woods, but they’re also all cut from the same cloth, all trying to make some semblance of order where there is none, acting impulsively and erratically as they try to make sense of the senseless. Nat’s dismissive of Lottie, but can she really claim her decision to fabricate Javi’s death scene is a superior choice? Taissa won’t let Van talk to Lottie, to the detriment of her relationship. Shauna listens to the phantom final gasp of her dead best friend, all in her imagination, and convinces an entire group to eat a body without much thought for what it really means. This core four all have a different idea of how to survive, but can any of them really claim to have all the answers?
Eating Jackie doesn’t seem like an act of survival; it seems like an act of debauchery. After all, they’re not just eating her; they’re feasting on her. The only adult present — the only vestige of an old order — exists on the outside of this, every bit as hungry as they are but terrified to his core of what he’s seeing.
Last Buzz: