This article contains spoilers through the end of Yellowjackets Season 2.
A funny thing can happen to a hit show when it’s no longer the hot new thing on television. If such a series manages to produce more seasons, it often becomes weirder, stranger, and more specific, narrowing its appeal rather than attempting to maintain its wider following. Twin Peaks moved beyond probing its central mystery and into exploring the dream logic of its titular town. Lost introduced time travel and a pair of demigods. Person of Interest became a meditation on the post-9/11 surveillance state, transcending its network-procedural DNA.
Yellowjackets, whose third season premiered last Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime, fits that mold to an extent. The series, about a high-school girls’ soccer team stranded in the woods after a plane crash, became a word-of-mouth, Emmy-nominated hit during its first season by attracting many different types of audiences. Fans of mystery-box shows pondered whether Yellowjackets’ setting was paranormal. Horror enthusiasts enjoyed the gnarly thrills and gory deaths. People who liked teen soaps could immerse themselves in the show’s exploration of girlhood. Plus, every episode welcomed obsessive theorizing by unfolding via two timelines: The first, set in the late 1990s, followed the characters’ struggle for survival. The other, set in the present day, depicted them as haunted, paranoid adults trying to move on from their shared past.
But in its latest season, Yellowjackets seems less concerned about servicing every kind of fan—perhaps in part because of the second season’s noticeable decline in buzz. In the four episodes I’ve screened, the drama is more playful, more ridiculous, and more eager to leave behind the events of Season 2. Rather than scrutinize the fallout from the finale’s cliffhanger, which ended with the characters losing their shelter at the height of winter, the first episode of Season 3 reveals that the teenagers have survived into the spring. Meanwhile, the present-day timeline ignores a previous subplot about a cult, and has the adults’ stories barreling toward new, convoluted twists. Yellowjackets is now built for—and deliberately toying with—the die-hard viewer who’s watching the show for its revelations, as silly as they may be. The opening scene this season embodies that ethos: The girls chase their teammate Mari (played by Alexa Barajas) through the woods, only for the hunt to be revealed as part of a game. This swerve teases those who have long suspected Mari to be the victim of the shocking, cannibalistic feast that kicked off the series premiere.
In other words, Yellowjackets has replaced some of its broader accessibility with a knotty, indulgent story—and a level of absurdity that would seem ridiculous were it not for the torment its characters have already suffered. The show has always explored hive-mind delusions, but Season 3 renders its ensemble numb to logic in the face of inexplicable occurrences. To that end, Yellowjackets’ new direction may disorient some returning viewers and resonate with others—especially the ones who might be feeling desensitized to seemingly nonsensical developments in the real world. The show doesn’t comment on modern-day politics or today’s headlines, but it captures the feeling of being inundated with surreal news. The result is a season that’s ludicrous in plot yet freshly unsettling in its portrayal of how people can become resigned to their fate.
Take the way most of the teens treat their circumstances: with a matter-of-fact, even dryly funny attitude. One of the lone male survivors, Travis (Kevin Alves), becomes afraid of the trees after hearing them “scream” while he’s on magic mushrooms, but much of the team waves off his concerns; they take screaming trees, imagined or otherwise, to be just another off-putting quirk of their surroundings. After Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) and two of her teammates have a shared hallucination, she refuses to acknowledge the violence that transpired within it. Mari copes with being trapped in a cave by singing Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” to herself, adjusting the lyrics to reflect her predicament. As always, Yellowjackets is full of mind-bending detours, supernatural gobbledygook, and foliage-laden costumes. But the teenagers are less willing than ever to fully process how peculiar their lives have become.
The present-day timeline similarly features characters struggling to engage with their reality. Rather than reckoning with her lover’s terminal-cancer diagnosis, Taissa (Tawny Cypress) begins searching for evidence of “the wilderness”—what she believes to be the supernatural entity behind the bizarre events the survivors endured. Misty (Christina Ricci), reeling from the death of Natalie (Juliette Lewis), drinks prodigious amounts of alcohol and behaves irresponsibly at her job. Each of the women wants to avoid what disturbs them, as encapsulated by a brief scene featuring Shauna (Melanie Lynskey): As her husband raises concerns about their daughter, who is acting out, Shauna nonchalantly grabs a bag of chips and begins munching on them, tuning him out.
These moments, which might read confusingly to a casual audience, come off like winks to the most dedicated Yellowjackets viewers, the ones who crave answers to the show’s puzzles. To the latter, watching Shauna blankly absorb an update about her daughter dumping a bag of animal guts onto a bully at school is both amusing and frustrating. Yet her response is also understandable: Shauna and the other survivors have endured more unimaginable horrors than they likely could ever process. They deserve a mental break.
Of course, Yellowjackets doesn’t keep its characters idle for long. At its center remains the mystery of whether the “wilderness” really is pulling the strings; the show also continues to examine how the girls’ friendships change in the woods, even after they’ve built a thriving camp. But if Yellowjackets was once, as my colleague Megan Garber wrote of the first season, a show “in which belief itself is a matter of life and death,” the series has renegotiated those stakes. Belief is no longer the problem the characters face; alarming threats and painful situations—whether they have supernatural causes or not—keep happening to them no matter what. The real question is whether they can find the strength to confront them.
