“Yellowjackets” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Old Wounds”

There’s a scene in this episode of Yellowjackets (Season 2, Episode 4) where teenage Taissa and Van are wandering around a narrow patch of woods, the same patch they’ve spent the whole day exploring. They’re searching for another tree with that now-familiar symbol carved into it, because Taissa has discovered a double-digit number of them while sleepwalking. Van has mapped their locations out and discovered that, when the dots are connected, they’re arranged in the shape of that same symbol. So there’s gotta be one last tree in this specific area in order to complete the pattern, there’s just gotta be! But try as they might, they can’t finish the picture. 

Okay, fine — they discover Travis’s long-lost kid brother Javi, mute but otherwise miraculously unharmed after months in the freezing wilderness, giving Van the proof she needs that Taissa, like Lottie, is psychically attuned to…whatever it is that’s going on out there. But shhhh, I’m trying to make a point here, which is this: Like the map that drove Taissa and Van’s seemingly pointless search for the missing symbol, I feel like Yellowjackets is an incomplete picture. I keep seeing what it’s supposed to be, recognizing exactly where it needs to go to fully flesh things out and become what it’s meant to become, but dammit, it never quite connects that last dot.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Yellowjackets season two for Decider.

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