Stranded in a shitty motel room with her dad, Callie finally comes out and says what I wish the show itself had made up its mind about two seasons ago: Her mother, Shauna, is a bad person, capable of horrible crimes, including the disappearance of the two researchers and their guide during her time in the wilderness. Her dad, Jeff, would rather unconsciously scratch his skin raw than face facts. But in the meantime, Shauna’s parked outside a stranger’s house with a recently purchased Rambo knife. Callie has the right idea, I suspect.

I wish the show did. I wish Yellowjackets had the kind of faith in itself and its audience displayed by, well, any number of other shows about murderers, which didn’t feel the need to obscure its’ protagonists’ awfulness with zany mix-ups and Scooby Gang shenanigans. If adult Shauna had shown any signs of being a lastingly bad person, instead of an adorable housewife having a fling, back in Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 would have been a lot more interesting. Instead you get what we’ve got, which is a show in which half of the airtime feels like it’s being spent actively combatting the other half. Even the Yellowjackets know that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Fantastic stuff from top to bottom, really. Ben’s fate is bleaker and more brutal than anything I’d anticipated. His death gives several characters — Natalie, Misty, Shauna, Lottie, and Akilah, who’s now having stop-motion animation visions of three-eyed bear-wolf hybrids — their strongest material of the season. Sophie Thatcher in particular stands out as Natalie, whose very soul you can see buckling under the weight of all its been asked to endure. She makes the character as we come to know her later make sense, which hasn’t quite been possible in many other cases. 

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The problem is that Tai can’t go through with it, even while doing target practice by aiming at a frowny face on a tree. Van, who’s helping her practice, suggests they try to summon Tai’s dark side, which we haven’t seen anything of yet this season. First, they try summoning it with sexual energy: Van pins Tai against a tree face first and fingers her. (The sex scenes have gotten a lot more fucked up and hot this season for sure.) 

When that fails, they kill a rabbit caught in one of the girls’ traps, since the sinister spirit of the wilderness seems to frequently call for blood. In keeping with the show’s storied tradition of extremely nasty up-close survival violence, Tai slits the poor rabbit’s throat in full view of the camera, which lingers as the animal’s legs and paws frantically flail at the air in pain and terror. With Van’s encouragement, Tai narrates the entire process of the rabbit’s death. “I see its fear. I feel its breath … I smell its blood. I feel its heartbeat slowing. It’s calmer now.” To really be present with the fear and pain you’re inflicting on another living thing — more importantly, to force the audience to be present with it — makes for harrowing television.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The episode-length sequence is a flop for a variety of reasons. For starters, key members of the cast don’t seem to know how to act after such a radical tonal shift, though a few rise to the challenge. Sophie Thatcher maintains Natalie’s uneasy balance of responsibility and fear easily enough, and Sammi Hanratty really demonstrates her range as a righteously indignant and legalistically canny Misty; it makes you excited to see what the actor will do when given actual adult roles, and it’s my favorite work of Hanratty’s in the series so far.

As Coach Ben, Stephen Krueger is similarly compelling. Fully believing the girls will convict (and likely kill and eat) him no matter what he says or does, he therefore has no reason to lie, and is bracingly honest both about what he dislikes about his job, which he has never seen as a career, and what he loves about the girls, even though they’re a threat to his life. Emoting all of this through a layer of grime and beard is an impressive feat in and of itself, and it shows how crucial Krueger is to the flashback material.

But Jasmin Savoy Brown as the faux-D.A. and Sophie Nélisse as the chief hang-‘im-high juror flounder are speechifying and smirking and acting more or less like people reading the script of a courtroom drama out loud. Liv Hewson as the bailiff fares little better with the corny shit she’s forced to say to open the trial, but as her part is relatively minor it’s nowhere near as grating as Tai and Shauna’s flared-nostril rage against their assistant coach, who quite obviously did not burn their cabin down. They’re straight-up trying to kill him, just as he’s accused of trying to do to them. Misty does such a bang-up job of unpacking this, in fact, that it makes the eventual guilty verdict feel not so much as unjust as merely stupid.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Two of Yellowjackets’ greatest strengths are on display in this week’s episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben’s trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It’s the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself “It’s only make-believe,” for all the good it does you. Like all of the show’s makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it’s not really happening, it’s just very good practical effects, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It’s great stuff.

So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of ’90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that’s been dominated by “shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things” for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves. 

Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they’re in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the ‘burbs, it looks like they’re in the ‘burbs. There’s light and shadow and contrast. I’m not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it’s not meant to be: It’s meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets Season 3’s two-part premiere for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)