Even in the present, the show’s historic weak spot, the material improves a great deal now that Shauna finally comes out and says the obvious truth: Misty and Lottie are a murderer and a cult leader respectively and have no business being around her and her teenage daughter. Van and Tai’s goofy waiter storyline also gets a much-needed shot of adrenaline when it gets connected to the No-Eyed Man and the wilderness mythos instead of just dangling there as a story of yet another poor sap who winds up dead because he encountered the Yellowjackets. In both cases, it feels like writers Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson stood behind their own show and gave it a good hard shove, forcing it out of the mud it had been stuck in.

But there’s one last observation to make, and it’s about what wasn’t in this episode. It’s easy to forget just how much crazy shit has happened on Yellowjackets, because Yellowjackets itself seems to forget from time to time. Remember how Shauna’s murdered lover Adam Martin was all mysterious because he had no online presence whatsoever? What happened there? Remember how Walter framed that murder on Shauna’s cop classmate Kevyn, whom he murdered in turn? Has anyone in the Shipman family mentioned how they owe their continued freedom to some lunatic friend of Misty’s they’d never met before? This is the problem with mystery-box storytelling, where you open three doors for every one you close. It’s easy to get, well, lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of 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!)

I came into the Yellowjackets season finale expecting it to be brutal. Well, it was brutal alright, just not in the way I hoped it would be. Folks, we need to talk about needledrops, specifically all the ones on this show. Simply put, Yellowjackets has the worst music supervision on television, and it’s fucking the rest of the show up, bad.

Seriously. “Zombie” by the Cranberries as everyone staggers back to the cabin with Javi’s corpse in tow, eyes glassy, completely drained, shuffling around like, you guessed it, zombies. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead as Natalie hallucinates being back on the crashing plane as she dies from an accidental lethal injection by Misty before, you guessed it, fading out. “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the most overused music cues of the past two decades (which should have been retired after its pitch perfect usage by Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko), as the surviving kids stand outside their burning cabin, looking forward to a future of, you guessed it, killing people under the moonlight. 

Every song is hugely famous already, carrying tons of preexisting emotional weight, and used to the most literal effect possible, like a sort of musical Cliff’s Notes for what’s happening and how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s all so blunt, so artless. It makes Stranger Things sound like The Sopranos. (Nora Felder, who took over from Euphoria’s Jen Malone on music supervision duties this season, also handled Stranger Things, to which I can only say no shit.)

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Decider. Woof.

This is all terrific stuff, frankly. (Kudos to writers Sarah L. Thompson and Liz Phang; writers are responsible for all your favorite shows and deserve fair treatment and fair pay!) It really, really is about time that Yellowjackets got around to portraying its teenage characters as feral cannibals in the making; as I hoped and predicted, the combination of Shauna’s baby dying in the past and the whole gang reuniting in the present has marked a turning point for the show. None of them will ever be able to walk back what they were planning to do, and what they’re going to do instead. It’s the hidden shame beneath every interaction the adult characters have had.

I reviewed today’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

New theme song! Gutting secret confessions! Intense grief! Thwarted suicide attempt! Hallucinatory parrot-based musical theater interlude! Multiple total breaks with reality! Savage Fight Club–style beatdown! Gahhh, there’s so much to talk about in Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 7…and it’s thanks to the work of writers Rich Monahan and Liz Phang that we get to watch and talk about any of it at all. The union writers of the WGA deserve to be paid and treated fairly by the major studios — surely not even the Antler Queen herself would be evil enough to disagree with that!

At any rate, last week I speculated that in simultaneously reuniting all the known survivors in the past and killing Shauna’s baby in the present, Yellowjackets may have reached a major inflection point, moving from being one kind of show into being something else. I think the new version of the theme song — quieter, more somber, and performed by Alanis Morrisette — may be an indication that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and showrunner Jonathan Lisco agree. You can’t do either those things and then go on as if two major, major milestones haven’t been reached, and now passed.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Yellowjackets, which I thought was pretty darn good, for Decider.

It feels like Yellowjackets is about to change, and for the better. In fact, maybe it’s already happened. In Season 2 Episode 6 (“Qui”), momentous events take place in both the present and the past. In the former, the gang’s all here: Shauna, Taissa, Misty, Natalie, Van, and Lottie end the episode face to face for the first time in 25 years, each bearing the weight of her own secrets and regrets; the unspecified terrible things they did in the woods loom over them like a threatening wave. 

And in the past, the moment the survivors have waited for for months has finally arrived: Shauna gives birth. A full episode passes before we really learn how that birth turns out. It’s another point of no return.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

So yeah, I worry that the show’s eyes are too big for its stomach. You can really feel the creakiness around some of these storylines, and because of their sheer number and variety, the creaky storylines are going to vary from viewer to viewer. Some people don’t give a shit about the survival horror or the supernatural stuff, while for others that’s the main draw. Some don’t care about the adult stuff compared to the teenage stuff, while for others the draw of the legendary ‘90s stars as grownups will outweigh the young unknowns. Some will like the comedic bits, some will think they’re in the way. Everyone will find certain characters more compelling than others. Everyone will prefer certain casting decisions (Lauren Ambrose as Van is dynamite) to others (Simone Kessell has none of her younger counterpart Courtney Eaton’s damaged, blank-eyed magnetism as Lottie). Some people adore the big obvious ‘90s needledrops (4 Non Blondes! Danzig!), while others think the whole I Love the ‘90s thing is, ahem, overblown. 

Me, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking I wish the hyperactive score by Theodore Shapiro, Craig Wedren, and Anna Waronker would just shut the fuck up for a few minutes, allowing the tension, the dread, the quiet isolation of the woods to build. And that’s a decent stand-in for my problem with the whole thing. Pare back. Let stuff breathe. Let stuff be.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Yellowjackets Season Two for Decider.

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.

On Yellowjackets, the present-day material functions like training wheels. Interested in a survival-horror story about cannibalistic ‘90s teenage girls lost in a haunted no-man’s-land, but afraid things might get too spooky and you’ll fall and scrape your psychological knees? Don’t worry! The comedic shenanigans of present-day Shauna, Misty, and Natalie will keep you nice and steady if things get too intense. 

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

The best episode of Yellowjackets since the very earliest episodes? The best episode of Yellowjackets since the pilot itself? An argument can be made, for sure. “Edible Complex” is fast-paced, frequently disturbing, and most importantly, deadly serious for about 85 percent of the time. It’s the Yellowjackets I want, for the most part.

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

Yellowjackets sold something I wasn’t buying. The breakout Showtime hit — not a phrase you hear everyday in this Netflix/HBO dominated landscape, which explains the network renewing it for not one but two additional seasons after its initial run ended — seemed, from its harrowing and horrifying cold open anyway, to be a story of survival horror among a late-‘90s high school girls soccer team stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash. The Terror starring girls who probably have a favorite Smashing Pumpkins song? Now that’s a show I can do business with.

The bifurcated thing we got instead, however, was not really what I was in the market for. Don’t get me wrong, I adore much of the work of the adult cast, whose job it is to chronicle the lives of the survivors in the present day. Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis? The stars of Heavenly Creatures, Speed Racer, and Natural Born Killers, very literally on my ballot for the best movies ever made? How could you possibly go wrong?

Oh gosh, let me count the ways. While the teenage material more or less stayed true to the promise of the concept — increasing desperation, clandestine sexuality, teenage betrayals, drug trips, incredibly disgusting self-administered amateur surgery, the establishment of a folk-horror cannibal cult at some point — the adult segments of the show became bogged down in schtick. Suddenly characters whose journey into murderousness you’re supposed to treat as deadly serious when they’re kids start offing people for black-comedy punchlines, deflating any sense of moral urgency. How are we supposed to take their moral conflict seriously, when the show very literally cracks jokes about them murking people and covering it up in the here-and-now?

I reviewed the Season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets, which I’ll be covering all season, for Decider.