Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 3: Although not quite convoluted, this week’s episode of Paramount’s Yellowjackets certainly follows a haphazard back and forth. It’s not to say that it has been purposefully accentuated with a needlessly dazed narrative pattern. All I meant is that the arcane demons of our scarred protagonists have never kept a more opaque agenda, with a few exceptions here and there, of course.
Yet it is these woozily wayward idiosyncrasies that, albeit in a very questionable manner, blow the horns for the emergence of an ominous hope. In this predetermined duel betwixt nature and nurture, the former is likely to take the trophy home, and that too wearing its most ruthless demeanor.
Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 3 Recap:
The Wins And Losses Of Denial Are All The Same
I guess the crippling hangover of cannibalizing their friend isn’t easy for any of the surviving Yellowjackets to stomach. Take the time to relish the pun or hate me for it. Struggling the hardest at the dawn of the conceivably mauled corpse of Jackie is Tai. Turns out, she wasn’t particularly lucid when she was gorging on Jackie’s face.
And to Van’s acute agony, sleep-walking Tai is more functional than either one of them would’ve accepted. Aiming to make sure that Tai’s claim is true, Van voluntarily unshackles a flighty Tai in her sleep and follows her through the frozen woods to come to a tree with the symbol on it.
The man with no eyes first manifested to Tai when at a tremendously impressionable age, she watched her grandma take her last breath. Trauma or a serious case of being perpetually haunted by a rather grim materialization of the reaper himself? Well, isn’t that the ever-looming question that makes you come back every week?
Denial isn’t looking too good on Coach Ben, either. His severely starved state, afflicted tenfold by the aversion brought forth by the heinous sight of the feast he witnessed the other night has him bound to the bed, dreaming up the blithe life he came close to choosing.
Rather unappreciative of the cumin his boyfriend might or might not have added to the hopeful pot of chowder, closeted Ben wanted to confine himself within the barricade of lies that his life as a soccer coach had granted him.
As he now resides with the girls who, in his shaken conscious, appear to be rabid and frothing in their mouths, Ben weaves an alternate reality comforted in the safety of his lover’s arms. In that reality, Ben chose to live his truth, and only from a great, sighing distance got to know of the plane crash.
A Life Of Truth And A Life Of Settling Aren’t All That Different, Either
Lottie and Nat’s ever-progressive moral and metaphysical conflict is the only dynamic that is as steady in the present as it was in the evil wilderness. Lottie’s messiah act, however desperately sanctioned by most of the girls who absolutely need something to have faith in, is routinely rejected by Nat.
No amount of “blessed” blood tea can save her when she walks out into the wild to leave Jackie’s massacred remains in the plane. Nat’s suicidal inclination thrives through her contemplation of Jackie’s “luck” in being dead. And in a way, she holds it against Lottie in the present day for being nicked from the mouth of death by her followers. She couldn’t care less about the cult-ish instrument of emotional release that Lottie’s clan swears by, just as she shrugged off the good luck that Lottie wished to bless her with on her way to the plane.
Nat’s dismissal of Lottie’s schizo hijinks is challenged by a mightly horned boar ramming against the plane door only to disperse in thin air within the blink of an eye. And not too unlike the garish ordeal, Nat’s cynicism about Lottie’s spiritual competence is questioned when the girl Nat bashed up is made to let go of her anger and embrace the attacker.
As though losing the limb of innocence, there’s one thing that young Shauna had that has been barred from surfacing in the older her. In the dilapidated little hut, Shauna was the embodiment of remorse and the lack of self-awareness. The animalistic monstrosity that she is capable of terrifies Shauna about the safety of the child in her belly.
The terror ravaging within her only lets up when a makeshift baby shower is amused to find a surprisingly fantastic, albeit ironically hilarious, rendition of Sally Fields from Steel Magnolia.
Love And Fear Of Acceptance
Misty has been racking her brain, looking for Nat. Walter’s startling emergence in Misty’s already mazey life is nothing short of an enigma. But as it apparently is, or at least what Walter claims, he is only looking for a Sherlock to his Moriarty–an eccentric African Grey to his tepid life of riches.
Playing mouthpiece for the eruptive wackiness of Miss Quigley, Walter interrogates a shaky Randy in his boat while impersonating an FBI agent. He learns of the purple people who got done drinking all the Fanta from the motel vending machine. Coming up with a plan to track the credit card details of the purple-clad individuals is how Misty gets her hook further into the heart of her dicey admirer, who’s already enamored by her. But I wouldn’t trust Walter just yet.
A complete antithesis to Misty’s self-acceptance, Shauna has squeezed her very individuality out of herself to fit in a snug box of normalcy. The life of a housewife, playing a reliable mom to a teen, and a vanilla wife to the particularly boring Jeff was not supposed to be Shauna’s truth. Now that the truth of her innately violent and kinky personality is right in Jeff’s face, he gets an A for effort for even trying to be spontaneous by–wait for it–suggesting a long drive and butter churning.
Whether he can admit to it or not, Jeff is, in fact, married to someone far more vicious than Rambo, who can snatch the gun out of a tuppenny carjacker. Having her rusty van stolen is not what eats away at Shauna. It is being stopped from showing that the crook messed with the wrong soccer mom, which becomes a relentless earworm for Shauna.
I wonder what teen Shauna would’ve thought of her middle-aged self if she had witnessed her seeking out the thrill of danger, threatening to turn the dealership owner’s skin into fruit roll-ups, and getting her car back like a badass. Very questionable? Yes. An absolute goosebumps-inducing exhibition of Shauna’s grisly reality? Definitely.
Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 3 Ending, Explained:
What Does Lottie’s Vision Signify?
Her love for Simone is probably the truest thing about Tai’s current, disorderly life. Yet, I doubt that as she is looking at her wife in the hospital bed, Tai is wishing for her to wake up. What would she even say to Simone that wouldn’t make her take Sammy’s custody away?
“The bad one” appears to have taken over Tai’s world with a perceptible embodiment of what guides Tai in her darkest moment. There would be no knowing if she was even awake in the ladies’ room, facing the mirror. But her sinister subconscious orchestrating the symbol on her face does indicate that her life is only going to go off the rails.
Lottie may have just given what could be the most useful present for Shauna’s newborn. But sewing the symbol on the blanket does throw most of the girls off. It’s bizarre how Lottie found a cryptic symbol on a dead man and thought it up to be an emblem of protection. Before anyone can make their mind up about the questionable symbol, flocks of birds crash against the hut and bid their sweet goodbye to life.
Disease or a supernatural phenomenon? After the bear, the girls are done wondering as they drop the dead aerial offerings at their savior’s feet. Someone’s blessing is someone else’s curse. And as she drops the symbol-bearing blanket to the ground, Shauna rejects the hopeful spin Lottie is attempting to put on the terrifying event.
Seeing Lottie’s disconnected cabin, even amongst her trusted flock, doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in Nat, not that she had any, to begin with. In the ceaseless meadow of her cult, Lottie has rediscovered herself as the queen bee of her new hive–a sentiment further nourished by her cultivation of bees.
Perhaps to justify the sacrifices that may or may not have been done in her name, Lottie merges herself with the likes of the firstborn queen bees that sting unborn possibilities to death. To ascertain her position on the throne is how most people are likely to perceive the queen’s actions. But as Lottie insinuates her plea for everything vicious that the woods stand as a witness to, it’s not an exhibition of brutality, it’s only the natural order of things.
Her faulty notion of being in charge is threatened by the end of the episode when in her psychosomatic vision, Lottie comes to find her hives to be brutalized and the bees lying dead like the flock of birds that were hoarded before her. Her petrified look at the blood-soaked frame comb is rattled by a wicked omen spoken by one of her followers. “Il veut du sang”–which, when roughly translated, warns of the blood-offering demanded by an entity.
