Yellowjackets (Season 2), Episode 2: Recap & Ending, Explained

Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 2: If I said, “ah yes! There it is”, would you do me a solid and imagine an evil laugh as you read it? Because the time is ripe with heinous possibilities. And, boy, are we in for a nasty treat!

Giving its scandalously ambiguous parapsychological tropes a break for what I hope isn’t the first and the last time, episode 2 of the second season of Yellowjackets gives us quite a vulnerable peek at its infected truth.

The veils of sanity are slipping off in chorus with a more honest barbarity stipulated by the ominous wilderness. The more we know, the more we linger.

Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 2 Recap:

Not, NOT A Cult

As it turns out, Lottie did have Nat’s best interests in mind. However, the rescue and deliverance may have been less than desirable on the side of her followers. Traipsing Lottie’s sumptuous reign with people who trust her enough to be buried alive for rejuvenation, Nat asks after how Lottie got hold of Travis’ note that reads, “Tell Nat she was right.”

It’s been quite a bizarre turnaround for Lottie, who’s wiped off the traces of a life locked up in a mental health facility and now has a Rolex wrapped on her wrist. The scars of the woods, supernatural or not, have chased each survivor well into their life away from it all. Travis’ case was no different. Having his mind eviscerated by the darkness he believed was following him wasn’t easy on Travis.

And so he reached out to Lottie, the one woman who’s time and again been able to soothe him with just her hand on his chest. Yet, that seemed to have lost its effect when it was needed the most. Travis was convinced that the answers and the confrontation were rooted in the edge of life and death. And that’s the state of being he wanted to attain when he ran off to his ranch and risked his very life in the process of getting closer to the truth.

Seeing as she had no persuasive words at her disposal, Lottie went along with Travis’ suicidal endeavor and held on to the switch, planning to haul him down the moment he lost consciousness. But fate had a different plan. Or perhaps it was the ulterior design of whatever had been following the survivors around to get Travis to the edge of the cliff.

Clicking the switch repeatedly did nothing to bring a suspended Travis down to the ground, and Lottie had no choice but to see him be the victim of his own doing. As she was about to flee the scene after packing up the candles Travis had lit following the symbol they’d learned of in the woods, Lottie was met with a ghost from her past, a girl whose death she had foreseen in the most peculiar context of being baptized.

Wild Wild Wilderness

Blood-infused tea seems to be a hit amongst the believers, one of whom, Travis, is of the belief that he and Nat can split up and that he’s able to keel over a game, given he finds one, with his bare hands. But it isn’t the game Travis is out freezing his limbs off for. He’s looking for Javi, a search that Nat believes will only be detrimental to the anguished older brother, and therefore, she’s come up with a plan of her own.

It wasn’t an easy resolve for Nat to fool her boyfriend with a pair of trousers she stole from Javi’s stash to ravage, soak with her own blood, and present to Travis as his last straw that would end his self-harming search. No wonder that right before his demise, Travis was of the idea that Nat would only make things worse had she known of his predicament.

How Tai had ever convinced herself not to seek help is beyond me, considering even in the woods, she has strangely gotten herself free of the cord Van had her tethered to and was almost about to plunge to her death while sleepwalking. The terror of her demon being back to plague her sucks Tai into a vicious cycle of desperately caffeinating herself to keep vigil and naturally dozing off in between. The ardent truthteller who didn’t flinch at the idea of calling out someone for anomalous behavior is now lying to herself about her fractured state of mind every sleeping and waking moment.

We Need To Talk About Shauna

It’s no fiction that having your back to the wall is a sure way to evoke the wildest, boorish proclivities. Hence, it’s of no shock that hiding away in the shack with the frozen frame of her dead best friend is when Shauna gets to evade the confining eyes of normalcy and take off her civilized facade.

Consuming her ear only seems to have infused Shauna with the mirage of Jackie’s consciousness, with whom she talks her heart out. Shauna’s psychotic tendencies hark out to be noticed when she puts makeup on dead Jackie and hides her lack of an ear with a braid. She isn’t done wanting to eat her either, considering she slices into Jackie’s frozen arm as though she were a block of ham.

The quick-on-her-feet Shauna that has replaced the jittery teen who could hardly speak up for herself finds it to be a cakewalk to lie to Kevyn when he shows up to ask a couple of routine questions about Adam’s disappearance. Albeit having known him all his life gives Shauna even more of an upper hand in the exchange, and Callie barging in with a distracting excuse only makes Kevyn bid his adieu before prodding her further.

Although it is likely to turn out bad for Shauna, that newly recruited cop Matt has taken a dicier and, frankly, unlawful way of getting to the truth by faking a meet-cute and seducing Callie.

Of Letting Go And Letting In

Not that Nat would be at her wit’s end to let Misty know that she’s okay, but in her defense, she hasn’t really had the chance either. But there’s no stopping Misty from nosing around whenever she gets a whiff of something shady going down. The person on her online portal of citizen detectives that claims to have a way to access Nat’s motel’s security footage is also the same person who’s joined two to two and come up with the theory that Adam’s girlfriend must’ve had something to do with him going AWOL.

Misty isn’t too keen on accepting help from a stranger who can hold her accountable for a crime she’s gotten smack dab in the middle of, but she can resist him either, especially when he shows up at her workplace and leaves behind a note with invisible ink. Checks all the freaky boxes for Misty, I’d say.

Shauna couldn’t possibly hope to keep her outlandish dynamic with the corpse of her dead best friend from seeing the light of day. Causing a sincerely concerned ruckus over finding a dolled-up Jackie in the shed, Tai has her fangs out against the creepiness Shauna has been up to. Although she’s initially resistant and sympathetic towards Shauna, Lottie can’t say no to it when pragmatic Tai proposes that they cremate Jackie.

Holding back her cannibalistic expression of it, Shauna’s aching love for her best friend is perhaps the most poignantly raw emotion that peeks through as she gives her heartfelt eulogy and lights the wood beneath Jackie on fire. Grief manifests in the strangest ways. In the case of Travis, who’s made to accept the scarring loss of her father, his grief finds its hedonistic channel through sex with the closest possible option, Nat. But the girl on his mind, as bizarre as it may be, is Lottie.

Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 2 Ending, Explained:

Was The Group Feasting On A Corpse A Supernatural Event?

Having its prey snatched right out of its mouth hasn’t the vicious backwoods all that happy. The danger they were relieved to leave behind didn’t, for once, relinquish its authority over the survivors. The first to go was Travis, as though death was following him all along. The second to be afflicted is Tai, who, whether it is by the sinister hauntings of the woods or her wretched mental state, has been sinking in the quicksand of complete devastation.

When her son walks from school and shows up at her home, Tai is comforted by the thought that the little kid, however, disturbed, misses his mother. But at the same time, she knows that she stands to lose the battle of custody in the event that it does get there if she fails to let Simone know of Sammy’s presence at her place. Being chockful of caffeine does nothing to keep Tai from drowsing off when Simone shows up to pick up Sammy.

When they can’t seem to locate him and sees his bedroom window ajar, Simone assumes that Sammy has run off and suspends the load of the blame on her wife. When they’re out to look for him, Simone gets a call from Sammy’s school, asking her to come to pick up her son, who has been waiting there for two hours. It’s a haphazard trial to accept for Tai that she has perhaps imagined Sammy in one of her sleepwalking episodes.

But as Simone lashes out at her, desperately compelling her to get help, we see a chilling metamorphosis occur in Tai’s face, which changes from a look of helpless anxiety to that of ominous fury–a side of her that Sammy in all probability, used to call “the bad one.” Not keeping an eye on the road lands Tai and Simone in a horrific car accident which is likely to be far more injurious to Simone than it will be to Tai.

We’re back to the woods to treat our bewildered eye to something we’ve been made to anticipate ever since the perplexing pilot dropped. A bird’s eye view drone shot accompanies an inauspicious gush of wind as it blows towards their cottage and manipulates a pile of snow that was stacked on a tree into enveloping Jackie’s flaming pyre and containing most of the flames.

The same wind then carries the smell of the flame-roasted flesh to the starving noses of the people deep in their sleep and lures them out. The calling of the cooked flesh, despite being not just of a person but also their friend, is too hard to turn a cold shoulder to for the group that has been surviving off of scraps. With an affirmative nod from Shauna, who believes that Jackie is on board, the starved group digs into Jackie’s scorched corpse and eats their fill. As they dream up a celestial feast while consuming the flesh of their friend, the suggestion of spectral control gets a heap of points in its favor.

But if you ask me, it could have entirely been a natural phenomenon that, through its fateful device, got a hold of the supremely vulnerable group who walked the tightrope of death and made them turn their backs on the societal rules of civility in a moment of acute desperation–something further proved by the fact that the coach could barely keep himself from getting sick and ran indoors to hide from the animalistic sight.

Yellowjackets (Season 2) Episode 2: Recap & Ending, Explained – Was The Group Feasting On A Corpse A Supernatural Event?