Summary of Yellowjackets: Sink or swim

When it comes to guilt, the remaining survivors of Yellow jackets have always collectively opted for an inverted “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” mentality: Wthen everyone has an equal(ish) hand in hand with carrying the mad train, no one needs to take the spotlight on doomsday. Until now what has kept them alive is that constant acquiescence to every sin a little in the name of a greater good or a greater god. But like season two moves to its back half, the jig in both timelines is up mercilessly; and the greater the pressure on the survivors to make difficult decisions with their own bare hands, the greater the appeal to leave life, death, and justice to the amorphous, amoral wilderness spirit.

If last week’s episode was all about individual exploration, this week’s episode is all about Van, Lottie, Tai, Misty, Shauna and Natalie pair up upwards. And when they do, there is no public and private self – and it’s impossible to know what secrets might wash up on the shore. One big fat mistake has already come to light: TThe police have found Adam’s dismembered body and now Tai, Shauna, Natalie and Misty are all on the line. Annexed to the cult’s “Sharing Shack” on Lottie’s orders, the adult survivors finally break up with each other, unburdening everything from Jessica Roberts to Misty and Walter’s FBI impersonation to Shauna’s weightiest secret: that Jeff was the whole time the glitter-covered extortionist was . Somewhere in the sharing session, Misty even mentions Walter as her boyfriend for the first time; leave it to that girl to equate a strange musical hallucination in a compelling sound bath with making things official.

Back at the cabin, a battered Lottie’s recovery after taking on Shauna’s postpartum rage is shaky at best; feverishly hallucinating, she urges a devoted Misty, “Don’t waste my body. Promise.” Always up to the next, Lottie is still lucid enough to feel escalation in the air: WWhether it’s the disturbing revelation that Akilah’s furry friend Nugget is just a mummified mouse corpse, Mari’s persistent delusion of blood dripping from the hut’s walls, or Tai’s recurring encounters with that “other” hair, everyone’s mind wanders to disturbing , uncontrollable ways, and no one gets their daily nutrients from soup stewed with a belt from Jackie’s luggage. There is now no daily hunting or rationing; the only fresh meat around them is each other. Sink or swim.

That, plus the fact that upstairs peeing blood and convulsing is the group’s spiritual compass, gives team spirit a new meaning:s Tai decides ahead of the episode’s breakneck, revealing final sequence, “We have to find a way to stay alive. But it can’t be her.” Without their leader to guide them, the group’s ritual boils over, and Yellow jackets finally lifts the veil on one of its enduring mysteries: the meaning of the queen of hearts. Standing around an altar, the survivors each draw cards from a deck to decide who will donate their body to the collective cause of “staying alive.” In the end, it’s Natalie who draws the bad luck card, but just as she steps to the slaughter…Shauna, the team;’s unspoken undertaker, who puts Jackie’s gold chain around Nat’s neck and holds a hunting knife to her throat…Travis intervenes, pushing Shauna to the ground and urging Natalie to run. She barely gets out the door when a horde of survivors run after her, hungry, desperate, and determined on a sense of “fairness.”

But nothing about what happens to these girls is fair, not the circumstances, not the aftermath. LLook no further than Jeff and Callie for proof. After Detective Saracusa and Kevin Tan show up on their doorstep with a search warrant (Saracusa is eager to break up Callie’s room and get on with their resolvea rather unromantic game of cat and mouse), Jeff is confronted with some hard, visual truths about what Shauna did to Adam. As Tan points out, Adam’s killer(s) had the foresight to cut off his head, feet, and hands, even mutilating his tattoos with a cheese grater. The only way the police could identify him was his bone marrow; because Adam once donated some to a cancer-stricken cousin, he is on a record.

Tortured later that night by an easy-to-unpack nightmare of a lecherous Shauna with circular saws for hands, Jeff wanders into his living room to find that Callie can’t sleep either, just as haunted by her mother’s reality that she can’t. change. “Daddy, am I like mommy?” she asks Jeff, who takes the opportunity to tell Callie a story that, bittersweetly, seems more plausible that he obtained by stealing Shauna’s diaries than by openly talking to his wife: Shauna lost a baby in the wilderness, Callie’s brother. But in a defining moment, Jeff makes it clear to Callie that while she can’t change what happened to Shauna, she can save herself from paying the price for decades-old desperate times and desperate measures. “All that stuff,” Jeff assures Callie, “that’s your mom’s burden, and mine too.”

Despite what Jeff says, adult Shauna doesn’t exactly seem ready to shoulder all her burdens. After revealing that a) she told Jeff about the murder, and b) Jeff was the real blackmailer, she makes excuses. aMaybe Tai hurt Adam in her sleep, or maybe Misty did the real dirty work. Eager to share the load, Shauna ignores the weight that cripples them all already, which Lottie clearly points out :Tthey have always “given back” to the wilderness, and now it’s time to make a sacrifice again. The fact that they have come back together, that their lives are each crumbling before their very eyes, that their secrets are forcefully working their way to the surface – it all has only one answer. Lottie’s recommendation: an Irishman’s Russian roulette, or randomly selected shots, one of which is laced with fatal phenobarbital. It is a quick and painless way to die, often dosed to sick animals; as Misty points out, it’s also what the Heaven’s Gate cult used to “take off.”

As Shauna points out, Lottie might be taking the cult a little too far. But with what all of them survived, and the ways they survived, whose glass house is strong enough to throw stones? “We can’t decide,” Lottie insists, after Van asks why she doesn’t take one (again) for the team and drink the fatal shot. “It chooses.”

However, letting the wild choose is not a releasing cheat code: It’s false equivalence. After Natalie runs off, she runs into a strangely assertive Javi, who tells her there’s a place he can take her that no one knows about…she just needs to trust him. They run after him and start crossing the lake, until the muddy ice cracks and Javi falls into the icy water. Just as Natalie grabs Javi’s hand, clad in the crudely hewn fingerless gloves she made for him, she is stopped from saving him by Misty, who tells her, “If you save him, the others will get you.” As they watch him drown in horror, the choices of the wilderness don’t feel as far from theirs as they’ve led themselves to believe.

Really, the difference between choosing to kill Natalie and letting Javi drown is the difference between being an instigator and a bystander: IIf someone cries out for help and you drown them because you know they will keep you alive, are you free from guilt and shame? Can Natalie really tell Travis, when he inevitably learns that they let his brother die to eat him, that she couldn’t have done anything because the wilderness chose to? None of the perceived “choices” the wilderness makes hold any validity until one of the surviving humans takes the knife in their hand, drowns the “chosen” victim, or lights the fire under the body. The Antler Queen may be terrifying, but she was right: A hunting without violence feeds no one.

An additional tragedy of Javi’s choice? Now he will never be able to share with them what he saw during his time alone in the arms of the symbol tree and how he managed to stay alive. As Coach Ben is only just discovering, Javi’s special reverence for one specific symbol tree – something Natalie points out early in the episode – is more rooted in reality than anyone could have imagined. Upon further investigation, Ben realizes that the base of the tree gives way to a hidden underground cavern, somehow untouched by winter. Down there, Ben finds an abandoned fireplace, littered with mushroom spores and small bones.

Could this be Javi’s house, or is this just the entrance? And what, if something, does this have to do with Lottie’s earlier vision of descending beneath the crashed plane into a cavernous underground space laden with candles? With the episode concluding with Low’s “Poor Sucker”, it looks like as with all ways of the wild, the team will find out all this the hard way. It’s always been si since the plane crashnk or swim, but either option has never looked so genuinely tragic and undesirable. Poor bastards indeed.

Lost oobservations

• Coach Ben’s foray into the woo-woo wilderness world was such a perfect opportunity for that Yellow jackets to increase his ability to engage the audience: an important example is when he carefully studies Javi’s drawing of the tree. It’s a nice trick and a well hung bait. iIt’s almost possible to make a silhouette out of the twisting roots, but am I just looking for it there, some sign of connection to make it all make sense? It’s ingenious how the show puts the viewer in a somewhat removed and much lower stakes of their mindset.
• Kevin Tan? Sexy. Sorry, I don’t make the rules! IT chooses, remember?
• Interesting how Misty, an open admirer of Jack Kevorkian, can’t bear to let the mutilated Lottie die. Again, teen selfishness prevails over the ethos she is said to have like it be known for holding on, even if it occasionally saves someone’s life.
• The Sweeney–Todd-soundtrack-to-actively-misleading-the-police pipeline… Walter may not be debonair outside of Misty’s vision, but he knows how to create a goddamn mood.
• Even a brief bit of discussion about Randy reminded me: I miss Randy. Leave it to Yellow jacketsone of the best series on television about female relationships right now, still left me wanting more screen time.
• Gifting Jackie’s necklace to Natalie just before she’s chosen as the group sacrifice certainly contextualizes “pit girl” a bit: Wwhoever runs and screams in that scene probably drew a card voluntarily, but jumped into fight or flight mode when she drew the unlucky queen of hearts. Natalie wasn’t the first to run away from the pack (that credit is all Travis’s) and she certainly won’t be the last. Join: Tit’s going to be a long winter.