Becoming The Muse

Yellowjackets Review

Yellowjackets is an American thriller drama television series created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. Season 1 of YellowJackets premiered on Showtime on 14 November 2021, the second season, aired on 26 March 2023 with season 3 releasing on 16 February with the Season Finale Full Circle this April. The show has not yet been renewed for a fourth season but it had originally been planned for five seasons.

The story follows a group of teenagers who survive a plane crash, and the consequences of their time in the wilderness in their adult lives. The story is presented in two timelines, switching between 1996 when a high school girls’ soccer team The Yellowjackets, crash-lands in the wilderness, and the present, where the now-adult survivors are haunted and hunted by the past.

The Good

Yellowjackets is inspired by William Golding‘s Lord of the Flies giving a modernised rendition of the classic novel with the distinct difference being that instead of boys the people who crash are a group of teenage girls and the timeline extends beyond the crash events.

At its core, Yellowjackets is Lord of the Flies meets Lost meets Mean Girls on mushrooms, it isn’t just a survival story, it’s about trauma, secrecy, guilt, and identity. Yellowjackets peels back the layers of human nature exploring the darker aspects, the primal instincts, capacity for violence and raw nature beneath the veneer of civilisation.

Yellowjackets follows a mystery box type of style where you are not entirely sure about what is going and it’s a puzzle you have to workout compounded by the dual time-lines, you know things happened in the wilderness, but keeps you guessing as to nature of what fully transpired and if there was more to it.

Each season delves into the psychological complexities of the characters, particularly from the time in the wilderness timeline and how its impacted on the adult characters. Having two timeline narratives, also keeps the puzzle interesting as you work out what happened between then and now and how the characters survived or didn’t.

The character development is phenomenal where you favourite characters can grow into hated characters and some of the characters you thought you disliked you end up liking based on their past actions and the adults they became.

Season 3 of Yellowjackets comes a Full Circle as foreshadowed by the title of the season finale it answers some long-standing questions and brings the story to a point of convergence for both the past and the present timelines.

The Bad

The mystery box feel of the show teases at something supernatural, but strings us along as it never reveals explicit answers to dispel if there’s anything else happening other than what we see, a bunch of girls who are just lost and are now struggling the post-traumatic stress of the things they did to survive.

There seems to be a disconnect between the adult cast and their young selves in the past timeline, its hard to reconcile how some of the characters become the way they are. The past timeline has a larger cast than the present timeline making it difficult to track who is who, who grows up to be whom and those who do not survive, maybe they purposely made it obscure so as to hide plot points that would have been immediately evident such as to who survives the wilderness

I prefer the storyline in the past to the present and felt the series should spend more time developing the teenage characters than the traumatised and broken individuals they become.

I have beef with how the characters seem inconsistent, behaving in ways that arent rational to how they have been behaving, its as if the writers opted to have plot shocks over emotional logic.

The Ugly

Yellowjackets is a bit much, exploring themes from cannibalism to mental breakdowns to teen-on-teen brutality, the series dives deep into disturbing content. While it’s thematically justified, it can be emotionally exhausting, occasionally feel exploitative and downright disturbing.

Final Thoughts

Yellowjackets is bold, messy, and unflinchingly dark, just like the wilderness it depicts. It’s a compelling meditation on what it means to survive and the costs to sustain survival. Season 3 regains some of its lost momentum by leaning into humour but the show risks stagnation if it maintains tonal ambiguity at the expense of bold story arcs.

Have you watched Yellowjackets?