Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for Yellowjackets Seasons 1 and 2 follow! If you haven’t been watching Yellowjackets on Paramount+ with Showtime, then what have you been doing? Set between 1996 and 2021 in New Jersey, Yellowjackets follows a high school soccer team’s harrowing experience in the wilderness after their plane crashes in Canada on their way to a tournament. Filled with tons of drama, and…cannibalism, Yellowjackets is quickly going from a cult classic to one of Paramount+’s most popular shows. The series has a star-studded of young actresses playing the teen versions of the characters like Ella Purnell from Fallout, and Sophie Thatcher from Heretic. The older versions of the girls are played by icons such Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey.
Yellowjackets is the perfect thriller for a girl’s night in and with Season 3 set to premiere on Valentine’s Day, there is no better time to recap what our favorite yet slightly deranged soccer girls have gone through in the last two seasons.
Season 1 opens with an unnamed girl — known to the Yellowjackets fanbase as “pit girl”— running through the snow barefoot and distressed and seemingly being chased by something or someone. Eerily human-like animal sounds follow her as she ultimately meets her demise in a pit full of spikes. Suddenly, a masked individual appears above dressed in various furs and wearing a tattered yellowjackets soccer shirt. Quite the introduction right? Flashback to the day of the fated flight, viewers are formally introduced to the ensemble cast. There’s Jackie, the popular one, Shauna, her best friend, Natalie, the mysterious one, Misty, the weird one, and more. Ultimately the entire team will find themselves stranded in the Canadian Wilderness with winter quickly approaching.
Season 1 is all about introductions — who are the yellowjackets? Every girl, whether it be in her past as a teen or her present as a grown woman, has a secret and it’s a matter of time before audiences find them out. From Shauna’s secret affair with best friend Jackie’s boyfriend to fellow teammate Lottie Matthews’s struggle with mental health as she is seen taking Loxapine, there are always rumors, lies, and betrayal following the girls and this comes to a head in the woods.
The team attempts to survive in the harsh environment the best they can. Season 1 cuts back and forth between the girls surviving in the woods to attempting to live normal adult lives after being rescued from the wilderness. This is much harder than meets the eye for the survivors who carry immense shame and guilt for what happened in the woods. Between the scenes in the woods and the adult girls living life, viewers can tell something bad happened in the wilderness and the adult survivors are doing whatever they can to keep it secret.
By the end of the season, the teen yellowjackets are struggling to say the least. After finding an abandoned cabin to shelter in, the girls are going through it. From Lottie’s premonitions about a potential danger lurking in the woods and a tumultuous love affair between Natalie and their head coaches son, Travis, to Shauna having to admit to teammate Taissa that she’s pregnant, there’s a lot going on, but under it all one thing looms: hunger. By introducing the girl’s devolvement into cannibals in the pilot episode, the show has had audiences on the edge of their seats to see when it actually happens and how. Well, by the end of the season, the chaos finally blows over with it being revealed that teen Jackie freezes to death after a fight with pregnant Shauna who forces Jackie to sleep outside.
Meanwhile in the present day, Shauna got embroiled in another affair with a man she ultimately kills, Taissa who had a sleepwalking problem while surviving in the woods learns her habit has turned disturbing in adulthood, and Misty is attempting to throw a reporter interested in what happened to the team off their scent. By the end of season 1, the girls’s lives — past and present — are falling apart.
When Season 2 begins, teen Jackie is dead, adult Shauna is a murderer (again), adult Natalie has been taken to Lottie’s wellness center, and adult Taissa is on the verge of a mental breakdown. While Season 1 was all about figuring out who the girls were, Season 2 is about familiarity. Audiences know these girls and are seeing them regress back to who they became in the woods.
The biggest moment of Season 2 was eating Jackie. Yes, that’s right. After Jackie’s death, Shauna is overcome with grief and guilt — I mean she is the one who sent Jackie out into the cold that led to her death. As such, Shauna’s in a fragile state and instead of burying Jackie, she has taken to talking to the dead corpse in a shed. Once the other girls find out about this, it doesn’t go over well and they decide to cremate Jackie (because the ground is frozen). Let’s just say the cremation doesn’t go to plan and the girls, starving and emotionally drained, end up feasting on Jackie’s corpse, marking the start of the girls’s cannibalism journey.
Season 2 is filled with more trauma for the girls past and present alike as Shauna gives birth, they begin hunting each other for food, and the supernatural aspects of the woods become more and more apparent. Season 2 ends with the girls’s cabin going up in flames and no one knows how it started. The characters have lost all morals and have descended into pure survival.
The adult versions are doing the same as they attempt to move on from their past even though it’s constantly calling back to them. Season 2 sees the death of beloved side character Javi, a symbol of innocence and good for the girls in the woods, and Shauna’s teen daughter learning of her mother’s sinister side. Remember when I mentioned adult Natalie had been taken to adult Lottie’s wellness center? Well, that’s where Season 2 ends in a reunion of sorts. Natalie, Shauna, Taissa, Lottie, Van, and Misty all find themselves reunited at the center. Season 2 ends with adult Natalie accidentally being killed by Misty who was trying to kill another girl after she found out about the team’s past.
OK, that was a lot, but there’s still more to come for our girls in Season 3. Fans hope to see more of the politics of the girls hunting operation, and to have answers to questions like, “Who is pit girl?” Will we find out who set the cabin on fire and will certain fan theories such as the girl’s descent into cannibalism being caused by poisoned water be confirmed? Who knows? What fans can count on is more drama, more death, and the iconic Hillary Swank joining the cast. I definitely know what I’ll be doing on Valentine’s Day!