Spoiler alert: This article contains Yellowjackets spoilers!
The gripping question: “Who is our final girl?” is on the mind of every Yellowjackets fan with the final season set to release on Nov. 20. The season three finale left viewers on a cliffhanger of murder, betrayal amid an incoming rescue, and the unmet demands of the wilderness. As the girls arrive home — safely deboarding the plane this time — they’re bound to be bombarded with questions from their parents, the public, and the police. And isn’t it ironic that these cannibals now have to be PR trained to make their stories more “palletable” to the public?
The official season four teaser was released on Oct. 14, and the team is welcomed back to reality with camera teams and boom mics. In the recordings shown in the trailer, the date is Jan. 3, 1998. The girls — and Travis — give their shared testimonial as to what happened in the wilderness, and none of them seem happy to give it.
Be Kind, rewind — where we left off.
Lottie is left dead after being “accidentally” pushed down the basement stairs of her apartment building by Callie, Shauna’s daughter. Lottie thought she could sense “It” within Callie — “It” being the spirit of the wilderness that Lottie believes “underguards everything,” the primordial force of nature that drove each of the Antler Queens to power among the group and rewarded their sacrifices with survival. She truly believed Callie carries “It” with her, that she inherited it from Shauna, and is better fit as a host than Shauna is or ever was.
Taissa, desperate for a lasting connection with Van after her death, carves out Van’s heart and takes a bite before she buries her. She’s completely unhinged — her poised political persona is no longer on her list of priorities. She says herself that she needs to remember all of what happened in the wilderness, and it seems she must go wild in order to do so. Tai blames the deaths of Nat and Van on Shauna, pointing to her vicious past in the wilderness as the start of her brutality.
Neither Tai nor Misty want Shauna to be “the last one standing:” the final girl.
Misty attempted to solve Lottie’s death on her own, but the answers came right to her when Callie felt it best to confront Misty about her altercation with Lottie, thinking Misty would best know what to do next.
Callie and Jeff left Shauna behind, presumably for their own safety. None of the Yellowjackets trust Shauna anymore, not as a teammate, a mother, a wife, or a friend.
After all, Shauna completely misinterpreted why Melissa sent her the tape recording and strayed from the other women in trying to solve the “blackmailer” mystery, which ultimately ended with Van’s death and the final dissolution of the Yellowjackets as a team. Was Shauna really the one most in touch and corrupted by “It’s” power? Or was she that corrupt by her own volition?
She writes in her letter at the end of the finale: “I’m finally starting to realize, we can’t remember it because at some point we became so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection … I think we can’t or won’t remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun. That’s the terrible truth we left out there, buried. Along with the people we called our friends.”
Back in the wilderness, Mari has been revealed as the faceless “pit girl” from the show’s pilot. Teen Shauna insists on conducting herself as a dictator to the team, and is losing the support of everyone around her. Natalie was the first culprit in what appears to be Shauna’s downfall, though Tai and Van were the next to follow suit. Melissa tried to kill Shauna mid-hunt, but was unsuccessful. Shauna is finally crowned as the Antler Queen before the feast, her cape cruelly adorned with Mari’s hair for the feast.
And “where the f*ck is Natalie!?” Nat is calling for help, high enough in the mountain to have service to finally bridge the Yellowjacket’s gap with the real world after 19 months.
No compass — where we’re headed.
The teaser shows a few quick clips of the Yellowjacket’s final stretch in the wilderness. The biggest question is who we still see in the teen timeline leading up to the rescue and who we haven’t yet seen in the adult timeline. Adult Melissa threw the biggest wrench into what we thought we knew about the survivors, but maybe “Hat-Girl” was just an anomaly. Hannah’s story has yet to be concluded, but it’s easy to infer that she’ll be killed by the Yellowjackets before the rescue.
As the caption to the teaser reads: “The wilderness has its own ideas about who makes it out alive,” so it’s incredibly likely there will be a twist mid-season.
Entertainment Weekly’s exclusive first look of season four confirms that the list of survivors, in order of school-assembly chairs, is: Shauna, Lottie, Van, Nat, Travis, Misty, Melissa, Tai, and Akilah. Akilah is the only survivor not yet seen in the adult timeline.
Knowing how unsettled the adult Yellowjackets were to find out that Melissa faked her own death to remove her past in the wilderness from her life, seeing Akilah alive and present at the assembly is off-putting. Unless the photo of the scene really comes from someone’s imagination of what the return home will look like, it’s likely something happens to Akilah in the time between that assembly and the adult timeline. In season two, Tai had sent Jessica Roberts to pose as an investigative journalist trying to lure information out of the other Yellowjackets. Melissa was not among the investigated because she was presumed dead. But Tai is thorough, and it’s not likely she would leave Akilah out of the investigation just because she didn’t want to be contacted.
A quick scene in the trailer shows teen Melissa about to stab someone, which feels off knowing who is present at the assembly. Melissa tried and gave up on trying to kill Shauna, after which Shauna called her “boring,” so maybe Melissa is trying to prove a point. Maybe she won’t kill, she’ll just injure — but who?
We’re also shown Lottie and Shauna held captive at the very end of the teaser in what looks like the same pit that Mari fell into. Nat stands over the pit, staring down at them. The most likely reason for their isolation is their previous objection to rescue, and after everything that Nat went through, she won’t let anyone ruin her chance of escape. Shauna is also visibly injured — in the pit and in scenes shown after their return. Did Lottie get revenge for the beating she took from Shauna in season two? Or did one of the others lose their heads over Shauna’s Queen-of-Hearts approach to ruling the group?
Back in Wiskayok, New Jersey, survival does not seem like the relief the Yellowjackets thought it would be. The Yellowjackets are no more — they left too many of them behind to consider them a team. They are now the survivors, specifically, which undoubtedly will allude to all of those who didn’t survive. It’ll be a constant reminder, an easy target of survivor’s guilt.
In two separate clips, teen Travis is shown grappling with belief and religion at home. Around 39 seconds in, Travis is laying in bed, thoughtfully staring up at a painting of Jesus; around a minute and 25 seconds in, Travis is crying beneath a burning cross. In the wilderness, he worshipped Lottie and sought out the prophetic visions the wilderness supposedly gave him. His relationship with faith, while not explicitly stated in previous seasons, is certainly tainted after the cult-like experiences he had. Their survival is a “miracle” to some, godly or not. Maybe we’ll finally get a direct insight of Travis’ life and see what really drove him to ask for Lottie’s help in season one before his death.
Around 56 seconds into the teaser, Travis and a few of the girls are shown running through the woods in clothes that were never seen in the wilderness wardrobes. Are they experiencing a kind of relapse to that feeling of morbid vigor adult Shauna writes about in her aforementioned letter?
In a more hopeful strain, teen Shauna and teen Jeff are seen reconnecting 58 seconds into the teaser. It’s safe to assume many of us want a wedding, especially considering how Shauna is far from a “blushing bride.” When does one transition from cannibalistic cult-leader to the housewife we see in season one?
Finally, the caption of the teaser leaves yet another ambiguity: “In the present, two of the Yellowjackets prepare to kill one of their own as an old flame roars back to town with plans all their own.” The finale of season three does show Tai and Misty confirming neither of them want Shauna to become the lone survivor of the Yellowjacket legacy. That would explain who the “two” are and who may be killed, but who is the “old flame?” Maybe it’s Akilah, finally out of hiding — if that’s where she’s been for the past 25 years. If not, the Yellowjackets may finally face a force they have not yet reckoned with.
Season four has set itself up to tie the loose ends of the Yellowjackets’ story together satisfyingly. With a stream of failed sequels and disappointing finales darkening various fanbases and minds of media lovers, hopefully the trail leading to our final girl will be a fulfilling one.