Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Yellowjackets.
It's a mark of a good season-ender — but not a series-ender, thank goodness — when there are just as many more questions raised as there are ones successfully answered. On Yellowjackets, several questions have loomed large over the course of its freshman outing, fodder for dissection in the comments of episode recaps or on Reddit forums. Is Shauna (Melanie Lynskey)'s toyboy Adam (Peter Gadiot) really just an artist with a penchant for strange tribal tattoos, or does he have more of a personal, possibly familial connection to the story than we thought? Did team captain Jackie (Ella Purnell) survive out there in the woods with everyone else — or, consider this: is she actually capable of traveling through time, as some posited? And who's responsible for sending those anonymous postcards with the symbol that keeps cropping up in both past and present: carved into tree bark, painstakingly rendered in iMessage format, scribbled down by hand on the aforementioned postcards in a way that feels summoned by memory, purely instinctive? With the Season 1 finale, we now have definitive evidence for some of the show's biggest theories so far — but that last scene, especially, managed to make the present-day plot just as compelling as anything that's still playing out in the wilderness 25 years prior.
The show's mysteries have been two-pronged from the beginning, with past and present taking shape in parallel to one another throughout the first season's arc, and show creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have had to carefully tread the line between burning through too much plot from the jump and teasing out just enough story to keep audiences ravenous. With Yellowjackets, the events of the woods — and what this stranded soccer team appeared to be resorting to in the name of survival — has hovered heavily over just about every other storyline, including the ones involving their adult selves. And even though the older versions of these characters are played by some actors with serious star power behind them (I remember glomming onto this show not just based on the premise, but the fact that names like Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis were attached), it's the younger generation who has to do as much heavy lifting when it comes to both establishing new relationship dynamics and living through some of the most traumatic moments that come to haunt these women even after they leave the woods behind. The finale, however, has done something incredibly thrilling — and that's bringing the woods back to the Yellowjackets all these years later, whether the survivors want to confront them again or not.
The fact that the schizophrenic Lottie Michaels (played by Fury Road's Courtney Eaton as a teenager, though the identity of who's playing her all-grown-up still remains a mystery) has started some type of cult in the present-day shouldn't come as a surprise, and yet the knowledge that she successfully emerged from the wilderness with the rest of the team when they were eventually rescued but has established her own form of twisted religion (and gained followers to boot!) isn't just surprising; it's exciting. In the ongoing topic of who managed to endure while others perished thanks to the plane crash, or to a horrible twist of fate (pour one out for Laura Lee), or to the increasingly harsh elements (speaking of, RIP Jackie), the notion that Lottie had been among them had never entered the swirl of theorizing each week — or, if it did, it was drowned out by the debates over whether Adam had a serious Oedipal complex going on with Shauna, or if Misty is still devoting herself to the pursuit of cannibalism on the downlow. (My lingering theory, heading into Season 2, is that Steven Krueger is not long for this world, especially now that winter is setting in; sorry, Coach Ben.) But Lottie being firmly placed in the survivors' camp gives Yellowjackets yet another big-time and much-welcomed injection of what-the-hell-is-going-on, a twist that isn't as manipulative as it could have been for the audience watching at home because we really should've seen it coming.
Even thinking back on the finale now, addressing the Lottie of it all feels like barely scratching the surface of all the ways in which this episode utterly stuck the landing. On a purely superficial note, I have not been able to stop thinking about the diegetic use of The Offspring that accompanies the Yellowjackets' slow-mo entrance to their own high school reunion. The promise of the Antler Queen beckoning from the shadows was shocking, but the reveal that Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is devolving into what appears to be a split-personality situation (speaking of, RIP dog) also delivered on the unsettling vibes. (I did have to suspend my disbelief that the results of this local election would have been so swiftly counted that we wouldn't have heard reports from the polls long before her victory moment.) And while it remained unclear whether the show would definitively address Jackie's fate at this point in the story, the manner in which her demise plays out succeeds at being much more emotionally devastating than anyone could have predicted. The thing that makes losing Jackie so tough to swallow — and not just because Purnell has been an utter force of nature on-screen this season — is that hers is a death that could have absolutely been prevented. Not all the other Yellowjackets that have been lost to the forest can claim the same, and it casts all the previous moments that adult-Shauna has found herself haunted by visions of her best friend into an even more tragic light.
Knowing that we have the guarantee of a second season does assuage certain anxieties about whether the show will be able to tie up the new plot threads that have been introduced — but also, remembering that there's at the very least a five-season plan in place (if past comments are to be believed) means that we've barely scratched the surface of what remains to be uncovered. With its first finale episode, Yellowjackets has woven both of its timelines together even more inextricably, making the mysteries of the now just as riveting as the puzzles that dominate the past.
All episodes of Yellowjackets Season 1 are now available on Showtime.