Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Yellowjackets.With Season 2 of Showtime's hit series Yellowjackets coming to an end, there are few highlights in its largely cluttered second season full of superfluous plot lines. The series is at its strongest when stays focused on its premise: a high school soccer team fighting for survival in the wilderness after their plane crashed. At times, the series loses itself as it oscillates between past and present. Season 2 excels when it reunites the Yellowjackets in the present day, but unfortunately waited until the final few episodes to do so.
‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Loses Focus
Yellowjackets is such a compelling watch because it offers a fresh take on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, showcasing teenage girls engaging in brutality usually reserved for stories about young boys and men. Though it is intriguing to see how the girls have carried their trauma into adulthood and the different ways they've dealt with it, the show is at its best when it remains in the '90s and investigates the behaviors and changing power dynamics of the girls in the wilderness. As time goes on and their hopes of being rescued all but disappear, it also examines the precarious situation the men/boys — Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), Travis (Kevin Alves), and Javi (Luciano Leroux) — find themselves in as they are vastly outnumbered by the girls who soon stop relying on Ben as their leader.
The first season's present-day storylines focus on Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Misty (Christina Ricci), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), and Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) as individuals before they begin reuniting one by one as they discover they're being blackmailed and that Travis has died, allegedly by suicide. At first, they seem content with keeping their distance from each other, aside from Misty who still craves their friendship and approval decades later, but reluctantly team up to ensure the gruesome details of their time in the wilderness are not exposed to the public. Season 2 brings two more adult Yellowjackets into the mix, Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Van (Lauren Ambrose), but also loses focus and spends an unnecessary amount of time on peripheral characters that should have never become focal points.
The Yellowjackets Spend Too Much Time Apart
The definite highlight of Yellowjackets' present-day timeline is when Natalie, Misty, Taissa, Shauna, Lottie, and Van finally reunite, but the show takes far too many detours to get there. The aftermath of Shauna killing Adam (Peter Gadiot) gets messier when her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) finds out and then unknowingly starts dating an undercover cop who attempts to use her to get information about Adam's death. Taissa, a newly elected senator, grows increasingly unpredictable and dangerous after a car accident leaves her wife in a coma, Natalie bonds with Lisa (Nicole Maines), one of her kidnappers, and Misty develops a friendship with fellow citizen detective Walter (Elijah Wood) who poses as an FBI agent to interrogate Randy (Jeff Holman), who Shauna pretends to have an affair with to throw the police off her trail. These deviating storylines keep the adult Yellowjackets separate for far too long, and cutting back and forth between the present and the past can make these redundant subplots tiring to keep up with.
Much like the show as a whole is at its best when it delves into the relationships among the teenage Yellowjackets, Season 2 peaks when it finally reunites Natalie, Misty, Taissa, Shauna, Lottie, and Van as adults. Though they haven't seen each other in many years, they soon start acting like their teenage selves again, for better or for worse. We haven't seen the teenage Yellowjackets having fun or enjoying each other's company since Doomcoming in Season 1 (which quickly took a dark turn), but when the women reunite at Lottie's compound, we see them gossiping, drinking together, and even dancing around a fire. But just like in the wilderness, the fun doesn't last long. In Episode 8, the secrets they've been keeping from each other are finally laid out in the open, and despite seeing how much they've changed in adulthood, we're reminded they're still the girls they used to be.
What's Next for the Yellowjackets?
Yellowjackets still has a lot of ground left to cover and plenty of unanswered questions to resolve in future seasons. Thankfully the series was renewed for a third season back in December, but due to the ongoing WGA writer's strike, halted production for Season 3 after just the first day. Season 2 spends too much time meandering from one present-day subplot to the next, and not enough on the relationships between the Yellowjackets as adults. Considering the limited scope of the storylines taking place in the wilderness, adult Shauna killing Adam in Season 1 opened up a variety of subplots to answer for it, which were hastily resolved in the finale. Going forward, Yellowjackets should keep in mind what made the show so compelling in the first place and maybe introduce other adult Yellowjackets, rather than giving us more peripheral characters to keep track of.