Rebel Girls

Elizabeth Alsop considers the third season of “Yellowjackets.”

By Elizabeth AlsopApril 12, 2025

• Television

• Gender & Sexuality

IN THE SEASON ONE finale of Yellowjackets (2021– ), four of the main characters meet up in the show’s present-day timeline to dispose of a corpse—the remains of Shauna’s secret boyfriend, whom she has killed and framed for blackmail. “So, you’ll handle the body,” Misty (Christina Ricci) directs Shauna (Melanie Lynskey). “I mean, cut it up.” A beat later, Shauna is standing next to a bathtub, wearing hospital scrubs and wielding a bone saw. Natalie (Juliette Lewis) looks on for moral—or maybe immoral—support. “Do you still remember how to do that?” she asks Shauna, who waves away her concerns: “It’s just like riding a really gross, fucked-up bike.”

This deadpan, dead-eyed humor pervades Yellowjackets’ first two seasons, which have threaded comedy through a bleak and frequently terrifying tale of survival that begins in 1996, when a plane crash strands a girls’ high school soccer team in the wilderness. The series cuts between the teenage storyline and one in which the survivors, now middle-aged, navigate the aftermath of those traumatic events—which are progressively revealed but, even by the end of season two, not fully disclosed. As one member of Natalie’s therapy group exclaims, early in the show, “Oh my god, what did you do? You literally never told us!”

But even the series’ darkest material—which includes cannibalism, DIY surgery, and death by exposure—has consistently been counterbalanced by a potent blend of Gen-X snark and a period-appropriate, HFStival-ready soundtrack. Like Twin Peaks, Yellowjackets has been by turns disturbing and delightful, scary and screwball. It’s The Craft and Heathers by way of Bend It Like Beckham, with a twist of The Bacchae. The presence of actual 1990s stars as the teens’ adult counterparts is a playful wink at fans of a certain age, which also happens to be my age. Not for nothing, the show also has one of the best opening sequences around: a glitchy, fuzzed-out photomontage that recalls the lo-fi aesthetic of the credits for Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files, and a big, abrasive, alt-rock theme song, co-written by Craig Wedren.

Yellowjackets’ third season, which premiered last month, leans into the cheekiness of its casting and the show’s surprising capacity for comedy. Shauna and her husband Jeff (Warren Kole), TV’s number-one wife-guy, do some great marital shtick; there are jokes about weed, which Jeff, in a charming callback to season one, still insists on calling “chronic.” Lynskey and Ricci, meanwhile, two of the original bad girls of independent cinema, get to clown. As with Dead to Me (2019–22), another darkly comic series starring female stars of the nineties, it’s just fun to watch these women share the screen.

But despite these comic flourishes, this season also doubles down on the show’s refusal to sentimentalize these characters—giving us, over the arc of its successive episodes, a darker, more irredeemable portrait of women violently shaped by what they endured as teens. For Shauna, especially, it becomes increasingly clear that the experience unleashed some antisocial, bordering on psychotic, tendencies. Some members of the group are initially drawn to her big id energy; as teen Melissa (Jenna Burgess) tells her in the earlier timeline, “I like that you’re not afraid of the bad parts of yourself anymore.” But others are less ready to face the transformations precipitated by their time in the woods. “You know there’s no it,” the adult Shauna later tells Lottie (Simone Kessell), the team’s guru figure. “It was just us!”

If Yellowjackets has often been framed as a gender-flipped Lord of the Flies (1954), three seasons in, it may be taking some inspiration from a different book: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which famously asserted that “one is not born, but rather becomes, [a] woman.” Yellowjackets, by contrast, is interested in women’s unbecoming, imagining what would happen if a group of teenage girls were suddenly forced to discard default social scripts. It’s no accident that Jackie (Ella Purnell) doesn’t survive season one, since, by her own admission, she can’t leave behind the gendered behaviors that had proved adaptive back home. Out in the woods, after all, survival requires more than passive aggression.

Alongside the many sensational questions Yellowjackets raises—Who dies? Who gets eaten? Who’s the Antler Queen?—are some deeper philosophical ones. Forced into prolonged isolation, set free from the status quo, do these characters become less themselves, or more? Is it surprising, after a lifetime of internalizing “good” behavior, that some girls might seize the opportunity to break “bad”?

At a moment when “feminist morale is at a palpable low”—when we’re seeing the rise of “conservative Cosmo” and a fleet of neofascist, pronatalist influencers—even unhinged displays of female rebellion can feel cathartic. If it’s the show’s nostalgic nods and girl-on-girl violence that have drawn the greatest attention to date, Yellowjackets’ more striking contribution may be the way it gives voice to the angst and anger multiple generations of women are feeling just now. Better ferocity, it suggests, than complacency.

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The third season is at its strongest when it foregrounds the conflict between these changed women and a largely unchanged world. Some of its more compelling moments feature the present-day return of characters’ repressed appetites and impulses. Seated for a fancy, four-star meal, Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose)—lovers in both timelines—run out on the check before making an adrenaline-fueled dash to a dark alley to make out. Misty, meanwhile, heads to a bar, where she drunkenly picks a fight with two guys playing pool, telling them threateningly that she has “lit dicks on fire.” “We’re kind of in the middle of a game here!” they protest. “Well, life’s a game […] and we’re all in the middle of it!” Misty yells back.

In one of this season’s tour de force sequences, Shauna, asked by her husband to kiss up to two douchey potential clients, isn’t willing to play the part. Instead, she cuts down “the Joels” with the accuracy she once used to butcher a bear carcass. “You do not deserve his furniture,” she hisses at them. It’s a reprisal, in a slightly less deranged key, of her second-season confrontation with a carjacker, during which she described in minute detail the mechanics required to flay a human body.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching grown women give zero fucks, and Yellowjackets knows this: few series are as committed to showing female characters behaving fearlessly. Much like Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) or Věra Chytilová’s anarcho-feminist Daisies (1966), Yellowjackets is less concerned with explaining its characters’ “deviance” than exploring it. If anything, the show’s self-consciousness about its trauma backstory is helpful here: since so many explanatory circumstances are right there, on the surface, the characters’ abnormal psychology invites less dutiful unpacking. As Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) puts it, breezily referring to her own family, “We pulled up to that place with, like, five Datelines’ worth of problems.”

If the series takes for granted that its main characters are seriously damaged, many of the more minor male players are less sanguine. In the wilderness timeline, Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) is horrified by the group’s behavior, but it’s not until this season that he cops to his disgust: “What you had to do to survive, it’s fucking incredible. I didn’t appreciate it. I should have […] I fucked up by judging you.” When Travis (Kevin Alves) hazards the suggestion that they should all feel guilty for, well, the cannibalism, Van counters, “I’m not ashamed […] I’m glad I’m alive.”

It is to the show’s credit that neither timeline reflexively vilifies its male characters, and that it depicts several—including Misty’s equally freaky boyfriend Walter (Elijah Wood) as well as Jeff—who know what these women did and love them anyway (or seem to, for now). Confronted by a police detective slavering to get his hands on these “bad” women, Walter, in disguise, sweetly plays into his misogynist assumptions. “There’s practically a coven of them,” he confirms, “all up to no good.”

The show’s most moving display of nonjudgment comes in the season two finale—one of several standout episodes directed by Karyn Kusama—which stages a series of powerful confrontations between characters in both timelines. Even as we see the stranded teammates forced to choose between certain death and severe moral injury, their adult counterparts prepare to reprise their witchy Hunger Games in the woods around Lottie’s compound. When things go very wrong, the look on one character’s face—locked in the rictus of a Greek tragic mask—conveys the cumulative horrors that have brought the women to this point.

From this angle, it’s possible to read Yellowjackets as not just a self-contained survival story but also a sharp commentary on American girlhood, and the varieties of treacherous experience young women contend with just to come of age. As one character says of Natalie’s harrowing home life, “It’s a miracle she survived before, you know, we survived.” (“You can just say ‘ate each other,’” another replies.) That Shauna’s daughter has faced her own catalog of horrors over the past three seasons doesn’t do much to support the idea that things for girls are getting better.

When I first watched the Yellowjackets pilot, I thought of the line from Sofia Coppola’s 1999 debut feature film, The Virgin Suicides, in which the youngest character confronts a clueless doctor by telling him, “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.” Yellowjackets co-opts the survival tale to suggest that female adolescence, broadly speaking, is a house on fire. It’s an unforgiving wilderness; it’s running for your life. It’s something, in short, to be survived.

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Whatever thematic interest the third season holds, there’s no denying that it’s also kind of a mess. As was the case last season, the present-day storyline meanders, as if only vaguely committed to the latest arc. This time around, there’s a whodunit plot involving the murder of one of the main characters, and a deeply unfun road trip that feels like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Knives. At some point, a Big-Name Female Actor turns up, playing a character everyone thought was dead, suggesting a sharper swerve toward the soap opera playbook.

Meanwhile, back in the woods, the vibes feel even more off. A trio of new arrivals stumble into camp for what turns out to be, for some, a short-lived visit; one of them, played by Joel McHale, feels like he’s wandered in from another show. More disappointing, however, is the decision to dial Shauna’s psychotic behavior in both timelines up to 11. Making her a monster sends the show careening toward melodrama, turning what was a spiky, original look at group survival dynamics into something more like a morality play.

Chalk it up to adolescent mood swings. And if this season, like the last, feels somewhat adrift, it also makes sense. Beneath its ironic exterior, there’s a pathos at the core of Yellowjackets that feels traceable not just to the girls’ unique trauma but also to a more generational disappointment with the failed promises of both second- and third-wave feminism. These are characters, after all, raised in the riot grrrl nineties; Shauna starts the show with an acceptance letter to Brown and a stack of Sassy magazines. But they age into the postfeminist aughts and then the tradwife 2020s. They survived 18 months in the woods, in other words, only to come home to the same limited options: suburban motherhood (Shauna), girlboss careerism (Tai), or its entrepreneurial variant (Lottie, in her “Goop sorceress rambling about the fucking tree spirits” cult-leader era). Misty, to her credit, is a steadfast weirdo; Van, bless her, runs a video store.

It’s this commitment to dramatizing failed potential that makes even the weakest season of Yellowjackets feel salient, and of a piece with other recent series that, as Phillip Maciak wrote, have foregrounded disappointment as a primary theme. It’s notable, in this context, that the show’s characters are all fanatical about “choice.” Repeatedly, they will insist that “the wilderness chose”—the implication being so they didn’t have to. But the truth is, the only real “choice” the girls had was an impossible one: starve to death or eat each other.

In that sense, these characters are not so different from their real-world counterparts: raised in a “pro-choice” era that really wasn’t, promised freedoms that, far from having not materialized, have since retrenched. As Rebecca Traister writes in the foreword to the recently published anthology Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade, “the anodyne language of ‘choice’ […] doesn’t get most people anywhere near an actual ‘choice’” so long as the material conditions that ensure actual freedom aren’t also in place. The show may not explicitly name its historical contexts, but it does allude to them: the mere existence of a championship girls’ soccer team, after all, is the result of Title IX (1972); Shauna’s pregnancy, which she’s forced to carry to term in the woods, may well have ended in the 1996 timeline with a legal abortion, thanks to Roe (1973). What the show doesn’t say, but viewers can infer, is that by its 2021 timeline, even those baseline protections have eroded. The 2022 Dobbs decision has not yet been made, but it’s on the horizon. The dream of the nineties, it seems, is not alive in suburban New Jersey.

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If the world offers not-great options, it’s not crazy to imagine you might build your own. The third season feints in this direction, opening with a bucolic montage of wilderness living, set to Cat Stevens’s rendition of “Morning Has Broken.” Akilah (Nia Sondaya) is raising goats and therapy ducks, the gang has built some wilderness-chic huts, and the “sheroes” are celebrating the solstice today with games of telephone and tag. The visual style plays along, with lens flares and sun-dappled images of an idyllic commune that seem to have risen from the ashes of the previous season’s wintry horror show.

Viewers will surmise that this is all more Midsommar than Brook Farm. Indeed, it’s not long before Shauna’s venomous voice-over cuts through the utopian cosplay: “I fucking hate them,” she narrates, as she scrawls in what Lynskey, in a recent panel discussion, called the character’s “rage journal.” By later in the season, however, she’s grown more ambivalent about the group’s separatism—and she’s not alone. Other characters start to balk at the idea of rescue, realizing that they may not feel at home in the world anymore. Tai warns Van that back home, as a queer couple, they can’t be out. Lottie, for her part, is scared to return to a society that sees her first and foremost as mentally ill. “What home do you have to go back to?” she asks. “If I go back […] I won’t be well. I won’t be me. The me that was made out here.”

To be clear, Yellowjackets never suggests that we should confuse this desperate last stand with a feminist manifesto. But that doesn’t mean that the series, Gen X–coded as it is, fails to grasp the desire for an alternative. In the finale, Shauna gives voice to that urge, describing “the danger, the thrill, the person I was back then—not a wife or a mother, I was a warrior. I was a fucking queen.”

It’s almost too bad, in the end, that Yellowjackets couldn’t imagine this kind of emancipation free of bloodlust—couldn’t picture women’s power without violence. Shauna’s vision may be demented, and her perspective, by this point, wholly unreliable. But her desire for something more? Relatable.