Showtime’s ‘Yellowjackets’: TV Review
Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress and Christina Ricci lead the horror-drenched drama as survivors of a horrific plane crash that took place 25 years earlier.
Christina Ricci as Misty, Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Juliette Lewis as Natalie and Tawny Cypress as Taissa in YELLOWJACKETS.
Brendan Meadows/SHOWTIMEA few minutes into Yellowjackets, a journalist (Rekha Sharma) dangles a particularly juicy question. “So what do you think really happened out there?” she asks a subject, her voice dropping conspiratorially. It’s the mystery at the very heart of the series, its initial lure as well as its reason to keep watching. What really happened when a private plane carrying a high school soccer team crashed in the middle of nowhere? What did the girls really have to resort to in order to survive 19 months until rescue? How did the ordeal really shape the women they’d go on to become 25 years later? But asking questions is fun for only so long if no answers are forthcoming, and in the six episodes given to critics for review (out of 10 total for the first season, out of who knows how many seasons), Yellowjackets seems increasingly in danger of becoming as lost as its own characters.
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It does get off to a killer start, though. The series opens on a girl running barefoot through snow, pursued by unseen forces, before she’s impaled on a trap. Context will have to come later, but the harrowing sequence casts an immediate sense of dread over the rest of the hour, which weaves together two timelines. In 1996, the Yellowjackets — including team captain Jackie (Ella Purnell), coach’s assistant Misty (Samantha Hanratty), straight-A student Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), overachiever Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and burnout Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) — board a plane en route to a soccer game we know they’ll never reach. In 2021, the grown-up survivors, played by Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis, shut down any speculation about the ordeal with a level of aggression which confirms that whatever they did — and flashbacks point to ritualistic cannibalism(!!) — it haunts them still.
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Naturally, our attention gravitates first toward the episode’s more gruesome shocks, of which there are many: the graphic image of a broken bone protruding through flesh, the sickening smack of mouths tearing into what must be human flesh, the panicked screams of passengers aboard a falling plane. But the episode’s true promise lies in the way it grounds those provocative swings in carefully considered detail. Any horror show can shock with the sight of a dead body strung up for consumption. It takes a sharp eye to sketch out an entire world around those corpses and cannibals. Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson gift their characters with specific voices (Shauna and Jackie may be best friends, but you’d never mistake Shauna’s deadpan threat to a boy for Jackie’s softer cajoling), while pilot director Karyn Kusama maps out an entire web of subtle, ever-shifting social dynamics in the side-eyes and half-smiles exchanged among the girls.
For a while, it feels like enough. With such vivid characters to go with the puzzle-box mystery, tense survival drama, and supernatural-tinged horror, Yellowjackets scratches the Lost itch more satisfyingly than most of the obvious copycats that followed. Its intense subject matter is tempered by a sardonic sense of humor: It’s not necessarily funny ha-ha that a sadistic character’s driving soundtrack of choice is Cats, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that conjures a smirk of recognition. Strong performances across the board — especially from Lynskey as a suburban mom who hides her broken-glass rage under a meek housewife exterior — keep us leaning toward the screen in hopes of getting to know these people better. And with about a dozen major characters to keep track of over two timelines, Yellowjackets always seems to be on the move.
But the shimmering allure of that first episode dulls over the next several. Around the third or fourth episode, it becomes obvious the mystery isn’t actually moving forward all that quickly — it just feels that way because its attention is so fractured. More worryingly, it becomes less and less clear what the show’s even trying to be about. Though Yellowjackets seems at first to be headed toward a Lord of the Flies-style journey into the savagery of the human soul (or whatever), it makes a string of plot choices that seem to muddy the concept and rob the characters of their agency. Any attempts to connect the past and present versions of the characters are stymied by the gaping hole in the middle, which after six episodes is still filled only with promises that some future twist will explain everything. The series feels so stuck on the question of what happened that it can’t even begin to think about what it might mean.
To be sure, it’s possible that Yellowjackets could rally yet, serving up a reveal smart enough to snap the pieces into place, or themes pertinent enough to recast some of its more puzzling narrative turns as retroactively brilliant. In the meantime, Yellowjackets remains too fun to write off just yet. Its gutsiness sets it apart from the usual survival-drama fare, and its performances suggest a deeper story even if we don’t know what it is quite yet. (Besides, what am I going to do — not stick around to find out the ending after investing six whole hours?) But it’s a journey best undertaken with eyes wide open for signs of trouble, lest we follow its characters into the middle of nowhere.