Yellowjackets Recap: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
“A Normal, Boring Life” is available to stream now via Paramount+; it will make its Showtime network premiere on Sunday.
If you were stuck in the wilderness for over a year, what would be the “dream thing” you’d do when you got back? Would you slurp on a blue Slushee like Mari? Or would you chow down on a three-course meal at McDonald’s like Melissa? Maybe you’d just indulge in the creature comforts we take for granted, like luxuriating in a sea of fluffy bedding or using indoor plumbing. I’ve never been stuck in the wilderness, but even after a vacation to a faraway place, I always wish to sleep on my own pillow, cuddle my friends, and eat familiar foodstuffs. Yes, I know. I wouldn’t have lasted long in the wilderness.
When rescue is on the table, most of the Yellowjackets begin wishing for their normal lives back. We can argue over what “normal” means — nothing is truly normal — but we can all agree that all definitions of normal don’t include hunting and eating one’s friends. And it definitely doesn’t include voluntarily electing to stay in the Canadian wilderness on the brink of what’s sure to be yet another brutal winter.
With rescue within reach, it makes sense that the three Yellowjackets that had the most pronounced mental-health issues prior to the crash — Lottie, Shauna, and Tai — are the ones who create a bloc preventing the others from leaving. Their collective decision underscores the idea that “It” was really a shared group illusion after all. Tai, Shauna, and (most certainly) Lottie had no chance of being considered “normal” when measured against the mores of ’90s America. Now that they’ve created their own society with their own rules and hierarchies, these three have found a place where they can thrive and be accepted despite their maladaptive behaviors. Here, they’re revered and feared. In fact, what might be considered maladaptive behaviors in the “real world” — in particular, Lottie’s visions and Shauna’s affinity for power struggles — turn out to be pros, not cons, in the wilderness milieu. It’s no wonder they don’t want to leave.
The episode opens with a nightmare about the normal life. While Shauna waits outside Hannah’s daughter’s house, she dozes and dreams of being a teen. She’s blithely checking out groceries (a.k.a. butchered body parts wrapped in plastic and a box of hot chocolate for Easter egg funsies) while Jackie berates her about her life. “You really did not pan out, huh?” she intones. Shauna then spies a swarm of moths attracted to a fluorescent light in the ceiling, dooming themselves to fly toward nothingness again and again and again. This is Shauna in a nutshell, repeating patterns of destruction and going absolutely nowhere.
When Shauna finally enters Hannah’s daughter’s house, it somehow feels that this season of Yellowjackets was working up to this episode all along. As she catches a glimpse of Melissa (Hilary Swank, finally!), we all know that we’re about to be in for a delightful treat. Shauna is astonished to find out that Melissa lives there — that white baseball cap is doing a lot of work on Hilary Swank’s talented head — and the two sit down for a tête-à-tête for the ages. The rest of this episode was pretty excellent, but I would not have complained one bit if we had focused on these two fabulously talented actresses, locked in a heated and loaded discussion for the entire hour. It’s Lynskey versus Swank, round one! Ding ding!
Melissa, it turns out, faked her own death and is now living in Virginia under the name Kelly. Shauna is shocked to find out that she has “married the daughter of the woman we killed.” Man, that sentence is wild. Either Melissa has some serious survivor’s guilt going on, or she really does love Hannah’s daughter, Alex. Or maybe it’s both. In any case, she’s not giving up her boring, normal life so easily. Shauna was right: Melissa turned out to be boring. Well, aside from the whole marrying the daughter of someone she secretly murdered in the wilderness thing.
Elsewhere in the present-day timeline, Tai and Misty hang around the hospital waiting to hear news about Van. When a doctor finally comes to see them, it’s not good. The doctor gently recommends looking into palliative care. Obviously, Tai cannot accept this, so she drags Misty to find a person to sacrifice. The hospital is like a buffet of options, and the first guy she finds is in end-stage heart failure. Misty is taken aback by what Tai is doing, but she doesn’t exactly try to stop her. For her part, Tai tries to put a pillow on the dude’s face, but she can’t go through with it. As she berates herself, the guy flatlines anyway. Tawny Cypress delivers a truly funny moment as Tai’s emotions rapidly morph from anger to panic to wonder. “Does that count?” she asks out loud, eyes bugging out of her head with intense hope.
It’s unclear if it counts or not because we don’t really see much of Van in this episode. What we do see is Tai arguing with Other Tai. Previous episodes have hinted at the fact that Tai was Other Tai this entire time, and this sequence — Other Tai locking her out of Van’s hospital room, telling her she’ll “do what needs to be done” — suggests that the Other has been in control for a very long time. But, if this is the case, then why on Earth didn’t she kill that guy with the heart condition? We’ve never seen Other Tai flinch when it comes to violence, so this whole setup feels weird.
Misty, for her part, has been calling Jeff to find out where Shauna might be. Of course, Jeff doesn’t know because Shauna never tells him anything, and it feels like Jeff might be starting to crack. I do love how Jeff calls Misty a “freaky little four-eyed mushroom” at one point, but I don’t love what Shauna is doing to him and Callie. They’re both starting to question Shauna’s true goodness, and Callie makes the most obvious statement of all time when she muses that the Yellowjackets’ time in the wilderness “really messed them up.” That moment earned a big eye roll from me, but go off, Callie, I guess?
However, Jeff redeems the Sadecki side story this week as he confronts the Joels as he and Callie check out of the hotel. He really does throw Shauna under the bus for her attitude at the tapas meeting, and in any other relationship, I’d say that’s a huge red flag, but Shauna is currently stalking her ex in Virginia, so I think we can all feel happy for Jeff here. He asks the Joels, “Haven’t you ever been in love with an unhinged woman?” He also invokes the idea of being boring if you’re not hitching your wagon to a sociopath, but it’s unclear if this is his own thinking or Shauna’s influence rubbing off on him. Without Shauna in tow, it feels like he makes a great impression on the Joels, and I’m reminded of Shauna’s offhand comment from the premiere where she said that Jeff would thrive as a widower. He would. Totally.
Back in the wilderness, Shauna isn’t thinking about Jeff at all, even though she’s potentially about to see him again. Honestly, in retrospect, it’s really weird that she hasn’t brought Jeff up in the teen timeline at all, except in relation to her betrayal of Jackie. This chick totally has an undiagnosed personality disorder, and I honestly don’t know why it took me so long to see it. Instead of dreaming about the comforts of the real world, Shauna is panicking about going back. Presumably, Shauna has parents to go home to and a potential college path at Brown University, but all of those things seem to pale in comparison to the power she wields in the wilderness. Honestly? She’s kind of right. For a thrill junkie like Shauna, nothing will ever be able to touch the adrenaline rush of the life she’s living in the woods. So, she attempts a coup.
As the Yellowjackets prepare to leave camp for the last time, all aflutter with possibility; Lottie is the first to make a stand. She gives a speech that’s sad and touching because she’s totally right about how her life is going to go when she returns to polite society. In the wilderness, she’s an all-knowing deity, but at home, she’s just a girl who needs to be medicated. Lottie’s speech emboldens both Shauna and Tai to stay, too. Tai’s overt motivation to stay is a bit different than Lottie or Shauna’s — she is afraid that the world won’t accept her relationship with Van — but I can’t help but think that Other Tai is having a ball in the woods and doesn’t want to give that up either.
Natalie is having none of this shit. Still in leadership mode, she decides that they’ll leave the others behind and find rescue without them. But Shauna, the current leader, says no. It’s a shocking moment that’s sure to set the stage for a brutal two months (or so) before the current timeline meets up with the rescue point. We still haven’t seen Pit Girl, and it sure seems like that horrific sacrifice will happen on Shauna’s watch. What other horrors will Queen Shauna subject these girls to as she puppeteers them to satiate her own broken personhood?
Melissa, for her part, knows Shauna. And when she’s finally sitting in front of her at her kitchen table as an adult, she calls her out on all of it. Again, I must state how fantastic it is to see these two women sitting across from one another, volleying ideas about what it means to deal with trauma and what it means to be normal.
For her part, Melissa says that she did send the tape, but only to assuage herself of her guilt so she could continue to live her “normal, boring life.” There was a note with the tape, possibly one that Callie confiscated? Melissa denies killing Lottie, and she also denies messing with Shauna in any way. She realizes that she’s dealing with a paranoid sociopath as she breaks down all the incidents in which Shauna thought she was being followed. Oh, she found a cell phone in a bathroom? The brakes on her ancient van went out? She got trapped in a walk-in freezer? These are things that just happen to people! Shauna’s lizard brain just made them into something else.
Shauna shoots back by telling Melissa that she doesn’t get to have a normal life. And she’s also right. Melissa was a party to death, destruction, and cannibalism … and we haven’t even gotten to (what’s sure to be) Shauna’s dictatorship in the wilderness yet. Do any of these women deserve to have a normal life? Is it even possible to have a normal life after what they’ve experienced — after what they’ve done?
Yellowjackets always skirts the idea of trauma as a lingering wound that won’t heal because of continued repression, not because trauma is something that no one can overcome. When the girls returned, they doomed themselves by agreeing never to tell anyone about the horrors they inflicted upon one another. When trauma is repressed — especially severe trauma — it eats away at a person. Unexplored trauma is an auto-cannibalistic bitch.
Melissa is trying to heal. She sees a life coach named Barbara, and presumably, she’s told Barbara most of the truth. Shauna doesn’t seem too perturbed by the idea of Melissa spilling her secrets to this woman, but she might just feel a little irked that Melissa is getting some peace. Shauna doesn’t believe that they deserve peace, mostly because Shauna’s unresolved mental health issues won’t allow her to be at peace. Melissa knows this and calls her on all her shit. She gets the killer line, “You stir the pot just to feel alive.” Unfortunately, Melissa also decides to grab the knife away from Shauna at this moment, causing Shauna to go feral.
The two women scrap on the floor for a bit, with Shauna gaining the upper hand almost immediately. She pins Melissa to the ground and takes a huge chomp out of her upper arm. Friends, the gasp I gasped when Shauna pulled a giant chunk of Melissa’s flesh out of her mouth was so loud that it might have actually been audible in the wilds of Canada.
This is the most punk rock thing that has ever happened on Yellowjackets, and it’s a cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. The camera switches to Melissa’s perspective, and we see Shauna dangling the flesh blob before our eyes. Melanie Lynskey sells the moment, deranged lights dancing in her eyes, as she orders us to “eat it.” That the show uses this scene to deploy Sleater Kinney for the very first time in the show’s run just makes the moment all the more perfect. “Dig Me Out” plays over the credits as we’re left realizing that Shauna is further from “normal” than we ever could have dreamed.
Buzz, Buzz, Buzz
• Travis and Akilah have a side plot in the episode where they attempt to hike to safety with Kodi. This makes no sense as Kodi later tells them it’s a grueling, six-day hike to the pick-up point, but we see Akilah’s devotion to the larger group as she leaves a trail of sweater yarn so the rest of the girls can track them. Also, Travis reveals that the wilderness didn’t really pick Akilah: she’s just been having tripped out visions because she’s “huffing cave fumes.” Akilah, for her part, doesn’t seem super convinced. Later, she has a vision of all her animals dying, which seems ominous now that the group is primed to stay in the woods
• When the girls question Hannah about what’s going on back home, Van asks the important things, shouting, “Did Mulder and Scully ever get together?” Fun Fact: They hadn’t gotten together as of October 1997, but they did eventually share their first smooch in 1999. I’m so happy that Van got to experience that in real-time.
• ’90s Song Watch: As a big Sleater Kinney fan, I’m overjoyed that they finally got a needle drop. And what a needle drop! Other notable songs featured in the episode include “Wonderwall” from Oasis and “Alright” by Supergrass.
• The moths Shauna sees are the Silence of the Lambs moths, right?