Hi! Welcome to your Yellowjackets 304 recap, where we will be discussing the episode “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis,” which was written by Julia Bicknell and Terry Wesley and directed by Jennifer Morrison. Yes, that Jennifer Morrison! Of House M.D. fame! Catch up on past recaps (and the comments sections), and buckle up! This is a pretty brutal episode! Remember to bury any spoilery comments by front-loading a couple sentences of non-spoiler thoughts/commentary, as the first couple lines appear in the sidebar on the homepage.

The episode picks up after the events in the cave (which were apparently quite divisive among viewers) from last episode. The crew leads a captive Coach Scott toward camp. Shauna, Van, and Akilah are walking together, and Shauna insists “it wasn’t that weird.” It, referring to the fact that they all experienced a shared nightmare together. I mentioned this in the comments last week, but I really recommend reading Jonathan Lisco’s interview breaking down the episode, which touches on some of the cultural connotations of shared dreamspace that I also mentioned at the end of my recap as well as the neuroscience of memory/remembering.

At camp, no one can agree about what to do with Ben. Shauna wants him promptly punished for trying to burn them down in the cabin, something Ben has pretty convincingly claimed he did not do. I believe him. Ben has long been a foil to the feral hive mentality of the girls. Natalie says the fire could have been a freak accident, which is my personal theory as well, though I’ve been enjoying the speculation in the comments that it could have been Other Tai or Misty. Nat declares they should have a trial. A two-thirds majority will determine the outcome, which Shauna, bloodthirsty, opposes, but Nat says she’s meeting her halfway by not sticking to the unanimous vote required of criminal trials. Given the episode’s title and the characters’ conversation here, I wouldn’t be surprised if a recent homework assignment prior to the plane crash was to literally read Twelve Angry Men. I read it in school when I was a little younger than them. Tai, who I’m guessing was either in student government, mock trial, or model UN in her pre-crash life, swiftly volunteers to be the prosecuting attorney. Nat will be the judge. They’re briefly stumped on who to serve as his defense attorney before landing on the obvious: Misty. She reluctantly agrees to it.

Adult Shauna and Jeff are at the autoshop to have her car checked out after her little brake failure incident last week, which Shauna is still convinced is Misty’s doing. She asks the mechanic if it was a cut brake line, and he says no, it was a brake booster failure. So she speculates someone tampered with the brake booster, and he denies this, too, saying it was just a normal failure. Could it have really been just an accident?

It wouldn’t be the first time Shauna perceived danger where there was none, Adam being the most egregious example. I write about the natural phenomena of “coincidences” on this show a lot, and this particular episode has me thinking a lot about accidents. So many tragedies in life are just that: accidental. What if no one burned down the cabin? What if no one tampered with Shauna’s car? That’s not to say there aren’t very real, deliberate and meditated acts of violence and harm that happen in the universe of Yellowjackets, but perhaps not everything is intentional malice. This is a series, after all, that begins with one big accident: a plane crash. I don’t believe anything caused it other than mechanical failure, though I know there are fan theories out there about the wilderness causing the crash and there being some bigger picture conspiracy afoot. In truth, I’m not the kind of viewer who overly speculates about why certain things occur on this series, though it can make for fun thought experiments and conversation starters in these recaps. But to me, it’s almost more interesting to consider the randomness of the horrors that occur.

And if I’m right about the cabin fire being an accident, then the only characters carrying out actual meditated, intentional harm are Ben’s prosecutors. But I’ll come back to that.

Jeff (we missed you last week, Jeff!) thinks the car problem is karma, and he’s determined to repair the Sadecki household’s karmic debt. Later, Shauna finds him sorting things for donation. Apparently, Jeff read a WikiHow page on how to get good karma points. In addition to donating random shit to charity, he’s going to find a cat that has been missing from the neighborhood for over a year. Callie asks if they’re going to do charity because they put Lottie out on the streets. Jeff is very concerned about the karma deficit! What’s actually going on here is he’s feeling immense guilt and doesn’t know how to deal with it. Shauna indulges him and agrees to do some volunteer work. Callie is out.

Taissa calls Lottie, who is at the bank doing something. The show really makes a point to make sure we see she’s at the bank and has some sort of deposit or withdrawal slip, so this is bound to mean something at some point. Taissa wants to asks Lottie what she meant outside the ambulance when she said “it” was pleased with them and they’d soon see. Taissa is still looking for answers about the waiter and Van’s new cancer prognosis, something she sees as connected but could also technically be a coincidence, his death a freak accident with no real meaning beyond that. These characters though — as a result of their traumas but also just as a result of being humans who seek answers and meaning behind death — rarely accept anything is a coincidence.

Back in the wilderness, Akilah hesitantly approaches Lottie and tells her about the “twisted dream” she had in the cave. Nothing perks Lottie’s ears like psychic hallucinatory experiences, so she’s locked in and wants Akilah to share more about the cave. Given her little drug experiments with Travis, which have seemingly left him even more traumatized than he already was, I do not have a good feeling about where this is headed for Akilah.

Misty visits the prisoner Ben and slaps him, asking how he could have possibly burned down the cabin after everything she did for him. He once again denies it, and she says prove it. “Yeah?” he asks. “How? With a high school mock trial at the end of the fucking world?” The whole thing is a farce, he claims, and he’s right. These are kids playacting at some sort of judicial process. Again, more on that soon! Misty tells Ben he can’t call it a farce “out there,” in front of the others, many of whom are taking this very seriously and want his ass dead.

Back in the present, Tai and Van are making a game out of fate on a not-so-romantic date day in NYC. They’ve bought a deck of cards and taken the Queen of Hearts out to leave on the sidewalk. They watch to see if anyone picks it up. A few people do before putting it back down, but then a random guy decides to pick it up and pocket it. “Fuck, It chose,” Van says. They get up and follow. What exactly is their plan here? It does feel thematically tethered to what’s going down in the past, where the girls have essentially made a game out of determining Ben’s fate with their mock trial. In both cases, the characters don’t see what they’re doing as a game at all. They’re intensely self-serious about it, and that’s what makes it all very unnerving rather than goofy, even though their behavior is indeed goofy! What are y’all doing!

In the wilderness, Van gets the trial started, announcing The Honorable Judge Natalie. Nat emerges wearing a set of antlers. I think we’re long past the days of a single Antler Queen theory. The Antler Queen is more like a position of power and authority anyone can step into. For now, it’s Nat. Tai, taking this all very seriously, calls Mari to the stand. They realize they forgot to swear her in, so Lottie brings the deck of cards to her and recites a wilderness-themed oath.

These proceedings really are a disorienting blend of humor and horror. The balance works! The humor underscores their youth and, as coach put it, farcical nature of a mock trial in the wilderness. But those reminders of their youth and the make-believe nature of the whole thing also amplifies the horror. They’re collectively acting as judge, jury, and (probably) executioner for this innocent man! There is absolutely no reason they need to be doing any of this! Ben’s life is in their hands, and there’s nothing he can do to get out of such an absurd situation. The fact that they’re all approaching it in such a humorless and intense way is terrifying! In many ways, this is more disturbing than their literal cannibalism.

Tai asks Mari if Ben is deranged and if that’s why he held her captive. Mari says he didn’t want her coming back to tell them where he was. “He didn’t want us coming to get payback,” Mari says. Shauna nods, as if this proves he’s guilty. Misty cross-examines Mari next and asks if he said payback for what. Mari says she assumed, and Misty very sincerely says the old “ass out of you and me” adage. These girls have clearly seen a legal procedural (I like speculating which 1990s one they are basing these little performances on — maybe early seasons Law & Order or Night Court).

On their quest to pay their karmic debts, Shauna finds that Jeff has brought her to the assisted living facility where Misty Fucking Quigley (which Shauna once again says verbatim) works. Shauna is not happy about this, and neither is Misty. She friendship broke up with Shauna last episode. Shauna says she wants to mail the bill for the brakes to her. Misty wants an apology. Sweet, clueless Jeff says it seems like something is going on between the two of them. No one ever accused Jeff of being a citizen detective.

Misty is thrilled to place Shauna on tapioca duty. “This is better than an apology,” she says with an evil little giggle. Misty would take revenge over atonement.

Misty in the past is interrogating Shauna on the stand and trying to build a narrative that Shauna was the one to start the fire. She points out that the fire happened the same night Nat was chosen to be leader. Misty pushes Shauna’s buttons trying to get her to admit she wanted to be the leader. She brings up Shauna’s dead baby and having to carve up Javi. She’s lucky Shauna doesn’t stab her; Shauna isn’t exactly someone whose buttons I’d push. Tai then wants to talk to Shauna, too. She asks Shauna if she thinks Ben is a hero, and Shauna adamantly says no (never mind the fact, as some of you pointed out last week, that Ben saved them all from the cave. If he really wanted them dead, he could have easily left them there). Tai and Misty bicker during this whole process, again reiterating that they’re teen girls who have let their squabbles escalate to the point that we’re now watching their coach go through a murder trial.

Tai asks Shauna why she doesn’t think Ben is a hero, bringing up the fact that Ben didn’t help at all when she was in labor. Tai asks what he did while she was in labor. “Nothing,” Shauna says. “He just left me. I was bleeding and in so much pain, so Natalie went to get him. And he just looked at me and said ‘all I did was press play on a VHS tape’ and then went back to his room.” I do indeed think about this moment from Shauna’s labor episode a lot. It’s the definitive moment where it becomes clear Ben’s adulthood doesn’t actually tangibly make a difference out here. He can’t be what they need him to be. And that’s not entirely his fault. He doesn’t have the answers or the solutions, just like them, and that’s an incredibly tough pill for them all to swallow. We’re taught so much as kids that adults can save us from difficult situations, but often, they fucking can’t. It was both a huge failure on Ben’s part to not be a more supportive presence during Shauna’s labor and also a completely understandable reaction from him. He doesn’t know how to deliver a baby any better than the rest of them.

Tai asks Shauna why she thinks Ben started the fire. Shauna says because he judges them. “He’s judged us this whole time,” she says. “He’s not one of us, and he hates that. It terrifies him.”

There it is. Her words are ironic given that that’s exactly what they’re all doing to Ben here: judging him. They’re enacting the worst kind of judgment, too, the kind that is punitive and potentially lethal. The Yellowjackets have become dangerously factional, and any difference of opinion or dissent is seen as a threat. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say they’re inching very close to forming a fascist society. This whole mock trial is predicated on what they know in the outside world, and what they know in the outside world is a culture of incarceration and punishment. They’re replicating the realities of the outside world but on an intense and microcosmic scale. No one is here telling them this is the way to run things, but they’ve ingested years and years of social conditioning to believe this is how the world should work. Their suburban New Jersey lives before the crash were scaffolded by these punitive rules and systems with an emphasis on assimilation and homogeny. We know different girls have different class backgrounds, but all of them come from this 1990s American suburban context. We watch the Yellowjackets going through this trial process, and it looks archaic and feudal on the surface, but when you really examine it, it’s just as farcical as the actual U.S. legal system tends to be.

Ben has done nothing wrong, but it doesn’t matter. The second he opted out of cannibalism, he marked himself as different and therefore dangerous in the Yellowjackets’ eyes. Part of what they’re feeling is perhaps guilt for making those survival choices. But they’ve also constructed a society in which cannibalism has become an agreed upon norm. Ben doesn’t agree with it. That makes him a dissident. It’s a fascinating upending that happens here. Cannibalism is usually portrayed as transgressive, forbidden. But in the society constructed by the Yellowjackets, it’s Ben’s refusal to participate in this rite that becomes a transgression.

Van and Tai in the present are still following the man who picked up the card. Van seems to think the whole thing is a little absurd, and yet, she keeps walking of her own volition. It’s like she’s outwardly in denial but subconsciously believes Tai’s theory that something mystic is happening here. Again, what’s their plan?!

At Misty’s workplace, Jeff is helping Randy — who volunteers here because of his DUI — run the bingo game. The problem? Jeff is too damn good at being a bingo host. So he ends up replacing Randy entirely and making a lot of new geriatric fans. Everyone loves Jeff! I relate!

Misty goes to check on Shauna on tapioca duty. First, she stops in Svetlana’s room and finds a letter seemingly written in invisible ink, one of Walter’s signature moves.

Shauna’s listening to “The Sign” when Misty walks in on her. Misty’s dismayed to see Shauna enjoying herself when this was meant to be a punishment. She still wants an apology. “I’m sorry…for not knowing why I should be sorry,” Shauna says in what reminds me a lot of how the women on any Real Housewives show “apologize.” A true non-apology! Misty then has a rage fantasy where she stabs Shauna in the back with a knife, but it’s only that, a fantasy. (In many ways, the trial in the wilderness seems like a rage fantasy come to life.) Misty storms out of work, but not before picking up the invisible letter…and a few of the pieces from the puzzle Svetlana was working on, just to be chaotically evil!!!

In a mirror, Adult Lottie is practicing saying the words “I understand that I hurt you.” She’s preparing to apologize to someone, but we’re not sure who yet.

In the wilderness, Lottie is on the stand. Misty asks her about history, which Lottie apparently has an A in (any time little pieces of their before lives at school pop in, it’s like a poked hole in this new reality they’ve constructed for themselves). Misty asks her about examples from history of people who don’t adhere to certain belief systems burning places to the ground. Lottie agrees there are famously examples of this from history. Misty suggests that anyone who didn’t believe in Lottie’s belief system could have been the one to burn down the cabin: It could have been Shauna or Nat or Gen (“You could go either way, probably,” Misty says of Melissa, perhaps just a reference to Melissa’s indeterminate loyalties and personality so far or a cheeky joke about her queerness). Misty points out Lottie could have had motive, too. She could have been upset the wilderness didn’t want her to be the leader anymore. Misty’s whole point? That it could have been any one of them to burn down the cabin. I agree, which is why I think it was no one. Reasonable doubt? She’s certainly established it. I hope I’m never tried in the woods by a bunch of teen girls after a plane crash, but if I am, I hope Misty Quigley is my lawyer.

Tai thinks she just lost the trial, but Shauna lays some new information on her: Nat knew where Ben was hiding and that he was alive. Could this be enough to change the course of the trial, which was starting to bend in Ben’s favor?

Adult Shauna is wrapping up her volunteer duties by putting stuff away in the walk-in freezer, when someone CLOSES HER IN. This is a lot more stressful than Carmy’s incident in The Bear, especially if we’re to take Shauna at face value in her belief that someone is out to get her. (Walk-in freezers have internal release mechanisms, but they do sometimes fail and there have been real-life cases of people dying in them.) Shauna starts beating on the door with a hunk of frozen meat, but no one is around to hear her. Instead, she immediately starts hallucinating Jackie inside the freezer with her, which makes sense given the way Jackie died.

Tai and Van follow the complete stranger who they’re hoping idk DIES? into his apartment building and up the stairs to his door. He goes inside, and they stand outside of it, trying to figure out their next move. “You’re not butch enough to have locksmith tools,” Van says after asking how they’re going to get in. Tai reaches for the door, and it’s not even locked. It’s pretty obvious here that this is Other Tai, no? Her general demeanor is off. And Tai never believed in any of this! Van talks her down from entering the man’s home, and Tai tells Van to meet her at the edge of Central Park in an hour.

In the wilderness, Tai calls Nat to the stand. Yes, the judge! They’re perfectly content to remake the rules of their trial but can’t reimagine what a different approach to society would be beyond this punitive outside-world-mimicking one. Tai asks Nat if she ever thought Coach Scott caused the fire, and Nat says she thinks anything could have caused it. Here’s where Tai drops the bomb that Nat knew Ben was alive and out there and ordered them not to look for him anyway. “He wasn’t any kind of threat,” Nat says. Shauna refutes this, sticking to her belief Ben is a threat.

Misty next does what every lawyer in need of a hail mary on the television program The Good Wife used to do: She calls the defendant to the stand. Ben is going to speak for himself.

Jeff has found a very good audience for his dad jokes and congeniality, living it up at the senior home while his wife is busy trapped in a freezer talking to her dead best friend. It’s so fun to watch Melanie Lynskey and Ella Purnell play off one another; Adult Shauna has hallucinated Jackie in past episodes, but never for this long. Jackie tells Shauna she is all talk, throwing accusations around about someone targeting her without actually doing anything about it. This is of course Shauna’s own id talking to her. Her rage and thirst for revenge that we see very much at the surface of her teen self lurks just beneath the surface of her adult self. It can come out at any time. “I’m the most interesting thing about you,” Jackie says, making it clear this is still an insecurity and fear of Shauna’s, all these years later. “It’s okay, you’ll be warm soon,” Jackie says, threateningly.

With Ben on the stand, Misty desperately tries to get Ben to say he likes working with teens, but he’s intent on not lying. He admits he was never really interested in working with kids or being a soccer coach. He says he only really stuck around because the team was the best in the state and he hoped it could lead to a better gig eventually. He did like teaching, even though he didn’t think he would. “I liked coaching you,” he says, “because you guys were annoyingly fucking relentless, and you were underdogs. I kinda like those. I am one. Grew up one, stayed one.” That relentless cutthroat nature of the girls on the soccer pitch that he was initially drawn to is the exact thing damning him now. His words are devastating! He really just is a guy who has tried his best, who connected with the girls for being an underdog just like them. And now those underdogs have become his overlords.

He points out that he had plenty of opportunities to hurt them through the years. He could have turned them in when they got shit faced before a tournament instead of pretending he had food poisoning to cover for them. He could have told Tai and Van’s parents about their relationship when he caught them in the parking lot together. And he could have put Misty on the team instead of making her equipment manager when he knew she’d get hurt and bullied if she actually played. He wanted to look out for these kids the way his parents never looked out for him. He loved them and cared about them, but then they got to the woods, and they cut his leg off impulsively and didn’t listen to him. “I was scared that I maybe was next,” he says of his decision to leave.

He confesses to having been a coward by leaving. “I left you and I shouldn’t have,” he says. “I acted exactly the same way that my parents would have, and that is embarrassing to me. It is shameful. And I am so fucking sorry, Shauna.”

This is a real confession, a real atonement. It is so much more real and meaningful than anything this sham trial seeks to bring. Ben is not guilty of burning the cabin down. He is guilty of abandoning the girls and of reenacting his parents’ neglectful patterns, but he knows that, and he is sorry, and nothing the girls do to him will change any of that, will fix any of it. He is guilty, but he does not deserve to be punished. He has an opportunity to choose differently this time; they all do. They can stop this trial any time. They can realize they’re seeking a form of justice that is not possible.

Jeff returns home from his great day at the senior home to find Shauna holding a random cat she got from a shelter in Manhattan. Jeff thinks it’s literally the cat from the flier he found. Shauna tells him of course it isn’t, but they don’t have to tell the family that, the cat looks close enough. It’s not…exactly an actual act of goodwill so much as another Sadecki Family Lie. Even when these two are trying to hard to do good, they miss the mark. Maybe they should worry a bit more about parenting their teenage daughter than elaborate cat hoaxes.

Van meets Tai in the park, and Tai is finally making good on the date Teen Van proposed all the years before of getting her a pretzel and going on a carriage ride. “Linger” is playing as this happens! It would be romantic if you could forget everything that came before it and also aren’t left wondering, gravely, what Tai got up to in the hour leading up to this rendezvous. Is she so far gone that she would have circled back and killed that man? Something else nefarious? Whatever she did, I can’t imagine it was good, especially if she’s Other Tai at the moment.

It’s time for the jury’s final vote. Misty, Tai, and Nat are exempt from the voting. By the first vote, there isn’t a definitive two-thirds majority for innocent or guilty. Nat decides they’ll vote again until people change their votes and a two-thirds majority is reached. They vote over and over and over again. Shauna interrupts the vote to make her case for guilty. She does not mince any words about it, and she gets some people to change their votes, including Gen, Lottie, and Travis (who based on the title of the episode is apparently drunk through all of this?). Shauna has her majority.

Melissa approaches Shauna and says this is what she had been talking about. “Do you feel that right now?” she asks Shauna. “That’s fucking power.” Yes, the power to condemn a probably innocent man!!! Again, it’s terrifying how many cues these girls are taking from the outside world and outside power structures in the formation of their wilderness society.

Melissa and Shauna squeeze each other’s hands, but Lottie is the only one who notices. She sits next to Travis who has drawn on a piece of bark a bunch of bodies looking up at one body floating in the air. “It’s the outcome,” he says.

At home, Misty logs onto the murder boards and receives a text from Walter saying he just heard about Lottie and asking if she’s alright. Misty scrolls through the murder boards and finds an image of Lottie, dead in a stairwell. We transition to the crime scene where cops are already present and see she is indeed very much dead. Furthermore, this place of death looks a lot like the stairwell Teen Lottie dreamed about in the wilderness — a tunnel-like industrial stairwell with candles strewn about it. Did Lottie know somehow this was where and when she would die? For now, there are no real answers, the episode ending on this death reveal. I do appreciate this show’s willingness to kill off major characters. It keeps the stakes high. And Yellowjackets dying as adults — like Natalie and now Lottie — after they survived so much as teens has a heartbreaking pathos to it.

But even more devastating than Lottie’s death in the present is Ben’s verdict in the past, a verdict that Lottie surprisingly contributed to. You would think Lottie’s mental health struggles and lack of agency around them in her youth would perhaps make her more skeptical of this judicial system. Then again, Lottie’s dad is the one who hooked the girls up with a private flight, so she obviously comes from extreme wealth where these punitive policies are even more strictly enforced. That’s the world she comes from. Right before we see her change her vote, we also cut to a sequence of the screaming trees that could suggest she feels she’s being told by the wilderness to vote this way.

In any case, the trial confirms what has been true for a while now, which is that the systems these girls have created in order to survive are also killing them, because they’re too similar to the systems of the outside world that depend on oppression and stratification to run. Forget “mean girl” politics; these are just classic American politics if you think about it. We often describe the girls as going feral, but in truth, they’re returning to what they know. In the absence of civilization, they’re rebuilding a civilization that makes sense to them, even if it does not actually make sense. It does not make sense to put Ben on trial, even before his heartfelt confession and apology. They don’t know this, but he has a whole food stash! Probably medical supplies that were also in that rations box! If they had let go of their hunger for revenge and law and order, they could be benefiting from that. By pursuing the trial, they not only hurt Ben but themselves. It’s a perfect paradigm for how carceral systems work in real life, harming us all.

Last Buzz:

• I can’t figure out how to hyperlink footnotes, so let’s nix those for now.
• Mock Trial at the End of the Fucking World would have also made a great episode title.
• As far as Cranberries needledrops on this show goes, the “Zombie” one went way harder than the “Linger” one, but I do like this sad love song playing over doomed lovers Tai/Van.
• WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO BEN NOW?
• Who is responsible for all the high-end whittling happening in the wilderness? Those soup bowls in the premiere? The gavel here? It’s giving Williams and Sonoma hand-carved wood products.
• Lottie’s death is sure to be divisive, so let’s talk about it! Tell me where you stand!
• “The Sign” playing in an episode in which Tai and Van are recklessly pursuing “signs” is fitting.
• This is a really fucking good episode for Sophie Thatcher.

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