*heavy metal remix of Mariah Carey screaming it’s tiiiiiiime* Oh, we are so so so back, buzzheads! After a long hiatus due to the Hollywood strikes, Yellowjackets finally returns for its third season. The first two episodes drop today, and I’ve got separate recaps for both of them locked and loaded! As a refresher or if you’re new around here: These recaps will go up every Friday morning. I’ll keep spoilers out of the headline, excerpt, and main image, but once you click in, it is not longer a spoiler-free safe space. Try to give spoiler warnings in your comments, because recent comments also appear on a sidebar on the homepage. And on that note: PLEASE COMMENT!!!! Comment activity is way, way down here at Autostraddle, but literally my favorite thing about writing these recaps is the comments section! We used to pull over 100 comments a recap! PLEASE TALK TO ME otherwise I will just end up talking to myself in the comments section in order to feel something 😣. Revisit past recaps (and their comments!). Also if you’re new here, these recaps don’t always flow PERFECTLY linearly, sometimes grouped more thematically or so certain subplots aren’t split up. And without further ado, let’s get into this Yellowjackets 301 recap. This is “It Girl,” written by Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson and directed by Nickerson.

In a direct callback to the opening scene of the entire series, Yellowjackets season three begins by following a girl running through the woods.

It’s summer now, a significant chunk of time having passed in the wilderness between the Yellowjackets’ cabin burning down, the winter of that pilot scene still to come. Mari, long theorized by fans to be the “pit girl” from the pilot, runs through the woods seemingly in peril, pursued by other girls and animal sounds. She’s straight up slide-tackled by Shauna in what I imagine was a signature move of Shauna’s on the soccer pitch. Shauna bites Mari while trying to wrest something free from her hand. Ears, hands, what have you! There’s nothing Shauna won’t bite into.

But, don’t worry! This isn’t a hunting ritual at all. It’s a game. In the time since we last saw the teenaged Yellowjackets, they’ve picked up a few new activities to keep themselves occupied in the wilderness: games, a sort of storytelling theater experience, and raising livestock, to name a few. This game is like a more violent version of capture the flag or team keepaway, involving a piece of bone that you have to relinquish if you’re tagged. The game reminds us that they’re just kids lost in the woods. The game reminds us they’re always playing games, whether they realize it or not.

Though it has been a long time since we have seen these characters in their soccer uniforms, the series has never abandoned the characters’ soccer girly roots. Varsity sports are ruthlessly competitive environments, and in my experience, girls soccer is one of the most violent and intense elite level team sports there is. I never played. I was too scared of those girls. It tracks that this particular group of girls would become embroiled in a power struggle, one that at times becomes lethal (remember, Jackie essentially died because Shauna punished her). The way they play this game simultaneously reiterates their youth but also their teen girl social politics, which are volatile and heightened by their competitive athlete roots.

There are some new shots in the title sequence! Let’s talk about them in the comments! Did anyone else’s body completely relax at the sound of the theme song starting? Mine sure did! What is wrong with me!

Back in the wilderness, Akilah is tending to a bunny farm. We see the tipi-like structures that we haven’t seen since the pilot, replacement housing for the burned-down cabin. Gen, newly minted group hunter, brings home a fat bird. (Note that Vanessa Prasad has replaced Mya Lowe as Gen this season.) Tai combs Van’s wet hair, kisses her head. A group of girls, including a couple new faces, play a game of telephone with Travis. The Yellowjackets are kinda thriving!

Or, well, that’s what they all want to believe. In stark contrast to their general good vibes is the hand-biter herself, Shauna Shipman. She’s still very bitter she wasn’t selected to be the group leader, sarcastically referring to Natalie as “my queen” when Nat attempts to broker peace between her and Mari, who Shauna hates for undefined reasons, but I imagine this, too, is something that goes back to pre-crash life or is otherwise just because Mari simply annoys Shauna. If I were Mari, I would not annoy Shauna, the girl who famously manslaughtered her best friend because she was mad at her.

But again, the Yellowjackets really want to think they’re thriving. Van dons a fancy fringe cape-coat and starts a performance of the aforementioned storytelling theater. She holds all the girls’ rapt attention as she delivers a soliloquy recapping their time in the wilderness. “Previously on the Yellowjackets,” she announces. Now, normally I would roll my eyes at a show doing this rather on-the-nose delivery of re-exposition/summary of what has come, but it actually works here, because Van’s recap, as Shauna is quick to point out, is a bit…reality-adjacent. Van casts the crew as the heroes of their story, great warriors who maybe made some sacrifices but no don’t look too closely at those sacrifices and instead focus on the fact that they’re valiant, strong, capable survivors of great terrors. They’re champions, just like they were meant to be at soccer nationals.

Shauna, narrating as she writes in her diary, points out the fallacies of this framing. Her best friend is dead. Her baby is dead. They all watched her incredibly traumatic birth that resulted in a dead baby. They ATE PEOPLE, including the youngest among them, Javi, after watching him drown in a frozen lake. Shauna doesn’t want to hear about sacrifices and miracles.

Everyone has more or less found their role in the wilderness, and Van’s is storytelling. We’ve seen her do this before, like when she recapped the entirety of While You Were Sleeping. It’s the other reason I don’t feel the info dump monologue takes us out of the narrative: It’s in-character for Van. As part of her epic tale here, she nods toward the individual contributions of various Yellowjackets, including Tai, who salutes and says “handy lesbians for the win” when Van credits her with building the housing structures. Van is good for morale. This all feels very in line with the fact that she used to be their goalkeeper, the last line of defense against the enemy — I mean, opponent.

But while Van’s optimistic and valorizing approach no doubt helps many of the girls cope with their new reality, it’s not what everyone needs, and it also means they’re not actually dealing with any of their trauma.

Shauna’s version of their story:

“Once upon a time, a bunch of girls got stranded in the wilderness, and they went completely fucking nuts. They worshipped evil spirits and they hunted their friends and they feasted on their flesh and they fucking liked it. So they told themselves stupid fairytales and pretended they were brave and strong. Because the reality was that even if rescue came, they could never go home again because of what they’d done because of what they’d become. That’s the truth and hearing anything else makes me just want to fucking—”

Points…were made. While everyone is finding their role in the wilderness, that doesn’t mean there’s harmony. The exterior of this new campground they’ve created looks cohesive and collective, but the fractures show in the girls’ interactions and in the game they play at the start, a game that results in the “losers” becoming servants to the winners for the evening. There are many stark contrasts between the characters, like Van’s faith and Tai’s lack of it, and like Van’s optimism and romanticization of their time in the wilderness and Shauna’s bleak realism. At the moment, the girls are fed. But they are certainly not thriving.

In our first scene in the adults timeline, Callie is smoking weed out her bedroom window, because if she didn’t give a fuck before, she really doesn’t give a fuck now! And who can blame her! Her parents have blackmailed and murdered and covered up murder, and oh yeah she SHOT Lottie and watched Natalie die at the hands of Misty. If ever a teen deserved an angsty and despondent phase, it’s Callie!

Shauna enters and shares that it’s Natalie’s funeral today. Based on that, it seems less time has passed between seasons when it comes to the adult timeline. We jumped from winter to summer for the teens, but we’re maybe only a few weeks out from where the adults ended.

Shauna nags Callie for leaving dirty dishes in the sink, and Callie is like “you’re worried about the DISHES?” This is why I always love the Sadecki household’s melodrama. Shauna and Jeff are always trying to grasp at the simple domestic life they used to have, even though so much high-stakes, life-or-death shit has been interrupting that simple domestic life. But also: DID they ever actually have that idealized domestic life? They may be in denial about it, but I think that was always just out of reach for them, given Shauna’s latent anger and trauma and Jeff’s violation of her privacy by reading her journals and both of their absentee parenting when it comes to Callie. The Sadecki household — full of bunny figurines gifted as haunting memories of Shauna’s dead best friend and Jeff’s ex-girlfriend by the dead girl’s parents — was never a normal one. Like Teen Shauna presciently said: They could never go home again.

It’s time to check in on Misty Fucking Quigley, who is deeply depressed about, you know, accidentally killing her best friend — not for the first time, might I add! As a teen, she killed Crystal, who really was a friend, one of the few people who didn’t make fun of Misty. And as an adult, she killed Natalie, who maybe did not return Misty’s besties feelings but nonetheless played an important role in her life and vice versa.

She’s listening to a meditation track while in bed when Walter comes in to try to rouse her. But not even a teased murder mystery interests her. She doesn’t even seem interested in attending Nat’s memorial. The only thing that perks her up a little is when Walter drops a key on her nightstand to Nat’s storage unit that he dug up.

Only Shauna, Jeff, Van, and Taissa, plus a handful of strangers make it to the funeral, where Nat’s mother gives a very brief and unsentimental eulogy. It tracks with the few times we’ve seen Nat’s mom before, but it is a truly depressing funeral to bookend a truly tragic death. I wonder if as an adult Shauna realizes she’s glad she wasn’t the leader in the wilderness; it’s not like it gave Natalie any kind of power or protection later in life. Of course, this would perhaps require more self-awareness than I think Shauna possesses.

After the funeral, Tai, Van, and Shauna do tequila shots at a bar, an interesting way to honor someone who had a lifelong struggle with addiction, but again, self-awareness isn’t really these women’s strongsuit. “What does any of it mean anyway?” Shauna asks the others. “Nat’s life. Our lives. I mean, if you’re lucky, it’s smoke and mirrors and you can’t even remember half of it.”

“Well you’re a laugh riot today, aren’t you?” Tai replies.

Then they all do a little fun thought experiment where they imagine what people would say at their own funerals (which allows for some exposition, including the fact that Taissa apparently quit public office, which yeah, that makes sense!, and Lottie is still in a psychiatric facility).

The women joke that Misty has probably bugged the table to listen in on them. And then there’s a strange moment where Shauna reacts as if she’s being watched by someone, but it passes quickly and without any clarification. We shall be keeping tabs on that.

Misty skips the funeral in order to raid Natalie’s storage unit, where she separates things as trash and keepsakes. She smells and clutches one of Natalie’s signature leather jackets. This is the most genuinely emotional we’ve ever seen Adult Misty.

Back in the wilderness, the winning team is enjoying their rest and relaxation and berry wine while the others wait on them, especially Mari, who bosses Melissa around. Melissa, as a reminder, is one of the JV girls (played by Jenna Burgess) who was introduced last season but didn’t necessarily get a ton of screentime. That already seems to be changing though, so let’s get to know Melissa!

Shauna tells Melissa she doesn’t have to put up with Mari, adding: “I can’t believe we didn’t eat that bitch first.” Oh Shauna HATES hates her. Melissa looks at Shauna a little surprised at her candidness, but then she matches it. “Mari’s so dumb I heard she chipped a tooth on her vibrator.” WHAT! Teen girls say literally the most creatively mean things ever, I’m obsessed. “Wait, do you like actually have a personality?” Shauna asks Melissa. I love when they let new girls on the show talk. Crystal was such a delightful part of last season.

Akilah tries to get Shauna to wear a flower crown, but Shauna shoves it away, and then Melissa “accidentally” (on purpose) stomps on it, showing her fealty to Shauna.

Natalie, Tai, Van, and Gen have a little updates meeting where they discuss the issue of Coach Scott, who they all still believe burned the cabin down (I mean, yeah, who else would have done it?!). Nat insists she’s positive Coach Scott is dead, and then we cut to Coach Scott very much alive and checking traps in the wilderness. Given Nat’s history with Coach, I wouldn’t be surprised if she knows full well he’s alive.

At the end of their meeting, Tai confronts Nat to tell her she needs to do something about the festering rivalry between Shauna and Mari. “Tai, it’s dumb girl shit. We have actual life or death to deal with here,” Nat says. And then Tai accurately reminds her that it’s all life or death out here, even the “dumb girl shit.” REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO JACKIE?

Back to Coach Scott: He stumbles upon a pit in the ground. Could it be THEE pit? Inside, he finds a military grade box of survival gear, including nonperishable food rations and other supplies. A truly lucky find! Especially for someone who doesn’t have a gun and isn’t keen on eating human flesh. There’s a part of me that wonders if the box is a hallucination though, given Coach’s tenuous tether to reality in the past. Time will tell!

Speaking of creative mean teen girls, a group of girls in school with Callie stand in front of the Yellowjackets trophy case and say all sorts of nasty stuff about Nat and the others. They wonder if Callie is into the same freaky shit as her mom.

Callie is her mother’s daughter, indeed, so she schemes her revenge after overhearing them. She orders food delivery, delivered on a scooter by none other than Randy Walsh. Randy! He’s everywhere and nowhere! Shauna, getting high in Callie’s bedroom — again, like mother like daughter — gets a call from the principal. Callie dumped a bunch of animal guts on the girls, which Shauna is pretty chill about, but Jeff is naturally freaking out about, to the point that he actually wonders if it was HUMAN ENTRAILS. Shauna chows down on some chips, and Jeff is shocked she’s hungry, but hey she’s high as fuck, and she’s also the last person to be disturbed by animal guts.

Callie ends up suspended, so Shauna has to homeschool, which is surely gonna go great, yeah, she’s definitely capable of educating her teen daughter who she openly admits she doesn’t even like.

When Shauna confronts Callie about her little guts stunt, she asks if she’s dealing with dark thoughts following what she saw in the woods at Lottie’s compound. Callie clarifies that she didn’t do it because she’s damaged or a psycho but merely because the girls were talking behind her back and she wanted to teach them a lesson. If someone is going to understand that, it’s Shauna. “That’s all it was?” Shauna asks, indeed relieved.

So Callie eagerly shows her the video Ilana filmed of her doing it. Shauna is delighted! She’s dare I say…proud?! Maybe of Callie for the first time ever!

In the penultimate scene of the episode, Callie is already enjoying her time at home, fixing herself a giant bowl of ice cream in the middle of the night. But she’s interrupted by the sudden appearance of a package with Shauna’s name and the Yellowjackets symbol on it. Inside, there’s a tape. Jeff walks in on her, scaring them both. Could this have something to do with that feeling of being watched Shauna experienced earlier? Has someone taken the blackmail torch from Jeff?

It’s not a great time to be the child of a Yellowjacket; Tai’s son doesn’t even want to speak to her on the phone.

Van is staying with Taissa but sleeping in a separate room. Tai wants them to be together. But Van reminds Tai that she’s dying of cancer and also that Tai was apparently the one to break up with her because she didn’t fit into Tai’s idea of the life she wanted to live. All valid points! But Tai gets Van to agree to a fancy dinner out on her dime.

The place is too try-hard though for Van’s interests, so while they’re still drinking their pre-dinner glasses of wine, they decide to have pizza instead. But Tai, desperate for nostalgia, decides to reenact a moment from their youth by dining and dashing.

They flee the restaurant to the tune of “I Think We’re Alone Now,” pursued by their server. They run while laughing, and it would be a very sweet rom-com-like moment if I wasn’t busy thinking about how the server is getting fucked here. Well, to prove my point further, while running after them, their server is almost hit by a bus and then HAS A HEART ATTACK.

But Tai and Van have no idea that they’ve possibly accidentally just killed a man, too busy making out in an alleyway, another moment that should be sweet but is interrupted by Tai looking behind Van’s head and seeing the man with no eyes. She ignores the vision to keep kissing Van. Upsetting! But I like my gay characters haunted and a little doomed, so I’m eating it up.

In the wilderness, it’s the summer solstice, and the losing team has to serve the winners their supper of deer soup and berry wine. Shauna not so subtly spits into Mari’s bowl of soup before serving it to her. Mari tells the others, and Shauna promptly denies it. They physically fight, and Mari is truly stupid for taking Shauna on! Shauna who ALMOST KILLED Lottie when she beat her up. Shauna smashes Mari’s face in the spit soup on the ground, and it is truly reminiscent of Callie’s little guts prank. Shauna and Callie both like to teach other girls lessons in decidedly grotesque ways.

Queen Nat’s solution? Shauna and Mari are both on house arrest and can’t leave their enclosures for two weeks. Mari reacts by running off into the woods. Nat’s leadership power seems to be falling apart a bit.

In the present day, Misty is tending to her grief by channeling Nat. She’s wearing the leather jacket she found in the storage unit and drinking at a dive bar, where she is about to order her usual of an espresso martini but instead pivots to a shot of whiskey. She does SEVEN of them, so the bartender cuts her off. She then hallucinates Teen Nat telling her she doesn’t have to take shit from anyone, prompting her to attack a pair of men shooting pool in the bar because she thinks they’re making fun of her leather jacket. The “attack,” an attempt to recreate the time she and Nat threatened to light a dude’s dick on fire in season one, does not go well.

She ends up stumbling home in the dark, and Walter pulls up to her in a car to offer help. “The only people who understand are my friends, my teammates,” Misty spits at him when he asks why she’s pushing him away. Misty wants to call Shauna or Tai for a ride, but Walter tells her she left her phone at the bar and the bartender started calling her saved contacts. No one answered until he got to W. Oof.

Misty breaks down crying about how much she misses Natalie and how it’s all her fault. “I love her,” she says, crying in Walter’s arms. “She was my best friend.”

I’m reminding myself Misty is a manipulative mastermind and not to mention a MURDERER, but I really do feel bad for her here. Shauna’s words of warning that none of them would really return fully from the wilderness holds true for all the surviving Yellowjackets in various ways, but it’s seen the most acutely in Misty, who still refers to the girls as her teammates and still holds onto the wilderness as if it’s something special they all shared.

Earlier in the episode, in the wilderness, Lottie leads Travis on some sort of misguided spiritual journey where he drinks mushroom tea and she asks him if he feels the wilderness. Teen girls probably shouldn’t be running psychiatric drug trials! Lottie shares with Travis about how she used to “see things” but then was given meds by psychiatrists to make it stop. Then they started again the woods but have again stopped.

Travis then hears the trees screaming, which isn’t alarming at all!

This moment comes back in the final scene of the episode, when the girls — minus Mari — perform a solstice ritual honoring their dead. They release paper lanterns and recite a prayer led by Lottie.

But the ritual results in them hearing a cacophony of disturbing sounds echoing through the woods. The verbs used in the subtitles convey it best, so I’ll transcribe them here: screeching, baby crying, insectile chittering, growling, shrieking, roaring, rumbling, bird-like screeching.

It’s the kind of moment that connects back to my favorite question of this series: Is something supernatural happening in the woods, or is real life — especially when impacted by trauma — just fucking strange to the point of seeming supernatural? If you’ve ever been in the deep woods or somewhere remote and away from civilization, then you know sound can play tricks on you. The simple sounds of nature can sometimes be processed differently in your brain, especially if you’re already afraid or otherwise having a stress response. Auditory illusions can be a symptom of PTSD.

So, is there a monstrous creature or multiple creatures in the woods causing these sounds? Or could it just be wind and natural creatures like birds and wolves, all mixing together with the girls’ trauma and heightened survival instincts to create a symphony of sinister sounds?

Mari is probably wishing she had stuck around for the solstice circle, regardless of the creepy sounds. Because instead she’s at the bottom of the pit trap Coach Scott had set hoping to catch some food. Whether Mari is THE pit girl remains to be seen, but she’s at least A pit girl for now.

Last Buzz:

• WELCOME BACK WELCOME BACK I AM SO HAPPY TO BE DOING THESE RECAPS AGAIN EVEN IF THEY TAKE AN UNGODLY AMOUNT OF HOURS.
• As always, if I get something wrong, just let me know in the comments and I will amend, but be nice about it!
• Before the season started, I did a full rewatch of the first two seasons with my wife, and I highly recommend doing so! It’s absolutely the kind of show that rewards rewatches. I had of course seen every episode multiple times because of these recaps, but I realized that wasn’t true for the season two finale. I only watched it once. While rewatching it, I realized why. It’s a tough episode to watch! Especially the end.
• I find it interesting that Tai, Van, and Shauna as adults talk about (or around, really) Nat’s situation with her dad. It’s the first time those characters have acknowledged it in any timeline.
• “Callie, have you been smoking chronic?” The best part of this Shauna line is that she apparently picked up “chronic” from Jeff.
• “I just wanted to let you know there was an alert on the Meetings Are Murder, Unless They’re About Murder board. Now, I know you don’t go there anymore because of your creative differences with Eric, but it seemed like a pretty tasty one.” An incredible line reading here from Elijah Wood. I need to know more about Misty’s creative differences with Eric!
• “It’s not even tax season.” Adult Misty always has the best quotes of the episode.
• Teen Shauna’s “just give me a reason” is so chilling.
• IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE SECOND EPISODE YET, GET ON IT, I THINK YOU’RE GOING TO LOVE IT. On that note: Episode two recap is also live.
• One last note: These recaps are 100% free to read, but if you enjoy them, consider becoming an AF Media member for just $4 a month, because it really does help me keep being able to do them!

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