2 out of 5

Created by: Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson

covers seasons 1 – 2

There are some shows I’ll try out for an episode or two and figure they’re not for me, only to return later and… well, no, I still generally end up at the same position, but there might be a run of episodes where I can better understand the appeal, maybe to the point of (temporarily) being convinced my initial take was wrong. Sometimes I am! But all to say: my gut is generally pretty good at this.

There are some shows I go through this routine with, though, and never experience that temporary reprieve: there’s no point where I start to think – hey, this isn’t so bad.

Yellowjackets, at first blush, was a disappointment: some great actors dropped into a twisty-turny willing-to-go-dark drama about a past tragedy, and the strange occurrences that occurred thereabouts, and how they influence the present. With nods to the Andes crash, the show name is that of a high school girl’s soccer team; on their way to nationals, their plane crashes, and the girls and their coach must survive in arctic wilderness. We watch scenes of this split with flashes of the girls – now women – in the present, hinting at some horrible things that happened during their time stranded.

The intrigue is thus coming to understand what those things are; the drama is from seeing how they play out then and now; and the twists are due to framing this all as rather arcane and occulty – flash cuts to strange symbols and then girls wearing animal masks in the woods; the whispers in the modern day of the past’s tendrils still holding on…

The last bit, while kinda the selling point for the marketing, is also the sticking point: I’d like to engage Yellowjackets with its lore, but it doesn’t matter – it is a mystery box structure built solely to be a mystery box structure – and this is what I picked up on to start (everything is just so forcefully mysterious) and that frankly gets equal parts worse and stupider as it goes on. Insert some groanworthy 90s nostalgia (if Stranger Things already pushed it with the 80s, here’s another decade for you, that perhaps feels shallower to me personally since that was my coming-of-age decade), and you’ve got the frame for most of the show: something weird and out of the blue happens in the past, coded with Lost-y “it’s all connected”ness; in the present, the adult ladies act rashly to force drama in that timeline; then play a Nirvana song.

Name checking Lost is not casual: it’s undeniably an influence. Which is… fine, and maybe metatextual to the heavy-handed nostalgia vibes, but Yellowjackets certainly plucks some of its worst lessons of trying to line up too many questions at once, and hyper focusing on unimportant particulars as kind of fakeout revelations while the other mysteries never move.

The aforementioned intrigue comes across as pretty stale as a result of this pacing, requiring shock value to be used to build up to bigger moments. Frustratingly, the survival side of the story otherwise has really great beats to show the girls’ descent into tribalism, but it moves in odd fits and jerks in laying out those beats. Similarly, the post-traumas in the modern day are well-woven into the survivor’s lives, but are again brought down by choppy pacing, tryhard writing, and the unfortunate mystery box stuff constantly distracting. It’s hard to pick out the adult actresses’ strengths amongst this – Melanie Lynskey seems underutilized as “generic snippy worrywart,” for example – though Christina Ricci lucks into the best and richest role that she has a ton of fun with, as does the audience. The younger actresses’ have arguably meatier roles, since it’s all very high drama in the flashbacks, and not only is the casting uniformly good here, but the alignment of kid-to-adult was excellently done / effected firstly visually, but then physically, with the actresses either naturally or purposefully carrying over traits.

The second season has a bit more focus and is stronger, but Yellowjackets never really escapes from (or wants to escape from) its reliance on puzzle boxing and shocks, and continues to milk that to a point of tedium. Whenever I wanted to give the show some credit for working on its drama or subplotting chops, it would prove to be just another deke for a mystery box. (And then they’d play a Cranberries song.)

If you enjoy engaging in online guessing games, I’m sure this can be more fun, but coming to it after the fact, it’s a bit clearer how little impact all the twists and turns have, and how much that prevents richer elements from emerging.