Yellowjackets Season 2 Is Darker, Weirder, and Better Than Ever

The first season of Showtime drama Yellowjackets was that rarest of TV phenomena: A genuine word-of-mouth hit. Granted, the series was unlike almost anything else on television, wracking up seven Emmy nominations and the sort of genuinely viral buzz (pun absolutely intended) that most modern-day television properties can only dream of achieving. The deliciously disturbing survival thriller was one part horror story and one part surprisingly deft exploration of the complex inner lives of teenage girls, all with an uncomfortable hint of cannibalism on top—the sort of drama that subverts our expectations of what these stories can be and do even as its twisty mysteries encouraged viewers to theorize and speculate about each installment in excruciating detail. Suddenly it seemed like everyone had a Yellowjackets theory, from what really happened to the eponymous 1990s-era soccer team who were stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash, or how the traumatic shared experience was still affecting the lives of the survivors more than two decades later. Who made it out of the woods? What secrets are the women that lived still carrying? And who, exactly, got eaten by her teammates? 

Yet, all that speculation pales next to what is perhaps the most important question of all: What about Season 2? Was it possible that lightning would really strike twice? Could the series maintain its trademark wild, weird, utterly addictive tension in a second outing? After all, the threat of the proverbial sophomore slump is very real in the television industry and has kneecapped shows with much bigger production and marketing budgets than this one in recent years. (Looking at you, True Detective, Big Little Lies, American Gods, and dozens more.) Could Yellowjackets possibly maintain its cross-timeline intensity? Expand its central mysteries in satisfying ways? Give fans at least some answers to the many questions it has raised, while still offering up new puzzles to obsess over? 

Happily, the answer to almost all those questions is a resounding yes. Yellowjackets Season 2 is darker, more disturbing, and more confident than ever—utterly fearless in its storytelling and unflinching in its vision. Unlike so many shows before it, Yellowjacket’s critical and popular success hasn’t changed or compromised its quality in any way, and its second season feels like nothing so much as a natural expansion and extension of its first. In many ways, it is that first season, turned up to eleven—more uncomfortable, more transgressive, and full of even more rage (both sublimated and directly expressed) than its predecessor. 

Over the course of the six episodes available to screen for critics, we meet more of the plane survivors in the present-day timeline, even as the flashbacks reveal the increasing complexities of life in the wilderness as factions form among the team. And the show remains as cagey as ever about whether supernatural forces are at work in the woods or the girls are simply experiencing some sort of shared psychotic break brought on by starvation and trauma. (But one of the best things about Yellowjackets is that no matter which of those things you believe to be true, the story doesn’t get any less compelling or intense.)

Season 2 picks up two months from the events of the first season finale, which concluded with the region’s first snowfall and the death by exposure of Yellowjackets team captain Jackie Taylor (Ella Purnell). Now winter has come to the mountains in earnest, and the surviving team members are struggling not just to stay warm, but to find enough food to stay alive. Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis (Kevin Alves) rise earlier and earlier to search for game—and any sign of his missing brother Javi (Luciano Leroux). Lottie (Courtney Eaton) conducts an elaborate ceremony meant to bless the hunters, and the bulk of the girls seem to believe she—and her strange connection to the forest—is the only reason the pair are coming back at all. Taissa’s (Jasmin Savoy Brown) disturbing sleepwalking is getting worse, and Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) spends all her time talking to Jackie’s dead body, which is being stored in the meat shed where the girls have kept the bear Lottie killed at the end of last season until the ground thaws enough for a burial. (It’s exactly as creepy as it sounds, particularly when Shauna decides to do the corpse’s make-up.)