Yellowjackets has been a staple at our home since the premiere just over three years ago. However, things are not going great. The show has been very slow to hit plot points. And there’s a notable pacing and intensity difference between the two timelines. The storyline in the woods is gripping. The modern story is lackluster. All well acted but the writing isn’t holding it’s end up.
I think this is a natural outcome of the setting the stakes extremely high in the pilot’s flash forward to what seems like the end of the woodlands plot. Since then the writers have told the audience, we are building to THIS. Anything not a step towards THIS feels missing something. And then the modern story doesn’t feel like it’s building to anything.
The pilot was simply entrancing. It was a great start, a perfect episode, could not be better. But that’s been the problem. The show, outside a few spikes, has never again swung quite as hard as that first episode. And we’re all just kinda…waiting. What are we doing here? Where’s the drama? What’s happening?
For me, Yellowjackets faces the tempered soul of someone who got very obsessed than completely disinterested with Lost. Getting hyped and ass deep into theory and wild mass guessing is a young man’s game. I’ve bought too many pigs in too many pokes to go all in based on a great elevator pitch. To torture these metaphors a bit more, I need some food on my plate. Telling me to wait, wait forever, with no discussion, no check-in is just going to make me check out and my mind wander.
We’re coming up on the halfway point of our much vaunted Five Season Plan for Yellowjackets. The series has been off the air for two years and as much that’s the new normal for television, it’s devastating to my interest and attention span.
Anyways the point of all this is that I need to watch Season 3, episode 3, “Them’s The Brakes” by myself instead of with family. And my current headspace is narrow eyed, reaching for my phone. So here we go.
I skip the previously on because Game of Thrones ruined this staple of television forever. They would just spoil the episode by telling you what would happen.
We start with Coach Ben and Mari. Is this the same cave set as season 2? Who knows. Coach is apparently eating bats? This feels like a studio note, “how the fuck did this guy survive since…question mark.” That was a fun scene.
I wonder if the show wrote themselves into a corner or the budget it wrote for them on the number of girls they could have in the teenage timeline. In hindsight the pilot seems to be at the tail end of the girls’ second winter. Things at their worst. But apparently they just needed a bear and two friends to survive their first winter. If the writers had everything they wanted, would they have more teenagers to act as cannon fodder in the woods?
The timeline of the show is one of those things the show just needs you to take their word for it. The long Canadian winter apparently wasn’t so bad going from 1996 to 1997. Did they really just need Javi to make it through winter? Ah fuck it you wanna watch a TV show or not.
We spend less than 30 seconds with Van at the doctor. Her Stage 4 Cancer seems to be getting miraculously better.
We then move to Lottie, Shauna, and Callie. The pairing with Lottie moving in with Shauna feels very TV. In the same way Misty and Nat felt very TV.
I felt very triggered by getting Shauna interrupted for a conversation while she is trying to cook pancakes for the family. THE FOOD IS GONNA BURN PEOPLE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET THE FUCK OUTTA THE KITCHEN. Sweet jumped up jesus do not fucking talk to me when I got a goddamn pan on a goddamn burner.
Callie and Lottie seem to sneak off together to a store. It’s at this point that I remember from Season 1, Lottie likes to shoplift. That is fun good writing. I feel like the writers grew to like these two characters in season 2 and now we’re mashing them up together. I don’t know where this is going but I’m interested. Season 2 made Callie kind of a real piece of work, Season 3 seems focused on Lottie saying “we can make her WORSE.” I got a bad feeling about where this going.
Shout out to the PNC Bank Arts Center, formerly the Garden State Arts Center.
We get a few instances this episode of the trees or the earth growling . Everyone, girls and Coach, can hear it. I am interested but I need some data. Some exposition would be great if this is really Halfway through the series.
Mari advances an interesting theory about an alternate reality which is a story to get coach to release her. Coach approaches Mari with a knife. He’s not actually gonna do it. He’s gonna let her go. He cuts the ropes. HOW MUCH ROPE DO YOU HAVE, JUST UNTIE HER.
Other teamups this episode. Shauna and Misty at a coffee shop. Van and Taissa. This episode seems very “day in the life”.
Taissa reading the news about the dead server. While the election and her family seem to have completely glided past her in the background this seems to be landing for some reason. Like her family and the election belonged to her, they were her things to destroy. This waiter was an innocent.
Van’s mixed emotions about her cancer seeming to get better resonates. She was ready to die. Now she has to imagine life past next week/month/year.
Taissa speculates that IT could be happening again. An innocent dies but Van seems to be healing. They’re not specific in this scene. Also this seems so much more direct than season 2. Season 2 had a lot of Lottie visions and ended with Shauna’s declaration, “it was always just us.”
After the coffee shop, Shauna’s brakes go out. Shaun immediately accuses Misty and brings in the bathroom phone. Shauna really lets her have it. This is a good scene. As I’ve seen The Trailer and know Hilary Swank is in this season who the hell knows. It’s probably Hilary Swank but the season gives me no foreshadowing to speculate with.
Our first scene with the non-Mari teens is halfway through the episode. Lunch, I mean, Melissa wants to talk to Shauna. Feeling a 4th Wall Lean when Shauna asks, “You’re not gonna be fucking boring are you?”
When Mari comes back I liked the line from Misty, “Thank God or….Whatever.”
Mari stalls but doesn’t lie or protect the coach. She tells the team exactly what happened and Shauna immediately goes on the warpath wanting to find Coach.
Then we cut to Callie and Lottie cooking and drinking wine in the kitchen. Jesus christ my parents would’ve lost their fucking minds if I was underage helping myself to their wine. Also how much wardrobe does Lottie have with her? I’m including new shoplifting.
Then shit gets real. Callie is wearing The Jackie Necklace. The one Pit Girl wore in the pilot. Lottie gave it to her. Shauna freaks. Good scene but I feel like they could’ve done this in season 2.
Cut back to Van and Tai in domestic bliss. Again, we’re ignoring Van’s business and Tai’s family. They seem to be watching VHS tapes of Pee-Wee Herman with commercials when Guy With No Eyes shows up. I asked what the hell was going on at the time but in hindsight, remember Van is a big VHS buff. It’s good writing it just took me a minute to get there. Taissa shouting “It has to mean something!” feels like a 4th wall lean.
Taissa drives the fuck out of there into the night. I am interested in where this is going.
Cut back at the cave. More growling earth. Good detail on the tear stains on Akilah who has to be one of my favorite actors on the series. The Season 2 mouse storyline was a legit tearjerker. Nia Sondaya is killing it in this show. I doubt she makes it out of the woods but I hope they get a good showing, a good death, and get work out of this because they really deserve it.
The gang splits up in the cave. Hackneyed but again, I am curious where this is going. Guys I appreciate you being thorough looking everywhere in the cave but a one legged man did not come through that much water.
The Akilah, Van, Shauna group starts hallucinating. The 2nd Van Hallucination gets intense if you’re sensitive to scary bits. Then One Eyed Man comes back after “It’s just one dream.”
Again they keep calling whatever they’re trying to appease IT. Is this meant to be synonymous with The Wilderness or am I reading too far into it. I like the imagery of them being taken by Fire, Earth, and Water. Is this going to be just weird hallucination shit like season 2 or is this time is the hallucination plot relevant?
Maybe not because it turns out this part of the cave is experiencing an Actual Literal Gas Leak. Coach swoops in to help them out.
The episode ends with Nat with a gun over Coach. I’m surprised they got him and everyone got out of the gas leak alive. Team Nat got captured Coach although the details are sparse. I feel like that’s the show in a nutshell. We’re not supposed to ask “how did we get here?” We’re just supposed to enjoy the destination.
I did not really care for the openers. When I heard we were getting two episodes released together I said, “okay they’re going to be paced like one episode.”
But you know what I like this episode.
I am rolling my eyes at there being a mystery over “Who Burned The Cabin?” Like the 2nd Season seemed to make it crystal clear that it was the Coach because of the Cannibalism. Throwing ambiguity on that makes it seem like it was Taissa in one of her fugue states. Which like…okay…where we going with this and can we get there more efficiently? Is Tai dealing with mental illness or did she make a Warlock Pact With A Dark Power or Why Not Both has been a question since the REALLY GREAT reveal at the end of Season 1. But I’m ready to get somewhere with this, not just have Tai be crackers the whole series.
Season 2 was really spinning its goddamn wheels. They wanted to have The Jackie Moment be An Episode, not the first one. They wanted The Birth to be An Episode. They wanted the Mushroom Samba episode at Lottie’s Cult. They wanted The Hunt as an episode. They were chasing too many rabbits and lost them all.
For season 3 I’m hoping we get some faster paced steps forward and this seemed like the best ones in quite some time.
EDITS
- I’m seeing other reviews mentioning “the reveal” of No-Eyed Man. If that was The Reveal, that No-Eyed Man was just a commercial that traumatized Taissa as a kid, then that is so underwhelming I didn’t clock it as a reveal while watching this episode.