Yellowjackets Recap: Girls’ Trip

“Them’s the Breaks” is available to stream now via Paramount+; it will make its Showtime network premiere on Sunday, 

Good news, Citizen Detectives! It looks like we might have a break in the case of “It” v. Group Psychosis. There’s a whole mess of poison gas simmering underneath the area of the wilderness that the Yellowjackets are camping in, and it’s quite possibly a culprit for much of the wackadoo stuff that the group has been experiencing since their arrival. At the very least, the vision(s) that Van, Shauna, and Akilah had while basically being asphyxiated by the gas are going to come into play as the season progresses. And I fear that none of this is good news for poor Ben.

But before we get to the big wilderness reveal, let’s check in with the present-day Yellowjackets, where *checks notes* Tai and Van watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Callie and Lottie do some heavy shoplifting, and Shauna and Misty go get scones. Seriously, these are things that actually happen in the present-day timeline, and I’m just begging the show to do something more substantial. I love these actresses, and there’s certainly a big Melissa reveal on the horizon (Hilary Swank, probably), but the purpose of this timeline has become very unclear. I believe I’m one of the rare people who is genuinely curious about the Walter story line (shout-out to my raging childhood crush on Elijah Wood), and I’d like to see some sort of resolution of the Callie and Shauna story line, but otherwise I’m not sure what we’re doing here.

The most superfluous story line in the present comes courtesy of Tai and Van. Yes, we find out that Van’s cancer is in remission (yay!), but this just leads to Tai leaning into the wilderness shit. She believes that the waiter was the sacrifice that made this happen, but honestly, wasn’t Natalie supposed to be the sacrifice? At the conclusion of season two, I speculated that Natalie’s death might have paid for Van’s life, and so the waiter just feels like an extra cherry on the “It” sundae. Tai lights a candle and starts chanting, “We hear the wilderness, and it hears us.” Van looks on, possibly in horror, but also maybe thinking that the ritual couldn’t hurt. She does have stage-four cancer, after all, and people have been known to do desperate things when they’re very ill.

Later, they watch some old VHS tapes that someone recorded directly from TV, commercials and all. Ah, the ’80s. Once I randomly unearthed an old potato chip commercial featuring Brad Pitt on a random bootleg tape of Cheers episodes that my parents had recorded. The prestreaming age was wild, y’all. Tai and Van have a similar experience when Tai spies the Man With No Eyes in a commercial for Ozzie’s Ice Cream Shop.

Excuse me, what? Who would ever put something so horrifying in a commercial during a children’s show is beyond me. No wonder the place has long since closed. When Van and Tai get there, Tai insists on breaking in, and they find a fox with a dead bunny hanging from its jaws. Tai breathily asks, “What do you want?” To which Van replies, “We know what it wants. It wants more.” While this side quest feels like it was pretty unnecessary overall, Van’s claim about the wilderness does ring true. The world that the Yellowjackets know is a callous and cruel one, and of course their survivors’ guilt would steer them toward believing in an entity that would never be satisfied.

This is why Shauna has such a strong reaction when Lottie gifts Jackie’s heart necklace to Callie during this episode. Shauna is not great, Bob, but she does love her daughter. She never dealt with the traumatic loss of her son — a loss we see her revisit in her hallucination later in the episode — and her poor parenting of Callie is, in part, due to the fact that she believes she could lose her at any moment. This is why she made the wholly twisted decision to have Misty babysit Callie and Lottie the previous evening and why she goes to get intel from Misty in person.

Misty gets Shauna to meet her for a scone (with real Vermont blueberries!) and gloms onto her for the rest of the day, saying she’ll help her source gift baskets for the Joels or go to the podiatrist or whatever Shauna has to do, all in the name of forced friendship. Shauna reluctantly gives in, in part because Misty does really seem to have the scoop on the best places to get nice soft cheeses in the area, but also because she can’t say no. The two hop in Shauna’s van and quickly find that the brakes are out. They scream as Shauna expertly guides the van into a park filled with children and then up a giant hill so that the car loses momentum. Once they’re safe, Shauna blames Misty for cutting her brakes. Misty roundly denies it and stomps off in a huff when Shauna kicks her out of the car. Oddly, not one of the park patrons bats an eye at any of this.

So, when Shauna returns home, she’s frazzled. After a successful designer-dress heist, Lottie and Callie are making a healthy meal as a thanks to Shauna. Shauna is sampling a sauce when she spies Callie wearing the necklace. Panic starts to rise on her face, her eyes bugging out like the No-Eyed Man in that bonkers ice-cream commercial, and she rips the necklace off of Callie’s neck and kicks Lottie out. Lottie, for her part, coos a soft, “It never meant what you thought it meant” before she trots out of the Sadecki house.

I’m kind of with Shauna on this one. Lottie might be right about the overall meaning of Jackie’s heart necklace, but we do know that Pit Girl was wearing it before she stumbled into the pit, so it certainly comes with some bad vibrations. People don’t even want wedding rings from marriages that ended in divorce, much less a trinket that was once worn by one girl who froze to death and another girl who was ritualistically murdered and devoured by other humans. I’d take the hardest of passes on that one. It’s interesting to note that Natalie has the necklace in the wilderness timeline at the moment, but I’m willing to bet that it changes hands by the end of the season.

In the wilderness, things are getting tense. In fear for his life, Ben has effectively kidnapped Mari, and he’s not too sure what to do with her. At first, Mari tries to flirt with Ben to secure her freedom (gross), but Ben is not only gay, he’s sick of Mari’s shit. He recalls how she started a rumor that he had “raging gonorrhea” and that she was just generally terrible, but Mari persists. When she realizes she can’t seduce her way out of the cave, she grabs Ben’s bear spray and incapacitates both of them by discharging it in an enclosed cave. Man, Mari is not bright.

During her brief captivity, Mari and Ben commiserate over how messed up their situation is. Ben gives a speech where he dumps a lot of autobiographical info, sharing things like how he loves 7-Eleven frozen burritos and how he went to see the Dave Matthews Band three times but he doesn’t even really like them. (Same, Ben, same. Did you even live through the ’90s if you didn’t begrudgingly go to a DMB show?) His speech feels ominous somehow, like the show is fatting up an emotional calf for slaughter, and I don’t like it. Mari also shares an anecdote about how she watched her little 4-year-old cousin die while watching Eureeka’s Castle, and how she thinks that there’s a bad timeline lurking just under our lived experience at all times, but that it’s all real. Unable to kill Mari, Ben lets her go. And she immediately runs back to camp and tells her frenemy Shauna all about it.

It feels very odd that Ben has somehow become the most sympathetic character on this show. I fully believe that he didn’t start the fire — for the record, I’m sticking with my Bad Tai theory from last week, especially as we saw her play with fire again this week — and I also believe that he’s right when he says that the girls don’t really care about what actually happened. Despite it all, he remains a good guy, not only letting Mari go despite the fact that he knows she’ll tattle on him, but he also for putting himself at serious risk to save three of the other girls from the poison gas in the cave.

Mari not only tattles on Ben, she also offers to lead the entire team into the woods on a Coach hunt in the middle of the night to find him. I truly hope they eat her next. When they reach the cave, somehow Akilah is the one who convinces them that they need to go inside, but she’s not happy about it. A single tear falls down her cheek as she makes the decision. The paths in the cave diverge, and Akilah, Van, and Shauna stick together, going deeper into the abyss. At one point, Shauna’s candle goes out, but it’s okay because Van’s starts going haywire. The three girls lose one another, all hallucinating that they’re in various spaces. Shauna is in the lake, trying to get to her son, who’s now 2 or 3 years old, but no matter how hard she swims, she can’t get any closer to shore. Van finds herself back in the cabin and sits down next to the warm fire. In the wildest of hallucinations, Akilah sees herself wandering through the forest, eating blackberries and communing with a giant talking llama. (This type of silly, stonerlike vision seems incongruous with the tone of the show thus far, but sure, okay.) The llama warns Akilah that the path can be easy or hard, but “It” will get what it wants either way.

The hallucinations then converge, with all three girls finding themselves in a high-school classroom with Lottie at the board. And surprise! Jackie is also there (hi, Ella Purnell!), noodling with a slap bracelet. Akilah plays with it and it doesn’t harm her, but then Van snaps it onto her wrist and it cuts her. Jackie says, “It happens sometimes.” (Reader, it did happen sometimes.) Then, Jackie grabs the bracelet and slaps it onto Shauna’s neck, where it starts to cut into her flesh and strangle her. At Lottie’s behest, Akilah and Van attempt to help Shauna, but they’re unsuccessful. The symbolism and messaging in this dream is as subtle as that cacophonous noise in the woods: They’re playing with fire. No matter what they do, it will never heal them from the horrific experiences they’ve had. The vision breaks when the three girls find themselves a safe distance away from the gas, their dumb asses hauled to safety by a heroic, one-legged Ben. “It’s poison. It’s some kind of gas,” he mutters as he tries to catch his breath.

For his efforts, he’s captured by the vengeful Yellowjackets. There is no way that this situation will end well for Ben, but I’m going to continue holding out hope for him until the very end. I’m fully aware that this one is going to hurt.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz

• The idea of the symbols indicating a system of mines has definitely been on the Reddit radar since early on in the show’s run, and now it seems to be canon. What type of gas is it, though? I know methane gas will make a flame dance like the one in Van’s candle did, but it’s hard to believe that this show would pivot on something as simple as methane. Any armchair chemists care to venture a guess in the comments?

• Speaking of Van, I got serious Labyrinth vibes from her hallucination situation. Not only does she go through an unassuming passageway to a comforting place that ends up gloriously falling apart, but she also gets taken down by a bunch of random arms.

• The shoplifting plotline was kind of meh to me until I realized it recalled Lottie’s season-one confession that she would shoplift at TJ Maxx and she had thousands of Maxx Bucks saved up. I wonder if she ever ended up using them.

• When Tai lights the candle and starts chanting to the wilderness, there’s a giant bowl of oranges behind her. Oranges are a famed harbinger of death in the world of prestige TV, so Tai and Van had better watch their backs … or at least get rid of those oranges.