Yellowjackets Recap: It’s Done

“Thanksgiving (Canada)” is available to stream now via Paramount+; it will make its Showtime network premiere on Sunday.

Why, hello. A new group has just entered the Yellowjackets chat. And this new blood promises a shake-up that might just bring everything back to life. (Well. Except for Ben, who is very dead.)

A lot happened in “Thanksgiving (Canada),” an episode written by real-life married couple Emily St. James and Libby Hill. Prior to joining Yellowjackets, St. James and Hill were well-known, sharp-eyed TV critics, so when they were added to the writing staff for this season, I was super-psyched. Their first writing credit on the series does not disappoint, but there are some highs and lows to the whole affair.

First up, we need to talk about Ben. I swear that his fate will haunt me for the rest of my days. What the Yellowjackets do to him is unconscionable. In the aftermath of Akilah’s vision, they’ve tied him up outside 24/7 in the pen that also houses the animals. He doesn’t get to move. He doesn’t get to bathe or change his filthy clothing. He gets very minimal interaction with others. He is losing his mind and just wants to die. Honestly, this is some Game of Thrones–level torture. As months elapse and summer turns into fall, the group just lets Ben lie on the ground in complete psychic and physical misery. They have stripped him of any shred of humanity and are somehow surprised when he stops eating so he can just die already.

The wilderness group has made a lot of moral sacrifices in the name of survival, so the only one who seems to be sensitive to Ben’s suffering is Natalie. And, still, she allows it to happen because it’s what the group wants. Yellowjackets often touches on the idea of how destructive groupthink can be on individuals, and the situation with Ben underscores how twisted the concept of right and wrong can become when peer pressure is applied. Things are surely going to get more depraved in the forest (see the ritual from the premiere that we still haven’t seen in real time), but the way they treat Ben in his final days is abhorrent and appalling. When he stops eating, no one suggests that maybe they treat him like a person (!) by letting him bathe and maybe allowing him to stay in one of the shelters. Instead, Misty leads a crew to force-feed him through a tube. (Where did they get this magical plastic feeding tube? I don’t know!)

The idea that Ben is a “bridge home” gives the group hope for rescue, but months elapse during this episode, and no one is making any actual moves to get home. Yet again, I’m left asking what else the group is doing other than banking on Akilah’s cave vision and Ben’s good-luck juju. However, the grim force-feeding situation becomes the last straw for Natalie, who seems to be the only Yellowjacket left with any sort of internal moral compass. As the leader, she has more agency than the other girls, and she also knows that mercy killing Ben will lead to larger problems. She does it anyway.

In the dark of night, Natalie heads over to the animal pen. Travis sees her and briefly tries to stop her but then realizes that what she’s doing is the right thing. (Also, does he feel guilty about steering the group to follow Akilah’s visions? It sure seems like it.) He offers to keep a lookout for her, and Natalie enters the pen. Ben wakes in a panic but is instantly relieved to see Natalie there with a knife. She moves to slit his throat and Ben — the man who patiently taught all of these girls how to hunt and live off of the land — nudges her hand toward his heart instead. As Natalie moves to stab his heart, he whispers a relieved “thank you.” His death is quick and, compared to the horrors he’s been experiencing as a prisoner in the camp, relatively painless.

When the rest of the girls discover what Natalie has done, it seems as if they might beat her to death. We know her demise in the wilderness is not possible as we once had an acerbic and regretful Natalie in the adult timeline (we miss you terribly, Juliette Lewis!), but the group finds a different way to knock her down. Lottie proposes that Natalie be stripped of her title and that the merciless and vicious Shauna should lead them instead. The group tacitly agrees to this new arrangement. Shauna’s first role as leader is to dole out a punishment for Natalie. There will be a feast honoring Coach Scott, and Natalie will prepare it.

So, it seems that Shauna is now the Antler Queen, no? Now that we’ve had two other queens — Lottie as the unofficial leader and Natalie as an official one — it remains uncertain if Shauna will be “the” queen as we move toward the Pit Girl scene from the premiere, but it’s feeling like she might just stay in power for a long time to come. However, even though it seems like Shauna has no mercy, she does offer some pointers to Natalie as she starts to carve up Coach’s body for the Ben-B-Q.

It’s certainly of note that the group chooses to consume Ben instead of just giving him a proper burial, and this marks a pointed transition for the group as a whole. They have other food to eat. There’s an entire pen of Akilah’s goats and bunnies and ducks, and they have been trapping plenty of wild game as well. As the feast begins, we’re left to wonder if they’re eating Ben because they really think it’s the best way to honor their Coach or because they think it’s what the wilderness wants.

Death is everywhere on Yellowjackets. In the present-day timeline, Shauna comes home from her citizen-detective stint in the city and tells Jeff that Lottie is dead. (That she didn’t call him to inform him of this loss — or the reason for her absence — earlier just illustrates how very little she thinks of anyone but herself.) Callie overhears this and runs into her room to give Shauna the mystery tape that she found in the premiere. Shauna’s hackles go up, and she immediately comes to the conclusion that someone is trying to kill her and maybe all of the other surviving Yellowjackets as well.

The Sadecki family goes to hide out at the Jolly Hitcher. Shauna reaches out to Van (via Tai, because she and Van were never that tight) and asks her if she has a DAT player. She says she does and agrees to deliver it to her ASAP. Van and Tai have also been hiding out at a hotel, albeit a much nicer one than the Jolly Hitcher, and Tai is on a Treat Yo’ Self binge, pampering herself with oodles of spa treatments (bedazzled nails!) and the most expensive items on the room-service menu. Van is a bit put off by all of this, but she’s reluctantly along for the ride. When Van questions her about it all, Tai basically says that her life is in a tailspin and she’s just trying to control what she can control.

This spiraling self-care angle generally makes sense, but during the episode, Van experiences two odd communications from Tai that suggest that something else might be going on here. First, when Van searches for the DAT player, she finds an old light-up cradle phone that rings even though it’s not plugged into a jack. She answers, and she hears Tai’s panicked voice say, “Van? Um … I can’t … Help.” Later, Tai jolts up in bed, screaming, “Van! Van, please! You gotta help me!” These two cries for help are curious and perhaps telling of the struggle that’s going on inside Tai at the moment. As we learned last week, “Other” Tai comes out in moments of intense emotion (e.g., sex, anxiety about having to shoot Ben) and when she sleeps. The missive from the phone is odd, especially as it feels like a hallucination on Van’s part, but the idea that Tai might be getting pulled in two different directions as her life crumbles is certainly curious.

Van and Tai finally start to find a place in the larger narrative as they meet up with Shauna to listen to the tape. When the women press play on the tape, we hear an unidentified woman say, “Testing, testing, one, two, three …,” then the next thing we hear is all the wilderness teens howling and cackling, much like we see them do at the conclusion of the episode. The women are kind of floored that the tape exists, with Van saying that the people who know about the tape are either dead or in the car (this is Misty erasure), but then Shauna finds out that Callie has been recording the conversation and bolts.

Misty, for her part, is doing more detective work. With the help of two bags of garbage that Walter delivers to her via limo (?), Misty finds a clue. An empty Chinese-food container leads her to a restaurant where she finds Lisa. You remember Lisa, right? Maybe not. It’s been a while. Lisa was Lottie’s acolyte, whom Misty tried to kill during their adult “hunt” at the end of last season. Misty missed and ended up killing Natalie with her syringe full of fentanyl instead, a point that Lisa reiterates to Misty during their meeting in this episode. Lisa says that she doesn’t really care about any of it; she just wants to live her life. The day Lottie died, she had given Lisa $50,000 in cash and a note that read, “I’m sorry.” Lisa also tells Misty that she saw Tai with Lottie the day she died. Interesting.

As Lottie’s influence is so strong in the wilderness — she’s the one who makes the unilateral decision to make Shauna leader in the wake of Natalie’s perceived betrayal — it’s starting to make sense why the show wouldn’t want her adult counterpart snooping around in the present. Lottie works best as an enigma, a cipher for the beliefs and the often capricious actions of the group. As the episode ends, we linger on the Ben-B-Q feast, with Lottie becoming increasingly agitated that Ben’s fate didn’t seem to match Akilah’s vision. And then, all of a sudden, it does.

Following Lottie’s lead, all the girls begin to chant and scream and dance around the fire, with the iconic eerie vocal chanting from the score joining in. It seems as if the episode might just end on this beat — the team going full feral-wilderness girls, bellies full of their ex-coach — when Lottie spies something through the trees. At first, she thinks it’s Ben. In a Lord of the Flies–coded shot that puts Ben’s hacked-off head in the foreground, a man steps into the frame, lifts his hand, and says a cautious “hello.” He appears to be with at least one other person. Lottie’s reaction to this shocking development is instant and cutting. “No!” she shrieks. However, as the camera pans around to take in all of the other Yellowjackets’ reactions, there’s a wide variety of emotions: Shauna is in shock. Van is full of delight. And Natalie seems overcome with emotion.

And then? The man looks down, spots Ben’s bloody head, and freaks out. End scene.

Is this it? Are we finally getting rescued?! This introduction of “Others” in the wilderness has the potential to energize the plot and move things in a different direction than various iterations of survival tactics and wilderness worship, and it will certainly also shake up the social dynamics of the group as a whole. What will they do now that someone else has witnessed their barbaric feast? Well, that’s a question for next week.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz

• The man who approaches the Yellowjackets’ camp is played by Nelson Franklin. I know him as the sweet Robby from New Girl and the constantly put-upon Will from Veep, but you might know him from a million things because he’s a dude who stays working. He has great comedic timing (see his amazing reaction to a random man’s head on an altar in the middle of the wilderness), and I’m excited to see more of him as the season progresses.

• I’m not too sure what’s going on with Callie this season, but when she reminds Shauna that she’s the same age as she was when they were in the wilderness, it reminded me of a therapy concept. When our kids reach the age that we were when we experienced certain traumas, we are likely to revisit those traumas as well. This is totally happening to Shauna, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. Although random people are cutting her brakes and leaving threatening tapes at her door, so there’s that, too.

• I’ve talked before about how much I adore Elijah Wood and how curious I am to see what’s happening with the Walter story line, but things have been dragging here. Something needs to happen with his character soon, or I fear I will completely lose interest. Did Walter kill Lottie? Is he looking to kill Misty for some sort of revenge? Give us a reason for this man’s continued presence on the show, please!

• I’m a bit confused about the title of this episode, “Thanksgiving (Canada).” I guess it serves to mark time — if we take the title at face value, it’s mid-October 1997 now, approximately 16 months after they’ve crashed, and we know they were in the wilderness for a total of 19 months, so we’re close to rescue but not totally there yet —and I guess instead of a turkey, they’re having roasted Ben for their celebration?

• What part of Ben do you think Lottie is gnawing on when she starts chanting? Do we even want to know?

• If Ben didn’t start the cabin fire, then who did?