Yellowjackets Season-Finale Recap: Livin’ on the Edge

“Full Circle” is available now on Paramount+; it will air on Showtime Sunday, April 13 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

Let’s start at the end, with perhaps the biggest adrenaline rush that Yellowjackets has ever delivered. As Natalie perches on the top of a cliff, a stunning snowy vista surrounding her small, scrambling figure, she activates the broken satellite phone by using the antenna from the transponder. Frantic at the possibility of communicating with the outside world, Natalie desperately shouts, “Please help us! Send help! We need some fucking help! Can you hear me?!” And, in what feels like a miracle, someone can. “I can hear you,” a male voice responds. Livin’ on the edge, babies! We’re getting rescued!

This final sequence of season three provides an infusion of energy, hope, and possibility that has me very excited. Not gonna lie, I watched this scene no fewer than five times, and it’s thrilling every damn time. If this season of Yellowjackets has taught us anything, it’s that the show desperately needs to start working toward a definitive end point, and Natalie’s communiqué with the outside world mercifully seems to mark the beginning of the end. Parts of season two and a large chunk of season three felt like the writers were just dragging out the narrative for far too long in the interest of keeping the show going for what creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson considered to be a five-season story arc.

Case in point: Pit Girl. Yes, we finally found out Pit Girl’s identity (Mari, duh). And we finally found out who was the reigning Antler Queen when the hunt took place (Shauna, double duh). But given that the show has been teasing these scenes for so long — staticky, VHS-like jumps to footage from the premiere have even been interspersed throughout this episode, only serving to remind us how very long we’ve been waiting for answers — these reveals felt a little muted. Even though the show briefly tricked us into thinking that Pit Girl might actually be Hannah, we all knew it was going to be Mari, right? And it doesn’t come as a surprise that Shauna would be the one presiding over all of this ultraviolence as the Antler Queen. It should not have taken three full seasons to get to this point. But here we are, and thankfully, the conclusion of the season has much to recommend the show for a fourth (and hopefully final) outing.

While the wilderness timeline resolves the dangling Pit Girl story line and provides a thrilling cliffhanger in the form of potential rescue, the adult story line sets up a showdown that reinvigorates the plot, gives it a clear purpose, and ties it to the wilderness in a visceral way. The top of the episode sees teen Lottie finding her adult body lying in the morgue. Adult Lottie bolts up and worries that she’s too late for … something, but the younger version of herself asks if she remembers what she promised and then tells her that it’s time to meet “her.” It’s unclear if this is a dream sequence, a vision, or some sort of afterlife reality, but ultimately, it feels like this is a hallucination that adult Lottie has prior to meeting up with Callie in the basement of her apartment building.

Through Misty’s citizen-detective work, we find out that Callie was the one who killed Lottie. It was an accident, but honestly, Lottie was kind of being a super creep. In flashbacks, we see Callie look for Lottie because Lottie took the DAT tape. Lottie has been expecting Callie and has set up a creeptastic concrete staircase lined with burning candles for this showdown with Shauna’s daughter. Let’s remember that Callie wanted to know more about her mom, but Lottie was the absolute wrong person to come to for any sort of grounded answer. First, Lottie reveals to Callie that the girls not only ate one another in the wilderness, but they also hunted each other for sport. This is the answer Callie has been seeking but definitely not the one she wanted or maybe even expected. Then, Lottie intensely insists that Shauna is possessed by “It” and that Shauna has never been able to get close to Callie because she’s just like her, “but more.”

So. Okay. This whole argument makes no sense if you look at the actual reality of the situation. Callie is, by all accounts, a pretty normal girl who has Jeff Sadecki for a dad and, as far as we know, has never felt strong urges to burn down her entire life. We have not seen any evidence that she struggles with the same mental-health issues that Shauna does, nor that she’s harboring some powerful evil force within her. However, if we look at Lottie’s claims in a more developmental sense, they do track.

Shauna is jealous of Callie, not because “It” has chosen her, but because her daughter gets to live the life of a normal teen girl. Obviously, Shauna never processed any of the trauma that she amassed during her time in the wilderness, and so when Callie reached the age that she was when the Yellowjackets crashed, it brought up all sorts of old issues that she then projected onto her daughter. It doesn’t help that Shauna was probably reluctant to bond with Callie in the first place due to the unexplored loss of her child in the wilderness. It’s clear that Callie has been feeling all of this heaviness throughout her entire life. The “It” that’s growing in Callie isn’t what Lottie thinks it is; it’s intergenerational trauma.

For Callie, hearing all of this is confirmation of the worst things she’s ever suspected about her relationship with her mother. So when Lottie gets all up in her personal space with the intensity of a thousand candles, Callie shoves her, resulting in Lottie’s fatal fall down the stairs. Having found Callie’s picture in Lottie’s phone, Misty later confronts her about the accidental murder, and honestly, she’s the best person to do so because she once shoved someone to their death, too.

Shauna, for her part, still doesn’t exactly know what she’s done wrong. After helping Tai bury Van, she heads home to find that Jeff and Callie have split. Their closets are empty, and Callie’s phone has been disconnected. For some reason, Shauna goes to question Misty about the situation, and the freaky four-eyed mushroom is more than happy to spill the tea. Christina Ricci is a joy to watch in this episode as Misty gleefully pieces everything together. (And, since this is the final episode of the season, let me just pause to say that Natalie’s leather jacket did absolute wonders to make Misty look like a cool badass.) As Misty talks to Callie, and then later to Shauna, she exudes an air of giddy confidence and control as she assures all parties that she won’t spill their secrets. Shauna has been a shitty friend to her throughout her life, and now she has what she’s always wanted: leverage.

If we take a brief survey of the remaining four Yellowjackets at this point, Shauna has lost everything, Melissa is MIA, Misty is in her element, and Tai is grieving. We don’t see much of adult Tai in this episode, but it opens with her burying Van’s body in some random off-road wooded area. An unmarked grave doesn’t exactly seem like the way to honor your soul mate, but then Tai does something even more extreme: She carves out Van’s heart and eats it. This mirrors Travis’s actions in the season-two finale, but in that case I felt it was more of a waste-not-want-not situation. Someone had to eat Javi’s heart, so of course that honor would fall to his brother. Here, Tai accepts all of herself, the “Other” included, as she partakes in Van’s bloody ventricles to symbolize her intent to carry on and find revenge.

Back in the wilderness, we do see Van and Tai’s bond in action as they decide to stack the deck for the hunt, agreeing to mark Hannah for death. You see, Lottie and Akilah conspired to kill all of the game that Akilah had been raising so that the girls would be forced to have a hunt. This beat feels really hollow because the Akilah we know would never kill her babies. Later, she goes to confront Lottie about the fact that she knows “It” isn’t really real. Lottie, for her part, is still all in.

When the group draws cards, Shauna can sense that something is off with Tai and Van, and she steps out of the circle, shifting the card count. In a funny callback to the fact that these girls are just high-schoolers, Tai snipes at Shauna that she took AP Stats and moving places “doesn’t change the odds.” (She’s technically right.) To Shauna’s delight, Mari is the one who ends up with the queen of hearts, and they all scramble to prepare for the hunt as Lottie delightedly counts to 30 and Mari runs for her life.

Mari remains an idiot, because for some reason, she strips off her windbreaker, pants, and shoes (!) to make a sort of decoy, and then heads right in the direction of the pit she already fell into. Along the way, she encounters Lottie, who cryptically tells her, “Do you see where we are? You’ve been here already, Mari. You could let it be different.” Is she talking about the proximity of the pit? Perhaps? Or is she just spewing Lottie-isms? It doesn’t matter, because minutes later, Mari falls into the pit and the hunt is over.

We revisit all of the scenes from the premiere, with Van’s pink Converse peeking over the side of the pit and Mari’s twitching body below. Thank the wilderness that she died a quick death, because that would have been excruciating if she had technically survived that fall. Travis is good at setting human traps, I guess? After the feast is over, the group disperses back to their huts, and Shauna pounces over to Natalie for a little light humiliation. It turns out that Hannah was pretending to be Natalie the entire time, and Natalie has absconded to the snowy mountains to seek (and find!) rescue. Shauna is apoplectic with rage.

At the conclusion of the episode, we see Tai chatting with Misty in a diner, and they’re planning to take Shauna down. It’s deliciously diabolical, and it’s just what the adult timeline needs to sharpen its focus as we hopefully move toward satisfying conclusions in both the wilderness and present day. There’s going to be a present-day hunt. And not because of “It,” but for revenge.

Shauna, for her part, is gearing up for a fight. We don’t know what her teen counterpart did as rescue descended on the wilderness group — probably nothing good — but I’m hoping we get to see not only rescue but the girls’ (and Travis’s) assimilation back to the real world once they returned in the ’90s. Apparently no one was offered therapy, and even if they were, no one processed anything, because history is about to repeat itself. Having lost Jeff and Callie — her tenuous tethers to reality — Shauna decides that she’s going full Antler Queen.

Back home, she finds the errant note from Melissa, which doesn’t really seem to say anything of value except “I’m sorry” and “Forgive yourself.” She tears it up and then decides to start journaling again, putting to paper all of the horrible thoughts that she’s suppressed for so long. She was her realest self out there, she surmises, writing, “I was a warrior. I was a fucking queen. I let all of it slip away from me. It’s time to start taking it back.”

The promise of a rescue in the wilderness and a present-day battle to the death between the remaining survivors is tantalizing. I truly hope that Showtime renews Yellowjackets for a fourth (and, again, hopefully final) season, because I think the show may have just saved the juiciest cuts for last.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz

• I love me some ’90s grrrlz, but Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge” might be the single most thrilling needle drop this show has ever deployed. The musical cue not only speaks to where Natalie is in the scene — a geographical “edge” — but how these girls and now women are choosing to live their lives. Everyone’s going to be totally on edge in season four, and I love it.

• JackieShauna confirmed. There’s a moment when Travis says he can hear the thoughts of the dead, and that Jackie’s — complete with memories of make-outs with Shauna at sleepovers — are his favorite. Shauna’s reaction tells us all we need to know.

• Before the hunt, Hannah says that she’s eaten human flesh, which raises the question: Did the Yellowjackets serve her Ben-B-Q leftovers even though they had tons of game available for consumption? That’s truly hellish.

• What on earth is happening with Walter? We get a glimpse of him watching Tai and Misty in the diner from afar, but my brain is coming up with zero theories that make sense. This has been my favorite theory for a while, but it feels like the story is holding onto him too tightly for this to actually be it. Theories?

• Does anyone else get “The Pit,” from Parks and Recreation, stuck in their head every time they think of Pit Girl? Maybe we all really did fall in the pit? (RIP, Mari.)

• WHO BURNED DOWN THE CABIN IF IT WASN’T BEN?! Curious minds (me) need to know.