Spoilers ahead!
Yellowjackets is a psychological thriller and surrealist horror television show about a soccer team that crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness in 1996, how they survive for 19 months, and their lives now as adult women, grappling with the effects of their trauma as it comes back to haunt them. This show is my Adolescence. It’s my White Lotus. Hell, it’s my Severance! Despite the religious undertones and casual cannibalism, the show poses real questions regarding trauma: Does it linger or does it come crashing down all at once? Is it our own undoing? Are we subconsciously destroying our own future by reveling in our past as either a society or as individuals?
By the time this article is released, season three of Yellowjackets will be completed and soon comes the two-year drought until we get another season. With a rabid beehive of a fandom that yearns for answers, many have disregarded season three as a decline in writing. Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson explicitly state that the show is only planned for five seasons, and many of the characters in season three will not live to see season four.
As someone who writes horror stories and took Horror Film at USF with Professor Amy Rust, what YellowJackets partakes in, either intentionally or unintentionally, is Radical Formalism of Affect: the technical and sequential engineering of emotional reactions. With the show’s use of surrealism, the writers embark on a journey to make the viewer as uncomfortable, on edge, and confused as possible.
One of the many arguments regarding the show is whether the women are being haunted by a malevolent spirit known as the wilderness or if the women themselves are the wilderness. Most of the perceived supernatural events can be explained away by science or psychology. The fact that we, as viewers, can only accept one possibility over the other, and hold no room for nuance, is an example of Radical Formalism and affect being used within the storytelling.
Another good example of Radical Formalism within the series is when characters that have been hunted within the teen timeline survive, only to die in the adult timeline in the same order. Travis is hunted during the episode “Doomcoming” and is the first adult to die. Teen Natalie was supposed to die in the season 2 finale, and Javi took her place, only for adult Natalie to die saving someone — refusing to let the tragedy of Javi’s death happen again.
A popular horror franchise that does the same is Final Destination, which might be the route the show is going down. Those who survived the crash shouldn’t have survived, and now they are dropping like flies. You can cheat death, but never escape it, and isn’t that, in a way, more terrifying than what the girls did to survive? Only to die the way they do later on. Does it make the viewers uncomfortable not knowing if the conflicts come from the hands of the women themselves, or if it truly is the wilderness coming back to finish them off one by one?
If that theory is plausible, it implies Misty will ultimately be the final survivor, since she gave the wilderness its biggest sacrifice by destroying the plane’s transponder at the very beginning of the show.
So many people on TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit pose theories on secret survivors, whether Pit Girl is Mari or some background character, if Antler Queen is Lottie or ‘dead-ass Jackie,’ or even Travis. Whether Shauna is a good person or not. To speak candidly, no, Shauna is not a good person and isn’t supposed to be, and excusing her actions makes you no better than a man who religiously loves the Joker. Yet I feel the true conspiracy of Yellowjackets lies within the techniques used to make the viewers feel disgusted, horrified, yet interested and empathetic towards the survivors.
Which means, I’m probably the most normal Yellowjackets fan out there.