There’s Less to Buzz About in ‘Yellowjackets’ Season Two

The first season of Showtime’s sleeper hit series Yellowjackets walked a tightrope. A dual-timeline mystery with a bevy of characters, the show—from creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson—could easily have toppled into jumbled incoherence, a single-season compression of what eventually happened to Lost. Like that once-great series, Yellowjackets concerns people stranded somewhere strange after a plane crash, in this case a high school soccer team stuck in ominous woods in the Canadian Rockies. Years later, we see (some of) the survivors, now grownups, haunted by their experience and, of course, tossed into new precarity.

It was a lot to juggle, and yet the show managed to keep things compelling and legible enough. An unexpected murmur of the supernatural, or the potentially supernatural, worked its way into the series, adding a shiver of primal dread to an already frightening survival story. The show’s cast, both young and less young, successfully maintained a fraught emotional tenor without resorting to histrionics. The first season of Yellowjackets was one of the great surprises of 2021—smartly serialized and, at times, sensational.

Which, of course, makes one nervous about a second go-around. (Season two premieres on March 26.) How much can the story keep expanding—with more and more questions unanswered—before things get tedious? Lost struggled to figure out that arithmetic, managing some brilliant moments on the way to a muddled conclusion. What I’ve seen of Yellowjackets season two so far (the first six episodes) both confirms and allays those fears.

On the adult side of things, suburban mom in revolt Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is mired in a murder plot familiar to anyone who’s watched Netflix’s Dead to Me. Some tense, very Showtime-y comedy is mined from her predicament—and there’s a surprising development involving Shauna’s daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins)—but until about episode six, Shauna seems stuck in an eddy. To a lesser extent, so is Natalie (Juliette Lewis), who was kidnapped at the end of season one and now finds herself confronting someone from her past with a mix of suspicion and fascination. Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is in a hallucinatory tailspin, while cracked, maybe sociopathic Misty (Christina Ricci) gets into some investigatory antics with a new friend, played by Ricci’s child-star contemporary Elijah Wood. (They’re a long way from the New Canaan of The Ice Storm.)

The trouble is that the gang is atomized, off on their own misadventures until they are finally reunited midway through the season. Maybe things would feel repetitive if they were together, too, but it’s far less engaging seeing the crew drift apart than it was to see them warily coming together in season one. The performances remain sharp and just the right amount of peculiar (Lewis is the particular highlight), but even the best of actors can’t make wheel spinning terribly interesting after a certain point.

Back in the wilds of youth, matters are getting more dire by the day. Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is talking to the ghost of her dead friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell), and is many months pregnant. That’s a dangerous situation to be in while stuck in a cabin with a bunch of teenagers—and one injured teacher, Ben (Steven Krueger), who gets some gay-romance flashbacks this season. Misty (the remarkable Sammi Hanratty) may have made a new friend, but she also seems to be tipping further into lunacy. So does nascent prophetess-priestess Lottie (Courtney Eaton), whose visions and intuitions are aligning with the night-terror, sleepwalking trances of Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown). Something sinister is happening here, and when Yellowjackets leans into that mysticism—evoking some kind of forest god or malevolent spirit—the show shifts into its eeriest, most alluring form.

Of course, all of that supernatural stuff may just be a manifestation of troubled psyches—a trauma metaphor, or a comment on the primordial savage within us all. I, for one, would be a little disappointed if that turns out to be the case. But either way, I’m dying to know. Which says something about the show’s power, its persuasive insistence that something grand will eventually be revealed to us.

Watching the first half or so of season two, I found myself getting impatient for that significant something—the crucial information supposedly undergirding the show—to arrive. Perhaps it’s still the lingering burn of Lost’s implosion, but it’s hard to sit back and calmly wait for Yellowjackets to make sense. It’s also difficult to trust a show that, especially in season two, flits back and forth so unsteadily, between bone-chilling mystery-horror and acrid quirk, between adolescent psychodrama and B-movie pulp. If there is some master blueprint for the show—meaning, if its creators know exactly where it’s going and have a plan for how long it will take to get there—then perhaps some of the shaggier parts of the series ought to be pared away to streamline that mission.

The ending of episode six gives me hope that the back half of the season will collect itself and drive the story forward in a confident direction. But many hours of throat clearing and stalling have come before, which could send more casual viewers off in search of something more satisfying. I’m certainly not prepared to give up on Yellowjackets, but it may soon be in need of a rescue of its own.