‘Yellowjackets' Season 3 Is All Over The Place And Not In A Good Way

Forbes

31-03-2025

Yellowjackets
We are now eight episodes into the third season of Yellowjackets and I have decidedly mixed feelings. In some ways, I think this is a slightly better season than the previous one, but it's still such a far cry from the perfection of Season 1 that I'm having trouble really caring. In some ways, that's even worse than genuinely hating a show.
I've gone back and forth a bit on this season. There are some interesting and entertaining elements, but it feels like the writers continue to have no idea what to do with a lot of the characters, especially in the modern timeline. The events of the past timeline also make me question everything going on in the present, particularly when it comes to Shauna. Spoilers ahead.
One of the biggest mistakes this series has made, other than the massive tonal shift between Seasons 1 and 2, has been bringing back more survivors into the modern timeline. It began with just five: Shauna, Tai, Misty, Nat and Travis, who we know survived the wilderness but was found mysteriously dead from an apparent suicide, though with plenty of clues that it was something more nefarious.
At the end of Season 1, we learned that one other girl had made it out: Lottie, the mentally unhinged priestess of The Wilderness. The end of the first season ended with a cliffhanger. Nat had been kidnapped by what appeared to be Lottie's cult. It was incredibly frightening and exciting and I couldn't wait to learn just how diabolical a grown Lottie and her Wilderness cult would be.
Only, well, they weren't. Lottie was running a pretty milquetoast self-help retreat. Lottie herself, as an adult, was almost nothing like her teenage character. While every other adult version was a pretty perfect match, Lottie had an almost entirely new personality. It was jarring. Her cult was woefully bland. How we even went from boring cult to the hunt in the woods by the end of Season 2 remains a mystery. It certainly wasn't earned. Nat's accidental death by fentanyl was preposterous on so many levels, it makes me a little angry just to think about. And with Nat's death came an even bigger problem: The show lost its protagonist.
If anything, Season 3 is only driving that point home. Teen Nat and teen Travis are the closest thing this show has to a moral center. The closest thing we have to heroic figures we can root for. It's clear that Shauna is being set up as the Big Bad at this point also, but without an adult Nat in the modern timeline, there is no yin to Shauna's yang. The equilibrium is gone.
Back to what I was talking about before. By the end of Season 1, we had six survivors. Season 2 added adult Van who effectively becomes adult Tai's new (old) love interest. The writers pretty much just erased Tai's wife and child from the script and other than a brief moment in Season 3, that has remained the case. Tai and Van's adult relationship has been about 5% as interesting as Tai's family life in Season 1. When she was running for office and dealing with what appeared to be her son acting out, and lots of weird stuff was going on that we didn't understand (before learning that it was Other Tai), this was a really brilliant and compelling story. Simply dropping all of that so that Tai and Van could drive around and fret over Van's cancer was a huge mistake.
But bringing Van back creates other problems. Namely, it reduces the tension in the teen storyline because we have yet another main character who we know will survive. There aren't many of them left, especially after the latest episode when we learn that Melissa is still alive. Hilary Swank joins the cast and dons Melissa's teen signature backwards baseball cap, just so we in the audience know it's her. (As we all know, grown versions of teenagers wear the exact same clothes 25 years later).
Yellowjackets
Now we can check off yet another teen in the past storyline. We know for sure Melissa survives, so any future scenes with her character are a lot less interesting. The number of teens who could die before rescue has just dropped again (though the show is happy to just drop in new girls whenever it sees fit, despite how immersion-breaking that is). The number of girls who could be Pit Girl (the teen who died in the very first episode) has been reduced to basically two: Mari and Gen (the latter was recast for Season 3, which really confused me). These are the only light-skinned, dark-haired girls remaining that I can think of, though I suppose it could be the new addition, Hanna, though that would be a cheap trick since Pit Girl was very obviously a teenager in Season 1.
Speaking of the scientists, this feels very much like a plot twist they came up with when writing Season 3 rather than something planned out from the get-go. I could be wrong, of course, but it's just so out of left-field. And it adds yet another character with ties to the survivors in the form of Hannah's daughter. We know Hannah is dead based on what the survivors have talked about, but her daughter is alive and well and Shauna suspects her of doing all the nefarious things that have been happening to her, until she discovers that Melissa has married said girl under a false identity.
So this is quite the dark turn of events, no doubt. Melissa seems like a pretty normal person at first when Shauna confronts her. She tells her she lives a normal, boring life and would like to keep it that way, which is why she sent Shauna the tape and a note that Shauna never got (did Callie hide it? Was it Callie doing all this stuff to Shauna? Was it Callie who killed Lottie?) But there's nothing normal about changing your identity and marrying the daughter of a woman you killed and (presumably) devoured. In fact, it's super creepy and evil. Even though Shauna comes off as super unhinged by the end of Episode 8, there's little doubt in my mind that Melissa is also off her proverbial rocker.
In the teen timeline, I don't understand the showdown between Nat and Shauna. Nat and the group is about to head off with Joel McHale's forest guide, Kodi, and Hannah and hike the six-day journey to the rescue point. Almost everyone wants to leave, but then Lottie says she's not going. I understand her reluctance to leave. She's found herself in the forest. Found her faith, her priestesshood, her calling. The world back home is one of pain, judgment, and quite likely institutionalization. Shauna's motivation for staying is murkier, but I suspect it's similar. Over the course of Season 3, she's harnessed all her anger into a kind of power. She wants to be queen. She keeps asserting her dominance. And Tai's decision to join the first two makes sense, since we know this is Other Tai, or at least that Other Tai is influencing her.
What I don't understand is Nat and the others just obeying Shauna when she tells them that nobody is going to leave. Nat says 'We're going' and everyone turns to leave and Shauna just says 'No. You're not.' And that's it, they stay. Maybe they'll go in next week's episode. They have the gun and the crossbow. But it sure looks like they'll just cave and buckle to Shauna and the other two. Why? It doesn't make sense.
All these complaints aside, I do like Shauna's turn to the dark side. I like her being set up as the villain, and I like the contrast that provides between her ruthlessness and Nat's goodness. Nat and Travis are, as I said, the moral center of the group. Travis was smart to try to take Kodi and Akilah to find help rather than go back to the group, and it's really disappointing to see Akilah undermine him.
But the problem with this dynamic is that it really muddies the entire adult storyline up to this point. Sure, Shauna has done lots of bad things. She's created chaos in her life in the adult timeline. She killed Adam, for one thing. And she bites Melissa's skin off and wants to force her to eat it in this last episode. The issue is the way the others have treated her since Season 1, not as the ruthless ringleader of the Bad Girls but as one of them. There was next to no real tension between Shauna and Nat in the adult timeline. Lottie was treated like the dangerous outlier. But if Shauna was this awful and domineering and scary in the teen timeline, why has she been treated like a normal housewife by her fellow survivors this whole time? And the widening gap between how teen Shauna acts and how adult Shauna acts makes them feel like two very different characters. It doesn't add up.
It makes me wonder if this was, yet again, a change the writers came up with for Season 3 rather than something they had planned the whole time. If nothing else, the relationship dynamics between Nat and Shauna in the first two seasons should have been wildly different and more strained. That this wasn't the case is the strongest evidence I have that they just changed course with Shauna's character this season. Either that, or they did a lousy job in the first two at creating a more realistic dynamic between the adult survivors.
Yellowjackets
My guess is that they had always planned for Lottie to be the Antler Queen and the leader of the Bad Girls in the teen timeline, but changed course after Season 2 basically ruined Lottie's character. I could be wrong, obviously, but that's the feeling I get. Shauna is clearly being prepped to become the Antler Queen. Mari is almost certainly Pit Girl. The big question is whether we get confirmation of this by the end of Season 3.
I'm still enjoying aspects of this show, but it's really lost so much of what made it greatin Season 1 that I'm finding it hard to care. I've said this before but it's been widely misrepresented and misunderstood by fans: I just don't like any of the characters anymore, except for maybe adult Misty. And I don't mean that I dislike them because they're bad. Plenty of bad characters are great fun to watch. Walter White, for instance. But in this show, I need to enjoy the bad characters. Tai used to be a really complex character who I enjoyed a lot, but the Other Tai stuff has just sort of fizzled. I still like Nat and Travis in the past timeline, but knowing both are dead in the adult timeline really takes the wind out of their sails. In the adult timeline, everyone is just kind of awful or flat except for Misty, and she's not a protagonist to root for so much as a source of constant comic relief (like Jeff, who I also like but who functions more as a running gag than anything).
Without anyone to root for, and without the interesting story hooks that Season 1 gave us with Other Tai and so forth, the show loses much of what once made it so great. I guess we'll see. Two episodes remain this season. I wonder if we'll get a fourth.
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