Spring 1996. A high school girls soccer team has made the national championship match and is en route to Seattle when weather forces its flight northward. Seemingly minutes later, an unexplained malfunction occurs, causing the plane to crash-land in the remote Canadian wilds. Thus begins Showtime’s Yellowjackets, an irresistible genre mashup and the most assured new programming to run on that network since season one of Homeland.
Possessed of a dramatic ensemble that is almost uniformly excellent, Yellowjackets follows four main characters across two timelines. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a victory-obsessed bully who slowly blossoms into a leader when the survivors realize that help is not on the way. Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) has been accepted into Brown in the weeks before the crash but is as enigmatic and aloof as an Arctic wolf. For Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), a drug-abusing burnout, the wilderness represents an opportunity for redemption, especially once the girls find hunting gear in an abandoned cabin. Similarly useful is Misty (Sammi Hanratty), whose unfashionable eagerness veils an ominous facility with blades.
Despite a setup that owes much to ABC’s Lost, Yellowjackets plays just as often like a particularly lively season of Dawson’s Creek, the millennium-straddling saga of teenage sexual disinhibition. Slinking around the group’s makeshift camp, Shauna can’t stop thinking about her recent liaison with the boyfriend of team captain and fellow survivor Jackie (Ella Purnell). Natalie, too, has romance on the brain, having taken up with Travis (Kevin Alves), the son of an assistant coach who perished in the crash. Far more disturbing than these adolescent trysts is Misty’s growing obsession with Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), the only adult to emerge from the plane’s wreckage. “I know how you feel,” the peculiar young woman tells Natalie with an expression both gleeful and unnerving. “I have a secret boyfriend, too.”
Crucial to the series’s tonal balancing act is a flash-forward scene in the pilot episode’s opening moments. Barefoot and terrified, an unidentified girl runs panting through the snow. Suddenly, the ground opens beneath her, sending her falling into a homemade trap where she is impaled by spears. Her pursuer, a young woman of similar age and height, wears a face-concealing mask and a soccer jersey. Whatever else Yellowjackets might be, these images insist, it is not merely a story of erotic angst in the context of a back-country adventure.
Indeed, the matter of what exactly happened in the Canadian wilderness is at the heart of the show’s second timeline, a present-day narrative in which the four leads are grown women haunted by their pasts. A candidate for the New Jersey Senate, Taissa (played now by Tawny Cypress) must balance the public’s curiosity with her intense desire to say nothing about the girls’ ordeal. Having married Jackie’s unfaithful beau, Shauna (a superb Melanie Lynskey) recognizes that she has, in a very real sense, appropriated the life of her deceased best friend. (The cause of Jackie’s death is one of the show’s many compelling mysteries.) A troubled soul in adulthood as in youth, Natalie (Juliette Lewis) is preoccupied with the recent suicide of Travis, which she believes to be a murder connected to the pair’s shared history. Aiding Natalie in her investigation is the grown-up Misty (Christina Ricci), who remains as socially inept and quietly menacing as ever.
Though undeniably crowded, Yellowjackets produces none of the confusion that one might expect from a series with two dozen recurring characters operating in multiple chronologies. Rather, showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson carry the viewer along with lucid storytelling and technical bravado. On a purely practical level, this work is abetted by the uncanny likeness of the young and old performers who share the lead roles. (To use only the example of Shauna, the two actresses who play her could easily be mother and daughter.) Yet it is also true that the show’s editing is as good as any in recent memory. At once stylish and intuitive, the show’s jumps sharpen the suspense in each setting. Why settle for a single timeline’s horrors when mortal danger is available in two or more?
Take, for example, a standout sequence built around Taissa. Asleep in the abandoned cabin, the teenage character is awakened by strange noises from the attic. Adult Taissa, meanwhile, is moving through her house to check on her disturbed son Sammy (a disconcerting Aiden Stoxx). Simultaneously active is preteen Taissa, a flashback character who believes that something is very wrong at her grandmother’s funeral. As each iteration creeps toward her moment of discovery, the episode shifts seamlessly between times and places. The resulting scene is ingenious, suspenseful, and harrowing. Ridiculous though it may sound, I flipped on the lights on my way to bed that evening.
Given Yellowjackets’s substantial thrills, what, if anything, is holding the series back from pulpy perfection? The answer, alas, may be more correctable in part than in whole. Despite individual dramas that are highly engaging, the grown-up protagonists’ group adventure, involving an anonymous blackmailer who knows what happened in the wild, is a dreary dud. Even more distracting is Juliette Lewis’s mannered rendering of the older Natalie, a depiction that makes little sense alongside the naturalistic work of her costars. Having already been renewed for a second season, Yellowjackets will eventually shed its extortion subplot. Lewis, sadly, is almost certainly on board for the long haul.
In the end, and one bad performance notwithstanding, the protractedness of that journey is likely to depend on how well Lyle and Nickerson sustain their central narrative: the drama of teenage innocents driven by desperation to God knows what. Will the teammates, as a second flash-forward suggests, actually begin to eat one other as winter approaches? I, for one, am hungry to find out.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
