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Yellowjackets entertains the prospect of magic.
JESSICA CRUZ YELLOWJACKETS SERIES
But the series also leaves open the possibility that some of its events-the seemingly spontaneous combustion of Laura Lee’s teddy bear, say, or the compass that spins out of control when it’s next to a river that flows red-cannot, and will not, be fully explained. Anything could be responsible for what happens in the show’s frenetic timelines. Yellowjackets embraces the generalized suspicions of the classic mystery story and the true-crime documentary: Everyone is a suspect. Read: When the cliff-hanger takes its sweet timeĪnd on and on and on. In a moment when many people are reconsidering basic questions of trust-in government, in other people, in their own perceptions-the show establishes a world in which belief itself is a matter of life and death.Īmong the mysteries at play in Yellowjackets (and I’ll warn here again that spoilers abound below): Who is blackmailing Shauna, Taissa, and Natalie in the present day? Who killed Travis, the coach’s other son-Travis himself, or someone else? Who, or what, is “the man with no eyes” Taissa sees? Who is Taissa’s son, Sammy, talking about when he speaks of “the bad one”? Who is Adam, the artist-mechanic who keeps appearing in Shauna’s life? (Is he a grown-up Javi?) Which member of the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets was murdered by her teammates and then, presumably, eaten by them? Who might be alive, still, but as yet unacknowledged by the show’s selective gaze? But the show’s most foundational question remains unanswered: Are the humans moving the dial? Or is something moving the humans? Yellowjackets, in that sense, is a show about extreme circumstances that channels urgently prosaic concerns. Some, as the season nears completion, have been explained. The series, which toggles between 1996, the year of the crash, and 2021, is a fusion of genres as well: A little bit pyschodrama, a little bit satire, a little bit horror, its wonderfully hectic plots feature murder, kidnapping, blackmail, betrayals. Yellowjackets is a potent fusion of a show, Lost meets Alive meets Heathers meets Lord of the Flies meets many, many others.
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The viewer, at this point, might be asking the same question the survivors of Flight 2525 so often ask themselves as they consider the world they’ve crashed into: What is happening? And then: Lottie, who is prone to visions, begins speaking fluent French, her eyes expressionless, her mouth chattering about “it” wanting “blood.” She bangs her forehead robotically against a window. A gust of wind, seeming to carry the show’s camera, hurtles toward the cabin’s interior. They ask questions that start as silly (about school gossip, crushes) until Javi, the coach’s son, asks the only one that matters: “Are we all gonna die out here?” The pendulum twists into an 8-or, maybe, an infinity symbol. Shauna, the outwardly unassuming senior, holds the improvised pendulum: a “mystifying oracle,” incarnate. In the cabin they shelter in after their small plane has crashed in the wilderness, the teenagers-wanting insight about their circumstances, or at least distraction from them-light candles. The stranded soccer players of Yellowjackets, the remarkable series about to wrap its first season on Showtime, improvise their own version of a Ouija seance. For kids who had yet to learn about unconscious minds and suggestible bodies, the device really seemed to move the fingers, rather than the other way around. And then … the dial would glide-sometimes hesitantly, from letter to letter, sometimes shooting straight to the YES or the NO. Huddled around the board, aware of the low probability that an object procured from an impulse aisle would serve as a portal to another realm, my friends and I would nonetheless arrange our fingers lightly on the board’s plastic dial and give ourselves over to the soft thrill of the maybe. I know it mostly from childhood sleepovers.
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The Ouija board brands itself as a “mystifying oracle,” an ornately silk-screened conduit to the past and the future. This article contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Yellowjackets Season 1.