The hotly-anticipated second season of Yellowjackets—now streaming on NEON—more than lives up to the buzz for superfan Eliza Janssen. Here’s what we’re obsessively excited to find out about in the next chapter of the time-jumping survival saga. Beware: season one spoilers ahead.
Yellowjackets: Season 2
When winter set in and the snow began to fall on the lost high school heroines of Yellowjackets in the season one finale, a few important facts were proven true. One: nobody was coming to rescue the girls football team anytime soon, after the dread-inducing plane crash we witnessed in the pilot. Two: Jackie (Ella Purnell), the charismatic team captain we were tricked into seeing as our main character, was gone, and many more tragedies were sure to come.
And three: we’d all just experienced of the most exciting, buzz-worthy first seasons in recent memory.
Can a sophomore season of decade-jumping, cannibalism-hinting, 90s-banger-needle-dropping drama live up? I’m happy to say yes, and to break down exactly what Yellowjackets fans (or new team members!) should prepare themselves for in season two.
New faces in the present
When half of your series is set in a grunge-era Lord of the Flies-esque survival situation and the other takes place in our boring, suburban present day, you’d expect each episode to be pretty unbalanced. But somehow, creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson continue to keep the pace of each storyline as addictively tense as the other.
It probably has to do with the tremendous female cast playing our grown-up Yellowjackets. Melanie Lynskey is repressed housewife Shauna, Tawny Cypress is senator-on-the-verge Taissa, Juliette Lewis is broken badass Nat, and Christina Ricci is Misty, our loveably bonkers wildcard. Heading into the new season, I’m most concerned about Tai: sure, Nat was seemingly cult-napped in the season one finale, but Tai’s antisocial sleepwalking behaviour can only build to a nightmarish climax we’re not sure we wanna witness.
Those four are fabulous (and absolutely terrifying), but we were cleverly fooled by the series into assuming they may be the only survivors, meaning the casting of at least two more present-day YJs was a very big deal. Aotearoa TV talent Simone Kessell is brilliantly fragile as an older Lottie, and we hope things are cool between Tai and her former GF Van (Liv Hewson in the flashbacks, Lauren Ambrose as an adult) whenever they cross paths this season.
Season two offers more insight to Shauna’s daggy husband Jeff (Warren Kole) and daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins), who might be the only one in the family dealing with her mum’s infidelity and murderous tendencies appropriately (“what if I wanna vape until my head falls off?”, she asks numbly). And then there’s Elijah Wood as Walter, a role not too far away from his OTT mall-ninja from I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore (another collab with Lynskey!). He’s an internet sleuth like Misty who tells her that her grim past as a Yellowjacket is “the thing about her [he’s] least interested in”. It could mean romance. Or more tragedy. Let’s go with both.
Fleshing out the past (yuck)
Season two kicks off two months after the sorrowful end of season one. The team is running out of food, Nat’s roots are really starting to show, and somebody pooped in the pee bucket and won’t admit it—but much darker problems loom in the wilderness. Nat crouches over Jackie’s frozen corpse and tells her that she’s “lucky: I think shit is going to get a lot worse out here. You’re already dead, so…way to make everyone jealous of you one last time.”
With a necessarily limited cast of characters in these 90s sequences, it’s fantastic that season two is taking the time to get to know the larger group of teammates more. It’ll only make whatever happens next more devastating, with Shauna very pregnant and Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) seemingly giving up on any hopes of leadership as the sole surviving adult.
It’s not all misery, of course. As lovers Tai and Van, Scream VI‘s Jasmin Savoy Brown and Liv Hewson get some sweet asides, writing ‘I Love You’ in blood on each other’s arms (it’s romantic for this show, okay?!). And Courtney Eaton brings a twisted sense of hope to the cabin as Lottie, with her mystical qualities still yet to be confirmed as supernatural ability or mere madness. Watching along, we’re forced to wonder whether we would be driven to join in on her woo-woo woodsy new religion, just to have anything to believe in at all.
Hell, it’d be better than wondering where on earth poor Javi (Luciano Leroux) is, still missing in the snow since season one’s haunting psilocybin-fuelled bacchanal. Better than seeing ghostly visions of your dead bestie, wondering if she’s a source of nostalgic comfort or, um, protein.
A gasp-worthy moment every episode
The switch between the gorgeous yet cruel snowy vistas in the YJ’s past and the relative normalcy of their current lives has always been used to striking emotional effect. This season, tunes from Radiohead, Tori Amos, Veruca Salt and more float us seamlessly between eras, driving home moments that made me jerk away from the screen in horror. Both of season two’s first episodes end with such scenes, making this next chapter of Yellowjackets deliciously torturous if you’re watching week-to-week.
In some ways, Melanie Lynskey gets to continue her work as a chilling antagonist from The Last of Us. She threatens a petty thief by asking if he’s ever removed “the skin off a human corpse: you’ve gotta peel back just the edges of it, so you can get enough grip to pull.” Once our empathetic, reserved protagonist, I can now say Shauna’s the scariest YJ. She’s undeniably selfish, giving the innately loveable Lynskey plenty of tough material to work with.
Some of the thrills set up last season turn out to not be so drastic—Nat’s visit to Lottie’s cult is much more friendly than it first appears, and our main foursome might have really gotten away with the murder of Shauna’s affair partner. Seemingly. But other shocking twists come right out of nowhere and hit hard, like a precisely-aimed soccer ball to the gut. Miracles, tragedies, eyeless men and bloody prophecies.
It’s a lot, and it makes you weirdly grateful for a character like Ricci’s Misty: the one weird girl from your class who’s bizarrely well-adjusted when shit goes down. When she helps Shauna prepare for police interrogation with a cookie reading ‘I want my lawyer’ atop it, I let out a simultaneous laugh and sigh of relief. Yellowjackets is really back: hello again, Misty, you crazy fucking bitch.
