‘Yellowjackets’ Review: Showtime Hit Struggles to Find Its Footing in Intriguing but Wobbly Season 3

On Showtime’s Yellowjackets, there are (at least) two versions of every story. We’re reminded of this minutes into the third season premiere. Out among the group, Van (Liv Hewson) cheerfully recounts their journey as a heroic one, filled with sacrifice but also rewards from “the wilderness.”

At the same time, alone with her diary, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) recaps the same events in much more cynical terms: “A bunch of teenage girls got stranded in the wilderness and then went completely fucking nuts.”

Neither feels totally right and neither feels totally wrong — just as describing this series as simply a mystery-box thriller or a character-driven drama, a tale about girls in the woods or one about women grappling with past trauma, wouldn’t quite fit either.

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At its best, as in the show’s propulsive debut season, this duality is what makes Yellowjackets so deliciously rich. When it’s less successful, as in the second season, it can make the storytelling bloated and uneven. Now in its third go-round, the drama still wobbles in pursuit of an ideal balance. But as ever, it’s guided by character dynamics juicy enough, and performances excellent enough, to keep you watching.

In some regards, the third season feels like a soft reset. In the 1990s, the girls are out of the woods metaphorically if not literally — having made it through their cannibalism-fueled first winter, they’re enjoying the relative ease of summer. The burned-down cabin has been replaced by a circle of huts; food comes from forest nearby or from their own pen of rabbits and ducks. To the extent that it’s possible for a group of teenagers stranded for months on end after a deadly plane crash to be described as “thriving,” they are.

Meanwhile, the 2020s storyline has been trimmed of its shaggier subplots. Lottie’s cult? Never seen or heard from again, at least in the four hours sent to critics. Tai’s political career and family? Dispensed of with a few stray mentions. All those murders? Dead and buried for good this time, apparently. Even the absence of Natalie leaves behind less of an impression than one might have guessed; though Juliette Lewis’ sardonic energy is missed, most of the characters move on fairly quickly. (As for fresh blood, the new characters to be played by Hilary Swank and Joel McHale have yet to appear.)

In both timelines, the creepy mystical elements have been dialed down enough that the emphasis is less on “is ‘the wilderness’ a real supernatural force?” than “what does it mean for these characters to think of it as one?” While the girls are still visited by unsettling hallucinations and earsplitting shrieks — and while the adult women deal with a few is-this-a-coincidence-or-is-it-magic occurrences — Yellowjackets season three is, on the whole, the least spooky and least disgusting one yet. So far, anyway.

If this represents a fresh(ish) start, however, the show still seems uncertain where, exactly, it wants to go. There are breathtaking individual moments, like a kiss between Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) set to Bush’s “Glycerine.” (It goes without saying that the soundtrack continues to be catnip for nostalgic Gen Xers and Millennials.) There are funny-sad notes beautifully played by Christina Ricci as Misty, who’s still grappling with her grief and guilt over Natalie’s death, while Simone Kessell’s Lottie and Elijah Wood’s Walter continue to bring a disorienting weirdness to the proceedings. But the adult half of the saga remains too scattered to gain much momentum.

The teenage half is more cohesive, given that all the girls are stuck in one place. At first, it’s almost jarring to see the Yellowjackets look so happy and healthy, with enough leftover energy to chase each other through the woods for fun and plentiful enough resources to fashion flower crowns and flowing robes for a delectable feast. But the peace is hard-won and fragile. As much as Natalie might want to dismiss the brewing tension between Shauna and spoiled princess Mari (Alexa Barajas), for example, as “dumb girl shit,” Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is quick to point out that “Maybe out here, it’s all life or death.”

Throw the girls’ latent fury at Coach Ben (Steven Krueger, very good), presumed dead and assumed to have burned down their cabin, into the mix, and it’s clear the warmth of summer is about to boil over into something uglier. Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson continue to demonstrate a great eye for the intricacies of the group dynamic — the subtle temperature shifts that augur a change in leadership or relationship status, the complicated mix of love and distrust and yearning pulsing through each of the girls toward the others. (New writers this year include Emily St. James and Libby Hill, friends of this THR critic.)

As with the grown-up side, however, it’s difficult to discern if we’re in the middle of a slow build or stuck in a holding pattern. Unlike earlier entries, which dangled the promise of full-bore cannibalism before us, there’s no obvious next place for the story to go. With six episodes still left, there’s plenty of time for the show to swerve into new heights or disappointing dead ends or the vast middle ground in between. But it’s odd that nearly halfway through the season, we seem to still be in the setup phase.

In the meantime, though, there’s Shauna. Whatever is happening in the narrative at large, she’s the bloody heart of the whole thing. In a development that’s simultaneously kind of sweet and kind of fucked-up — which is to say, classic Yellowjackets — the shared trauma of the season two finale seems to have brought her closer to Jeff (Warren Kole) and Callie (Sarah Desjardins). Yet even this slightly less dissatisfied Shauna (played superbly as always by Melanie Lynskey) goes through life in quotation marks. It’s as if she’s just acting out the motions of being a functional and respectable grownup, while waiting to return to the realer version of herself she was once upon a time.

Because say what you will about the teenaged Shauna, but she was fully, ferociously, even uncomfortably alive. Nélisse, who’s already shepherded the character from introverted bestie to hardened survivor, steeps her performance in a rage so total it threatens to eat the girl alive from the inside, fueled by a seemingly endless reservoir of grief. In tandem, the two Shaunas’ arcs paint a layered, if still incomplete, portrait of what was lost and what was gained out there in the wild — supernatural forces or no. It’s terrifying, it’s devastating, it’s riveting. It’s Yellowjackets doing exactly what it does best.