Yellowjackets has always been full of unreliable narrators.
The Showtime sensation, which returned with its third season on Friday, tells its story from many points of view in two distinct timelines: the past and the present. The past timeline began in 1996 when a team of high school soccer champions, the Yellowjackets, landed in the remote wilderness, where the teenagers who survived the plane crash were forced to adapt and do the unthinkable in order to survive. The present-day storyline began 25 years after the crash with the adult survivors, revealing how their trauma (and perhaps, the wilderness itself) continues to haunt them.
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The first season of the mystery/horror/coming-of-age series asked: What did they do out there? The second season began to answer that question, as the teen cast formulated their rituals — the Antler Queen, the hunt and the feasts — that they leaned on in order to stay alive. As bodies piled up, the cannibalism that had been promised by the showrunning team of Ashely Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco was officially out of the bag.
The third season sets out to remind the audience about all of that when Teen Van, played by Liv Hewson, steps up onto her wilderness soapbox. After miraculously surviving winter in the woods, and after their shelter was somewhat mysteriously burned down in the season two finale, springtime has arrived. The teen survivors ring in the warm weather in different ways. Some of them competitively play games, while others handle their grief privately, like Teen Shauna (played by Sophie Nélisse) digging up and reburying the baby boy she lost in the harrowing birth episode of season two.
“Previously on The Yellowjackets…” begins Teen Van, as she tells their team’s story, in third person, about how they were robbed by the cruel hand of fate, or possibly by pilot error, from sweeping their national soccer championship. “But, no mere plane crash could keep our intrepid girls, and few dudes, down. They rose to this new challenge like the champions they were always meant to be.”
But Shauna’s inner monologue interrupts Van. “God, I fucking hate them. Like, sorry I’m not psyched to hear some bullshit story about our adventures in the woods,” she furiously writes in her journal. “My best friend is dead. My baby is dead. I held his body when it was covered in my blood and then I had to put his corpse out in the cold while everyone else talked about fucking sacrifices and miracles.”
So, which one is the more reliable narrator here? Technically, both versions of the Yellowjackets story are true. And that’s because, as The Hollywood Reporter‘s TV critic Angie Han pointed out in her season three review, there are always at least two versions of every story on Yellowjackets.
Hewson was tasked with delivering this speech to not only remind the audience where the show left off heading into season three but also to set a new tone for the series. The episode was also directed by Yellowjackets co-creator Nickerson as a first-time director.
“It’s definitely a reset,” Hewson (who uses they/them pronouns) told THR of the season three opener. “Bart and I would talk about the function of the speech, not only within the show but within the story itself. In universe, this is Van getting everybody’s story straight; establishing the mythology among the Yellowjackets of where they are and what they had to do. She is really deliberately getting everybody on the same page.”
Hewson also says there was a domineering aspect to what Van is doing. “It’s asking that the group agree that everything is fine, nothing bad has happened; we’re surviving and doing great. And that’s what the story is, OK? Because to entertain any other possibility would be to confront the things that they had been through and the things that they’ve done, which is obviously unacceptable.”
That’s where Shauna comes in, to undermine Van’s tale. “Shauna’s comfort is in actually confronting the things that were happening to them,” Hewson adds.
While cutting back and forth, Hewson says Nickerson told them to write more of the monologue. Not all of it was used, but it helped inform how Hewson played the scene.
“They wanted the option of being on my face and seeing me speaking while Shauna’s voiceover is playing to have the idea that Van is still talking in the background while Shauna is writing in her journal,” they share. “It doesn’t end up in the show, but there’s a whole other half of that speech where I got to think around and play around with what other things Van is trying to make sure everybody agrees with.”
One of those lines, Hewson shares, was, “To be a champion requires many things.”
Hewson continues to THR, “I came up with a few sentences in between each time you hear me speaking to bridge the gap between the things I’m saying and also fill in the blanks of what the speech is.”
Van then ends the speech by saying, “They never gave up hope that their story does not end here.”
When Hewson teases Van’s season three journey, the actor reveals there’s a double meaning behind that final line. Van’s story may not end here in this moment, but Hewson says Van isn’t looking to a future beyond the wilderness.
“As the younger character, I don’t know that Van is necessarily imagining a specific future for herself. I think she’s just hanging on for dear life. Actually, the notion that she would make it out is unthinkable to Van at this point,” says Hewson. “As we meet her at season three, there’s a full, ‘We live here. We will die here. There is no getting out or back, the wilderness is it: Our lives now are all we’re ever going to have.'”
Circling back to the show’s biggest question, the show’s co-creators Lyle and Nickerson told THR that season three will deliver more answers about what the teenagers did in their past. When filming this season, Hewson says some of that they discovered in real time, but Hewson asked more questions this time around.
In a way, all of that brings season three full circle for Hewson, since Van began as a smaller part that the showrunners then expanded due to Hewson’s performance. (“The opportunity for her death kept coming up, and then we kept writing away from it,” Lyle has previously said.) Lauren Ambrose joined the cast in season two as Adult Van, giving the character a future timeline.
“I’m someone who was originally hired as a guest actor and I wasn’t going to be in the show as much as I am now. For a while I was like, ‘Don’t ask any questions. If I just stay very still, things will happen and that will be fine.’ So it’s been a process for me getting more comfortable to ask more questions, and to have more conversations about the show and where it’s going,” says Hewson. “There are some things I do want to know about, and this season I asked more questions and was more plugged in than previous years. This year there were things that I really wanted to ask about and to speak about while we were filming, so I was more engaged.”
Yellowjackets season three is now streaming the first two episodes on Paramount+, followed by a linear premiere Feb. 16 on Showtime. The season then releases new episodes weekly. Follow along with THR‘s season coverage.
