REVIEW: ‘Yellowjackets,’ Season 2 Episode 2 — “Edible Complex”

The best moments of Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 2 culminate in the reminder of the devastating friendship between Jackie (Ella Purnell) and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse). Devastating because, as all-consuming as it was, how great their orbital pull was to the other, no matter the collision risk or the drama that was borne from their closeness, it was fated to end. Shauna may wear Jackie’s necklace meant to bring her luck around her neck now, but Jackie is dead, has been now for two months, and the rest of the girls, especially Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), are calling for the end of her mourning period. 

Yellowjackets so often get to the root of the universality teenage girls share in all of its painful, euphoric, and chaotically charged facets, and it does so with the greatest warmth to the point of burning with Jackie and Shauna. They loved each other; they hated each other too; they wanted to be one another’s everything and to achieve all the other seemingly had. As Shauna says in her eulogy this week, she doesn’t know where Jackie “ends, and I begin.”

Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 2 delivers one harsh blow after the other as characters crumble in the past and present and must reconcile with the harsh conditions they’re living through and how they need to live to survive. In the past, this means that, when through what appears to be an act of some higher power, Jackie’s cremation is turned into a barbecue, her teammates and friends all waking in the middle of the night to consume her in full, Shauna declaring it’s what she would’ve wanted, the others all too starved and desperate to question it.

The ending scene, the one the series has been building towards so far, shifts so that the footage of the ravenous teenagers gorging themselves on their lost friend is interwoven with a bacchanal set dreamscape as they’re decked in Grecian garb and helping themselves to heaping portions of berries and wine, poultry, and pork. Whether this is a way to help fool themselves into a space where they might dissociate from the carnage they’re indulging in or a visual metaphor concocted by the creators to create the sense of madness they’ve been infected with, it’s effective. This scene lingers and haunts in a way that will likely weigh heavy on the characters in the immediate aftermath as well. 

But it’s not just the final scene that signals the descent of the team, as they’re all forcing levels of delusion onto themselves and others. Lottie (Courtney Eaton) persists in sharing her belief in some unknown higher power that can protect them, while Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) is determined to bring Travis (Kevin Alves) back to his senses. To do so, she plants an item of clothing while they’re out hunting, hoping to force Travis to believe his brother Javi (Luciano Leroux) is dead. The delusion appears once we can’t tell whether or not Natalie is doing this for Travis or herself. Sure, Javi is most likely dead and Lottie is supplying him with false hope, but by ripping the bandaid, so to speak, she’s only causing Travis more trauma while selfishly trying to pull him away from the comfort of someone’s faith for the sake of her want for him to be hers alone. 

It certainly makes the future sequences between Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) all the more interesting as the two quickly fall into easy yet scathing banter. Lottie’s self-help program/cult and continued belief in something more than herself contrasted with Natalie’s nihilism make for an engaging dynamic, especially since we know the two share more history than most and yet walked away with polarizing different views. It means that in Travis’s (Andres Soto) he allowed Lottie to help while saying that Natalie would only make it worse. Though, it remains to be seen if Lottie’s account of his death is due to a faulty button are true, as we’re starting to witness how so much of what we’re seeing isn’t how it appears. 

That distrust in our protagonists leading the story makes Yellowjackets compelling, even in some of the slower moments. While we understand there would be a police investigation regarding the death of Adam (Peter Gadiot) and that, yes, it would bring them to Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) door, it’s just not as interesting as the flashbacks. Even less so is the separate storyline with Shauna’s daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins). At least with the adult team members, we care more because we see so much of their teenage selves whose chemistry and shared horrors make our empathy towards the adult versions reach. 

Splitting up so much of the story into too brief fragments means some of the strongest elements aren’t given enough time. The cast of teen characters are all so phenomenal, yet we still aren’t seeing enough of Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa. Similarly, adult Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is dealing with such enormous amounts of stress – which results in a car crash in this week’s episode – but it feels too removed. It’s just further proof that the series is strongest in the past and present when the cast is allowed to work off of one another. 

Still, Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 2 might be one of the highest achievements of the series so far. From its examination of the complexities of the friendship between two teen girls to the way in which trauma follows us, and the continued hints of the supernatural taking space in the story, “Edible Complex” is a deeply riveting, often upsetting episode of television. 

Yellowjackets Season 2 streaming now on Showtime.