Yellowjackets is writing dubious narrative cheques

There was some mild buzz surrounding the Showtime series "Yellowjackets" that was sufficient for the network to immediately order a second season, expected to hit by the end of the year. The series, following the two timelines of a female soccer team crashing in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 and the survivors of same crash in 2021, received critical and audience acclaim for its mix of horror, mystery and survival thriller.

I enjoyed the series enough to be interested in the second season, but I'm very weary of it at the same time. My fear is that the first season wrote a lot of cheques it will not be able to cash in. The reason for this, ironically, is the same reason why the show is so succesful in the first place: it has a lot in common with "Lost", the phenomenon series of the aughts.

 

To recap, "Lost" also features a plane crash in the wilderness (a tropical island, in this case), with the survivors struggling not only to survive but also to gain knowledge about some mysteries, a quest they share with the audience. "Lost" is infamous for piling mysteries atop each other, keeping the audience guessing what any of it means and how it connects from week to week (as it turned out, the answer was "not at all"). But the show also had strong character work, hard twists and diverging timelines (and even universes), and it glued the audience to the screen. So, can "Yellowjackets" repeat the "lightning in a bottle" that "Lost" was?

 

Given the six seasons that "Lost" ran, that remains to be seen, obviously. For now, there's a lot of content left to explore, since the plot so far covered roughly three to four of the nineteen months the soccer team will ultimately be stranded in the wilderness. The present day plot, obviously, can at least in theory be continued ad infinitum.

 

I want to try to avoid too many spoilers, so I'll give you just the barebones of what the mysteries in "Yellowjackets" are. In the 1996 storyline, one of the girls can apparently see into the future and interact with flora and fauna in some mystical way, without anyone knowing what's going on (it will, in classical horror movie trope, be deadly for the group sceptic, though). Nature or the specific place of the crash seems to be imbued by a will of their own, trying to prevent anyone from fleeing. A mysterious dead person was trapped before, a harbinger of the things to come. The girls, as shown in the initial scene of the pilot, will found a cult and engage in cannibalism, but the rest remains unknown as per the end of season 1.

 

In the 2021 storyline, someone is tracking the survivors and trying to blackmail them. This might or might not be the same person. One of the survivors dies of apparent suicide, but there remain strong doubts if said suicide wasn't helped along by a mysterious outside force.

 

For me, these mysteries aren't the draw of the series, though, they're more something I put up with and that I have serious doubts on (my metaphorical "narrative cheques"). Before I return to them, I want to get into what I consider to be the actual strengths of the series, the ones that keep me watching. Let's start off with the 2021 timeline.

 

Especially in the first half of the season, the trauma suffered by the survivors is a major point in their character development. After 25 years, the women still have not completely coped with the experiences in the wilderness, and some have done so better than others (or, one could say, hide their trauma better than others). The central cast consists of four women, and you'd be forgiven to assume they're the only survivors of the crash, leading to some real anxiety for the 1996 storyline, where everyone without a matching storyline in 2021 is living on borrowed time, essentially.

 

This aspect of trauma and coping with it is embedded in some strong ideas about how the rest of the world reacts to the event, and how the survivors themselves chose to frame it. Essentially, they decided not to talk about it and to try to live normal lives, which works with varying degrees of success. Their minor celibrity status is therefore neutered. The show does a passable job with this, but the whole thing stumbles in the final episode, where the great highschool reunion veers into the unbelievable and downright tone-deaf area a bit too much, while other aspects of the plot rely on the conceit working well a bit too strongly. But on the whole, it's carried along by very strong performances of the older actresses that are recognizably similar but still matured and different from their youthful counterparts.

 

The 1996 performances are a bit more varied; not all of the younger actresses manage to bring the requisite sceen presence to bear to make their characters interesting enough. However, the plot itself is the main draw here, as we know how it will end - five survivors after nineteen months, with a cult and cannibalism in between - but not how they get there, and how the girls we see in 1996 will become the women of 2021.

 

I always felt a sense of dread watching these scenes, precisely because I knew the horror and mystery was coming and would supercede the surival aspects, and I simply care more for the latter than the former. I was a bit surprised how long the show took to draw this change out, starting to kill the first characters late in the season and remaining frugal on the death stuff. The horror, too, remains subdued in season 1, as is the mystery. This is a good decision.

 

But I have not talked about the main draw for the series as a whole to me yet: one might realize when watching the credits that the team - director, producer, camera, editing, etc. - is overwhelmingly female. Telling a story about a female soccer team crashing in the wilderness could easily have become a cliched, trope-y nothingburger, but the story is told with what I'd call the "female gaze".

 

It took a while for me to realize this, but it's not only a story with female characters, but it's a story about women, told from a female point of view. You can see it in the lack of "male gaze" shots, you can see it in the way the relationships between the girls on the one hand and the women on the other hand are portrayed, with the attention to details such as period and other uniquely female life experiences that you usually don't get in the genre, and in the general authenticity of the interactions between the girls and the women. It just has this sense of being real that is sorely lacking in the genre, usually, and that bogged down the later seaons of "Lost", too, where the characters more and more became embodiments of an ever stranger plot.

 

The show has often been given the catchphrase of "female Lord of the Flies", but I think that should be taken about as seriously as the "Game of Thrones, but with X" moniker that is put on so many series nowadays. Yes, the initial idea might have been "female Lord of the Flies", but mericfully, this is exactly not what this is. The girls do not engage in dog eats dog behavior, but rather collaborate (not without friction, mind you; again, it stays largely believable).

 

And that leads us to the problems I see on the horizon. In an unfortunately common gamble, the show throws some cliffhangers and twists at the audience in its frenzied finale, and I do not have many hopes of them paying off in season 2 and beyond. I don't want to go too much into spoilers, but the 2021 storyline gets injected with a huge conspiracy, which is ALWAYS a red flag, and the 1996 storyline commits strongly to the horror and mystery aspect of the show.

 

Now, that doesn't need to be a dealbreaker, obviously; if done well, and if the things that are actually good and not just serviceable about the show remain the foundational principles, this can all work. But I've seen this fall apart way too often, and the marketing and structure point towards the series being interested in mass appeal, which is always a problem when trying to produce art because it lends itself to the tempation of continuing the plotlines indefinitely. And plotlines continued indefinitely always mean that the characters recede more and more into the background, their actions becoming erratic and solely plot driven. Again, look no farther than "Lost".

 

The first tears in the canvas are already apparent in season 1, because the show constantly keeps you guessing about who is involved in what, who is lying, who is telling the truth and how a situation will resolve. Who blackmails the women, for example? The show offers several candidates and keeps the mystery up quite some time, and unfortunately, this mystery, as others, has a milkman quality to it, as that truly anyone could be it. This leads to a certain arbitrariness that is hidden by the high quality of the writing, but it is there nonetheless and tempts the writers to rely on this crutch more and more. I've seen that happening.

 

So, I'm interested to see where "Yellowjackets" is going, but I fear that the cheques it writes now will not be cashed in later.