TV Blog: Yellowjackets

 Hello friends (all 5 of you <3)

First things first, I haven't posted in a while. I'm sorry. You probably thought that I was busy getting my life together but really I just haven't felt the spirit to blog in a while. Not like I haven't done tons of blog worthy stuff in the interim- (I did a blind taste test of maruchan vs the other brand of ramen today)- I just haven't felt the burning desire in my heart to blog. And I don't like to do things in my personal life unless I have an unhinged burning desire to do so (I've decided I'm gonna get really into kayaking or fishing this summer).

So a few weeks ago, during a 3 day weekend, I laid on my couch and binged tv like any other good, red blooded American. I landed on Yellowjackets.

In my experiences, the less I know about a piece of media before I consume it, the better.

So if you don't want spoilers or haven't seen the show yet, you may consider turning back now.

Ok, so all I knew about this show going in is that it was all buzzy and people on twitter were tweeting about it.

NOBODY GAVE ME A TRIGGER WARNING THAT THIS STORY WOULD INVOLVE A HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS SOCCER TEAM OR A BUNCH OF PEOPLE HAVING UNHEALTHY CODEPENDENT FRIENDSHIPS.

Was I triggered? Was I? Did I need a few weeks to process afterward? Did I feel like somehow it held a mirror up to the inner soul of my own youth?

...give me a sec....

Ok, so Yellowjackets is like Lord of the Flies x That Book about the South American rubgy team that crashed x Picnic at Hanging Rock x if Sofia Coppola was kinda funnier.

I don't even know how to tackle this plot line because, oh, is it a plot line. Sometimes I do just character rankings but that really won't do this show justice.

So it starts off in the year of our lord 1995 (or 1996, I can't remember exactly and I don't care enough to look it up). WHICH MEANS THAT OFF THE BAT, THE SOUNDTRACK SLAPS. There's a state title winner girls soccer team in NJ and they are coping with being GOAT. We have Jackie, she's the team captain and the coach explicitly tells her that she was chosen as captain bc she's popular lmao. We have Shauna, Jackie's dork ass BFF, also on team. We have Natalie, she smokes weed and wears a leather jacket. And then we have Taissa....

who is very tall and very crazy....

Taissa meets with the other main girls (above) and discusses not passing to this freshman bc the freshman needs to improve a bit. And IIRC, everyone else is kinda like "nah". Which is cool, until we get to practice that day....

AND TAISSA SLIDES INTO THIS GIRL AND BREAKS HER LEG LIKE THE BONE WAS HANGING OUT AND EVERYTHING GIRL WTF

-----sorry I just need another brief sec----

The number of times I had older girls take me aside and be like "hey do this and not this", was cool bc 1) it comes from a place of love <3 and 2) bc at least they didn't break my leg.

The story toggles between 1995 and 2021. In 2021, we get to see some, not all, of the fun girls from 1995 as they've grown into lovely middle-aged women. Taissa is uber successful and running for office (feels apt). Shauna is a stay at home mom and is married to.....JACKIE'S 1995 BOYFRIEND JEFF. Natalie is getting out of rehab. And Misty, the weird team manager, is a nurse at an old folks home. We don't get to see some of the girls from 1995 in 2021. And throughout the show, as the universe is fleshed out, we get a slowly expanding picture of who is still around in 2021 and what happened to them in 1995.

The 2021 ladies have each gotten some sort of weird, threatening message that hints at some sort of long-held secret from 1995 that is in danger of being released in 2021. For this reason, the ladies who DO NOT TALK, finally slowly reach out to each other to warn them about the messages. Taissa is afraid that this unspoken secret will destroy her campaign for office. 

The main character is Shauna, even though it feels like is really is a star-ensemble cast show. We get to see how Shauna, as a teen in 1995, felt like she was in Jackie's shadow. And had a weird teen affair with Jeff! And got in to Brown, but decided not to go, marry Jeff, and be a stay at home mom. Who, in 2021, feels a stupid amount of middle-aged ennui and prolly hates her husband and daughter.

Throughout the episodes, the story in 1995 and 2021 gets more and more fleshed out. In 2021, we learn that Taissa's marriage starts to strain because of her campaign, and her relationship with her son deteriorates, and she starts to have scary visions of wolves, and she starts to crack. We learn that Natalie is obsessed with some dude named Travis. And her teen best friend is a local cop who is also like in love with her. I honestly can't remember anything about Misty because she's just #quirky. She drives a Fiat.

Shauna starts having a weird emotional affair with some guy who she got into a fender bender with. It becomes a full blown affair after she suspects that Jeff is having his own affair (he's later revealed to just be really dumb and really bad at money). Everyone is trying to hunt down who they think is sending them the weird, threatening messages. Natalie finally finds Travis but it turns out that he allegedly took his own life. She and Misty slowly deduce that he did not actually take his own life and that he was murdered, by someone who left a mark in a shape that only makes sense in context of their long held secret from 1995.

Oh jeez, so I've completely been neglecting the 1995 line. This shit gets nuts. So the girls get on a place for the national title competition. Lottie, one of the girls on the team, has a rich dad who charters a private plane for the team. Midway through the flight, the plane crashes. All of the adults die except for Assistant Coach Ben. He loses his leg in the crash. Some of the girls die. Some of the girls almost die. Misty is knowledgable in first aid and is finally loved and appreciated amongst the team. She secretly finds the airplane tracking box and destroys it. After a few days, when the girls are not rescued, they hike around and find an abandoned cabin on the shores of a lake. Lottie starts to run out of her medication for what I presumed to be schizophrenia. They find a skeleton in the attic in the cabin, and a shotgun, and a small plane. The plane is chained up and no one knows how to pilot it. It does have a use manual and the really Christian character starts to study it. Natalie is elected to be on a hunting team with Travis, the dead head coach's eldest son. They fall in love (obvi). They also manage to make some successful kills. Misty becomes like camp doc, helps nurse assistant Coach Ben through his leg amputation, and heavily puts the moves on him, despite him being an adult man, saying no, and being pretty gay. Jackie isn't good at roughing it because she's a rich girl, and she's pretty and popular, duh. The other girls are all working super hard to stay alive and resent this.

                                        R.I.P. Jackie, your only crime was being pretty and popular

I love it when works are written by women because even if it's not like a gender specific episode/movie/book, I always feel like I can tell <3. Like let's look at the checklist: Bitchin soundtrack, feminine ennui, high school girls soccer team-ness, accurate portrayal of co-dependent friendships, on the surface fighting over a duded but it's never really about the dude. Like it all speaks to me because it is so true. It was like looking into the face I wore in my youth for the first time. It was terrifying, and very difficult to process.

I finished the show that weekend and marathoned it. I do not recommend this.

Shit really gets poppin when all of the girls get their period except for Shauna and then she has to hide from everyone except for Taissa, who is smart, that she is pregnant with Jeff's baby...that Jeff... the one who in 1995 was with Jackie. Now here is a small point I wish to digress on....

I do not understand keeping a journal/diary. I know that people do it and it helps them process, or decompress, or meditate after a long day. I just honestly could not imagine journaling because it requires  an ability to be aware of your own feelings, even when they are painful, and I'm not brave enough to do that. But also because like why am I keeping the journal? So I can remember how five years ago I went to court all day, and then went home and worked out??????? My main issue with it is people have journals and they just be telling on themselves!!!!!!!! 1995 dork ass Shauna keeps a secret journal that she hides in the rafters of the cabin that details her affair with Jeff and then duh, of course Jackie finds it and reads it! WHY ARE YOU GONNA TELL ON YOURSELF LIKE THAT?

Are you reading this and saying "oh that only happens in the films". NOPE. Criminal defendants get SCREWED if they keep journals detailing their crimes. GIRL. Just don't keep a journal, or at the very least don't detail your crimes in said journal please.

Ok so back to 2021. Shauna has a daughter with Jeff, but that daughter is too young to be the baby from 1995. We still don't know who exactly survived 1995 and who didn't. It's revealed, after a ton of hinting, that Jackie died in 1995. She read the journal (DUH) and feels horribly bitter and betrayed. After acting out because she feels bitter and betrayed, she chooses/kinda get pressured by the rest of the cabin, to sleep outside because everyone is mad at her and she's mad at everyone. They have some weird, trippy dreams maybe, and wake up to find Jackie FROZEN outside. 

In 1995, the religious girl decides to try flying the plane to get help after an untold amount of days studying the fly manual. She successfully gets into the air and everyone watches on the ground below and like celebrates....and then it blows up. Did this hurt you, a viewer who knows it's a fictional show, as much as this hurt me? If I was at the campsite, I would have been crying and throwing up the entire time, like I would have been worse than Jackie.

Lottie runs out of meds and starts having scary visions that end up being true in some sense or the other. Misty starts covertly poisoning them with psychedelic mushrooms. Lottie starts gathering supporters, other girls who believe in her visions, which in fairness, have turned out to be true. Shauna and Taissa don't believe in the visions but kind of go along with the rest of the group. One of the girls, Van, gets mauled by a wolf. Lottie kills a bear. The group loses Javi, Travis's younger brother, when, in a shroom induced frenzy, the girls start to hunt the boys.

In 2021, Shauna kills the dude she was having an affair with. Misty, Natalie, and Taissa come over and help her clean up. They're all strangely good at dismembering a body. Taissa's son has started asking her why people are afraid of her, and if she's a cannibal. He has nightmares about a scary woman outside of his bedroom window. Taissa gets asked by political donors to dish on how the girls survived 1995 (like obvi they had to eat people, right?). Everyone is super sensitive to any illusions of cannibalism, but Misty still eats jerky.

In the end beats of the show, Natalie finally makes peace with Travis ending his own life, and does not believe that he was murdered anymore. She's staring down the barrel of a gun and IMMEDIATELY a group of people burst in and snatch her up. Misty is in a weird side-plot with a journalist/private investigator who she kidnaps and drugs. Shauna lies to cover up that Jeff owes people money or something and it inadvertently throws the scent off of the actual cult that is running everything, IDK. Taissa is revealed to be the scary woman outside of her son's window, and she has like a secret shrine with their sacrificed pet dog in the basement. GIRL WTF.

She wins the election, I guess it worked out for her IDK. Lottie is mentioned to still be alive.

And on that cliff hanger, season 1 ends. I think the show has already been renewed for two more seasons. Which is cool, but I hate it when season finales end in cliff hangers because I personally believe that every season should be a self-contained arc. Idk. It's a weird irrational peeve I have.

So the season has ended but huge questions remain:

1) It seems Travis really was murdered, by this cult. Is this a cult? Are these the same folks who kidnapped Natalie?

2) Who was the guy that Shauna had an affair with and then killed? Who was he? He was super persistent at getting in her pants.

3) What happened to Shauna's baby from 1995? The sole daughter she has with Jeff now is not old enough to be that baby. What happened to the baby?

4) Is it anything actually supernatural? Or is Lottie just coming up lucky so far?

5) What happened to Javi????? For that matter what happened to everyone else ? Where is Van in 2021? Who exactly survived 1995?

6) AND DID THE GIRLS EVEN ACTUALLY EAT HUMAN FLESH EVER IN 1995? It's ambiguous, it's alluded to, it is never confirmed.

Overall grade: A+. This caused alot of conflicting emotions in myself after I watched. It brought up alot of memories. Obviously I have never been in a plane crash, let alone stranded in the Canadian wilderness in 1995. But I have been a teen girl, on a high school soccer team. And I guess there are universal experiences we share across decades and settings (rural American Bible Belt vs Canadian wilderness).

Watching this reminded me of the times when I was a teen girl and I would have awful fights with my friends over guys, and it was never about the guys, obviously. Never. Never ever about the guy. He doesn't matter really. He's irrelevant, replaceable. It's bigger than that, and more consequential.

Watching this reminded me of being a teen girl and "falling in love" with some dude because he was cool and we vibed.

Watching this reminded me of how I have not talked to any of the girls from my high school soccer team since I graduated high school and I have no intention of changing that, but I wish those ladies the best.

Looking into yourself is hard. Oof. BITCHIN SOUNDTRACK TOO THO. 10/10 will be watching Season 2, even if it means I have to subscribe to Showtime or something.