10 things to remember about 'Yellowjackets' before Season 2
Buzz, buzz, buzzzzz.
Our favorite football team-turned cannibalistic cult is back, and from what we've seen in Season 2's trailer, things are about to get even bloodier. If you haven't spent the past year ceaselessly scrolling through Reddit threads nitpicking the 19 months a high school football team spent stranded in the forest — we've got you covered.
Ahead of Yellowjackets Season 2 premiering this Friday on Showtime, we've rounded up everything you need to remember from Season 1 including teenage pregnancy, kidnappings, the making of a cult, and so, so much, death.
1. Teenage Shauna is pregnant with Jeff's baby.
Above all else, even the cannibalism, Yellowjackets is a show about teenage girls. And like any teen flick, there's some drama in our favorite catastrophically chaotic camp. In Season 1, we learn that a teenage Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is sleeping with her best friend Jackie's (Ella Purnell) boyfriend, Jeff (Jack DePew). To make the betrayal worse, Shauna is pregnant with Jeff's baby. The final cherry on top of this abysmal sundae is that she's stranded in the middle of nowhere with little to no food or medical assistance — and Jackie's onto her.
After reading Shauna's diary, Jackie discovers the affair and calls her out in front of the group. While Shauna's baby news first excited the girls, especially Jackie (who doesn't love delivering a baby in the epicenter of a survival disaster?), things get grim during this pivotal fight about Jeff. When Shauna tells Jackie to leave and no one intervenes, Jackie storms out of the cabin and decides to sleep outside...and we all know how that turned out.
2. Jackie dies and things start getting weird.
Right after their rift, Jackie spends the night outside the cabin where it's extremely cold. And where no one anticipated it would snow that evening. The team wakes up to a forest blanketed in snow, with the pitting realization that Jackie slept outside in these conditions slowly making its way into everyone's foresight. The group rushes outside and finds Jackie tragically frozen to death, but things somehow manage to get even darker after that reveal.
As part of their, let's call it, mourning, Lottie (Courtney Eaton), Misty (Samantha Hanratty), and Van (Liv Hewson), sacrifice a bear heart to the "wilderness" in a makeshift shrine that they've built. To add to the creeps, Lottie chillingly concludes the season declaring, "Shed blood my beautiful friends and let the darkness set us free." Things are now officially in full swing at Camp Yellowjackets, with the girls beginning their journey to the cannibalistic cult we know they later become thanks to the opening of Season 1. If Lottie's declaration is anything to be taken literally, more blood is about to be spilled.
3. Travis mysteriously dies and leaves a cryptic note.
Steering away from the onslaught of cannibalism for a moment, another big plot point in Season 1 was Travis' (Andres Soto) mysterious death. We know he was one of the few guys stranded with the girls in the forest, and we know that as a teen (Kevin Alves) he and Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) had a romance going on both during their time in the woods and after it. In the present day, Natalie (Juliette Lewis) is hellbent on finding out how and why Travis really died, refusing to believe the police's opinion he died by suicide — she's convinced there's something more sinister at play.
With the help of Misty (Christina Ricci), Natalie realizes there were candle wax marks in the shape of that dreaded symbol from the forest on the site where Travis was found. You know the one. The weird triangle, circle thing we're all obsessed with. The symbol's placement leads Natalie to believe that Travis was murdered or more specifically, sacrificed. In addition, Travis cryptically left a note reading "Tell Nat she was right," to add to the whole rabbit-hole surrounding his death.
But by the season finale, we start to get some answers. As part of her investigation, Natalie enlists the help of an old friend, Kevyn Tan (Alex Wyndham), to look into Travis' toxicology report (it was clean) and his bank accounts. While Natalie doesn't manage to answer the phone call (we're getting to why), we learn that Lottie (who will be played by Simone Kessell in Season 2) withdrew all of Travis' money and emptied his bank account, implying that she had something to do with his death — and that she's still alive.
4. Natalie is kidnapped by a purple-clad group with a familiar symbol.
We don't know many details about Lottie's present-day activities beyond her revealed connection to Travis, but we do know that a group of people in purple, sporting necklaces with the show's infamous symbol, kidnapped Natalie by breaking into her hotel room and forcefully taking her somewhere we're probably going to see a lot of in Season 2. Are Lottie and the group connected? From the trailer, it appears she might be some form of cult leader so...
Perhaps Lottie's revamped her brief stint as a teenage guru and made it her full time career? I'm already terrified of teenage Lottie, so something's telling me that she's only gotten more creepily prophetic as an adult, and Natalie might be in danger.
5. Taissa's sleepwalking is only getting worse.
Adding to Yellowjackets' staple creepiness is a sleepwalking Taissa (Tawny Cypress), whose condition is so extreme she practically turns into a different person at night. In Season 1, Taissa's unconscious nighttime wandering basically act as grounds for a double persona, where "awake" Taissa can't remember anything that "asleep" Taissa did. While stuck in the wilderness, Taissa's sleepwalking (so far) has mainly been just that, and in the more extreme case, eating dirt. But as an adult, her sleepwalking has become more sinister.
So far, we've learned she's been watching her son, Sammy (Aiden Stoxx), sleep at night. And not by peacefully sitting by his bed, but by crouching in a tree outside his room. We also learn by the season finale that she's built a whole shrine in their basement featuring: her son's favorite toy, a decapitated dog head (yes a real dog, her family's beloved pet Biscuit in fact), and a heart that could be the dog's or something else's. All these sacrificial knick knacks are neatly placed in front of, you guessed it, the same symbol from the forest, Travis' death scene, and the people who kidnapped Natalie.
After Taissa's wife, Simone (Rukiya Bernard), finds the shrine, she packs up her stuff and leaves with their son — who could blame her? But something's telling me that Taissa's sleepwalking is only going to get worse. We don't know why she's doing it. She doesn't know why. And at this point it should be called sleepmurdering. There's also the fun little vision she keeps having of the man with no eyes, an apparition she first saw on her grandmother's death bed, and something that we still don't know is actually real or an external embodiment of internalized trauma.
6. Jeff's blackmailing fiasco, the Adam issue, and Shauna's big mistake.
Another big Season 1 plot point to remember is Natalie, Taissa, and Misty getting blackmailed by someone who supposedly knew everything about what went down in the forest. When the three are sent cryptic postcards with the camp's creepy symbol on it, they're tasked with giving an associated blackmailer $50,000 to stay quiet. Natalie and Taissa team up with Shauna to figure out who the blackmailer is, and while their initial attempt fails, Shauna later finds out it was her husband Jeff (Warren Kole).
Jeff's furniture store was about to go out of business, so he needed the money to keep it going. While Shauna reprimands him, there's a bigger problem on her plate: Adam (Peter Gadiot). Having met after a fender bender, the two were having an affair, but Shauna starts realizing Adam might be hiding a big secret. She can't find his name anywhere online, and it feels like everything he's told her about his past can't actually be backed up. Adding to the suspicion is the fact that her diaries (with all of the Yellowjackets' secrets) went missing after Adam spent a night in her room — we know it's Jeff, but in the heat of the paranoia Shauna begins suspecting that Adam might be the blackmailer.
So...she kills him. Shauna shows up at Adam's apartment, begins interrogating him, finds an unofficial tell-all book on the Yellowjackets, puts two and two together, and stabs him. With Misty's expertise and Taissa and Natalie's help, Shauna manages to clean up the crime scene and dispose of her lover. After finding out Jeff was the actual culprit, she lies to her former teammates and says it was Adam — validating her murder and protecting her husband. For a fleeting moment it seems that Shauna's slippery slope is wrapped up, but we later find out that Adam's been reported missing and the police are out to find him. We can expect the Adam issue to prevail in Season 2, and odds are, Shauna's in big trouble.
7. Misty kills Jessica the "journalist."
Team Yellowjackets' body count doesn't end there. Along with Shauna's murder of Adam, Misty's also done a big killing that might haunt her in Season 2. To ensure her election campaign ran smooth, Taissa hired a pseudo-journalist (who's actually an investigator), Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma), to see if any of the girls would speak up about their time in the wilderness when offered a hefty amount of money. While everyone proves loyal, Misty's allegiance takes an extreme turn when she kidnaps Jessica and keeps her hostage.
Misty's kidnapping quickly becomes a twisted bed and breakfast, and she ultimately decides to let Jessica go, but not before lacing her cigarettes with fentanyl. While driving, Jessica takes a puff and immediately crashes her car — with Misty killing her under the guise of a drug-induced car crash. Sure Misty's plan seems airtight and Jessica's confirmed dead, but in the world of Yellowjackets no one is ever really safe.
8. Javi is missing.
Many things went down in the Yellowjackets' unique, wilderness-exclusive homecoming, but amidst the collective shroom trip and everyone quite literally losing their shit, Javi (Luciano Leroux) went missing. Watching the team basically go feral from the sidelines, Javi flees when suddenly Shauna chillingly warns him to run.
Javi runs away into the depths of the forest, and he still hasn't returned. Some think he's dead, but Travis is hellbent on finding his younger brother. Whether or not Javi is still alive is going to be a big question mark looming over Season 2, where we'll hopefully get some answers.
9. Rest in peace Laura Lee.
Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) was the first Yellowjacket to die in the wilderness — and she will always be remembered. When the girls find an abandoned aircraft (presumably belonging to "dead hunter guy" who owned the cabin they now inhabit), Laura Lee decides to amp up her aviator knowledge and read the plane's manual. With purely theoretical lessons under her belt, she decides to fly the aircraft to try to find help.
In an explosive moment (pun intended) of euphoria and hope, the plane takes flight and Laura Lee manages to fly for a bit, but the plane spontaneously combusts midair. The Yellowjackets have not only lost their first teammate, but they've also lost what could have been their only way out. Laura Lee's death was a turning point in the show and the team's time in the wilderness, with the aftermath seeing the looming darkness emboldening their belief that something in the forest doesn't want them to leave.
10. Lottie is our Antler Aueen, but our Pit Girl remains a mystery.
Everyone remembers Yellowjackets' opening scene. A mysterious girl runs through the woods, and falls into a pit landing on wooden spikes. Her body is picked up by a group of teenagers wearing the creepiest possible clothing, from fur masks to antler crowns — with one wearing pink Converse. Dubbed the "Antler Queen" and "Pit Girl" by fans, Yellowjackets' first episode previews the girls' future in the woods as clearly a cannibalistic cult — but who exactly are the Antler Queen and Pit Girl?
During their homecoming, Lottie wears the antler crown we see in the pilot and her behavior so far, from her visions to her sacrifices to the girls ultimately pinning her as a messiah, heavily confirms that she's the Antler Queen. But the identity of the Pit Girl still remains unanswered. We know she's wearing Jackie's necklace, but we also know that Jackie's dead. The Pit Girl could have been one of Jackie's closer friends, or the necklace could have been used by the girls to mark their next victim — or more crassly, meal. While our Antler Queen may have a name, our Pit Girl still remains a mystery, but by the looks of Season 2's trailer we might be getting closer to our answers.
Winter is officially in full swing at Camp Yellowjackets, and Lottie's premonitions don't look promising. It's time to buckle up and get ready for another wild season featuring our favorite football-playing, wilderness-surviving, cult-worshipping girls.