You’re getting this email because you signed up for the Chicago 312 — but every now and then we do a little detour for the deeply online and unwell to talk about television. If that's not you, feel free to skip — or, send me an emoji and I’ll make sure you only get the Chicago emails in the future.

⚠️ Spoilers for all three seasons of Yellowjackets ahead. Proceed with caution.

There was a time in 2022 when Yellowjackets was the only thing keeping me
I was going through it post-pandemic. I felt isolated. Burned out. And Yellowjackets, with the greatest hook of all time: Girl Lord of the Flies, 90s, Mean Girls Cannibalism, pulled me in from the second I turned it on.

Yellowjackets is about a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness—and what they become to survive. The pilot opens with a terrified girl running barefoot through snow, spiked into a pit, gutted, and cooked by her classmates. Ritual masks. Antlers. Screams. Cut to: high school soccer. YEAH.

The themes of trauma and teen girl horror at the heart of something both campy and terrifying at the same time, with real range and skill — it was something I’d never seen before. It was exciting.

I was not the only one who felt this way: on Reddit, people ran wild with theories about Pit Girl, the girl eaten and murdered in the cold open of the pilot. Threads about trauma bonding, group dynamics, queer tension, and various diagnoses for every member of the ensemble cast, got deep.

But somewhere along the way, the show lost its nerve. Why?

Season 1 didn’t ask for sympathy

The adult versions of the girls—played by criminally underrated 90s icons like Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis—were haunted, brittle, and barely functional. Their younger counterparts somehow mirrored them perfectly, each quietly unraveling in their own special way.

You had the double-timeline structure. The creepy prom dress Antler Queen veil. Very on point needle drops. There was gay stuff, murder (duh), politics, secrets, and terrifying group dynamics.

Karyn Kusama directed and produced much of the season with the same dark feminist bite she brought to Jennifer’s Body, and it was clear the entire creative team was having the time of their lives making something messy, weird, and genuinely thrilling.

But what made it land—what made it feel necessary—was that it didn’t pretend anyone was okay. These women weren’t healing. They were older, but not better.

Sure, there were moments where the tone wobbled—like the mushroom party turned group hunt, the maybe-gay-maybe-just-pathologically-attached Shauna/Jackie arc, or Misty’s increasingly Reddit-coded behavior.
But it worked, because Yellowjackets stayed with the premise that these girls did something unspeakable, survived, and were never okay again.

Season 2 Promised Chaos, Then It Kept Apologizing

Season 1 ends with a bang: Natalie is kidnapped by a group of purple-clad cultists.
Her terrified ex-sponsor, under duress, leaves a voicemail that plays over the abduction:
“Who the FUCK is Lottie Matthews?”It’s the first time the name (one of the main creepy cult leaders in the high school timeline) is mentioned in the adult timeline. AHHH WHAT?! But after this reveal... Season 2 opens, and Lottie is running a wellness retreat.
No antlers. No blizzards. No blood.

The cult? “Not a cult.”
The wilderness? Just a metaphor.
Lottie? Medicated, serene, a little mean about smoothies.

We’re told—loudly and repeatedly—that she’s mentally ill, not mystical - it’s clinical. Separate. Safe. Not connected to anything supernatural. Not part of the wilderness.

In Season 2, everyone gets this treatment: Shauna is rerouted into domestic comedy, stuck in the worst cop murder subplot of the decade. Misty becomes a Reddit caricature. Natalie—whose arc has always been about self-destruction—dies in a sudden blaze of transcendence, guided into the afterlife by a vision of her teenage self whispering, “You never left.” This is probably very meaningful to someone, but it made me want to throw a shoe at the screen.

Even Simone Kessell, who played adult Lottie, said the writers didn’t give her a clear arc. No answers about her character’s mental health. No explanation of the spiritual ambiguity. No plan. And that’s the problem.

It’s not that Lottie needed to be evil. Or that the characters had to stay edgy or scary.
It’s that the show got terrified of what it meant to keep any of them powerful, mentally ill, and spiritually unknowable. So they bent over backward to make sure her schizophrenia wasn’t mistaken for narrative danger.

And in the process, they cut out the heart of what made the show work.

Season 3 Tried to Get the Feral Back—But the Damage Is Done

In season 3, which wrapped last night, there’s more violence than before, and also more cannibalism. Shauna is pretty unequivocally evil now (good for her!) and the teen plotline is more openly nasty, more violent, and cruel.

The show (especially the cast and the production team) is still diverse, still queer, still full of weird feral energy—but the show itself seems different. But it doesn’t land the same. It seems like it stopped trusting us to stay with the girls when they got too dark. The writers pulled them back from the edge. Smoothed them over. Tried to heal them. And in doing so, made the show smaller.

Girl Lord of the Flies Got Scared of the Girls

Yellowjackets started with the premise that the girls did something unspeakable and lived. That kind of story requires discomfort. It requires characters who might do terrible things again. That was the thrill.

But in Season 3, even as the edge is back on with more violence, cannibalism, and *morally grey decisions*, there’s still something off. It feels like the writers got scared.

Scared of what it meant to write women who won’t ever be better, and probably don’t want to be.

That second part in particular could be so interesting — it could be scary, funny, even really profound. But the fear of what came after got in the way.

If you’re not gonna let the girls stay feral, haunted, and a little evil—
then take your antlers off and go home.

-H