The Yellowjackets are outsourcing a lot of their decisions to “the wilderness” lately. Too bad for its latest victim.
Season 2, Episode 8: ‘It Chooses’
Earlier this season on “Yellowjackets,” young Natalie recruited her teammates to help her try to fish a moose out of the frozen lake. The moose proved too heavy to dislodge, and it disappeared into the icy water, leaving the teens defeated and hungry.
Now, in the second to last episode of the season, Natalie is in a similar situation watching a body sink beneath the ice. Except this time she lets it sink in order to save herself and provide food for her fellow survivors. And it’s not an already unconscious animal. It’s Javi, the little brother of her sometimes lover Travis.
The moment also calls back to another situation Natalie encountered. In hopes of easing Travis’s suffering, she previously lied and told him that Javi, who ran away during the group’s drug-induced frenzy last season, had died. Here, she is partly responsible for Javi’s actual death, all while Javi was trying only to lead her to safety.
When Javi is declared dead, Van solemnly says, “the wilderness chose.” But did the wilderness really choose? Or did the girls?
As this season draws to its conclusion, the desperation of the Yellowjackets in the wilderness hits a new high — or rather low — point. Lottie is bruised, internally and externally, from Shauna’s beating. Akilah realizes that her little mouse friend has been dead all along, it’s cute, fuzzy body just a desiccated corpse. And everyone is starving. Really starving. And extreme hunger means rational thought has gone out the window.
Lottie tells Misty that, if she dies, the others should not let her body go to waste. But Lottie holds such sway over the group that they cannot fathom losing her guidance. So instead of allowing Lottie to perish, they invent a new ritual. Standing in a circle around their makeshift altar, they all pick cards. Whoever gets the Queen of Hearts will be sacrificed. In this inaugural drawing, Natalie draws the losing card.
Whatever discussions were had about how the ritual would unfold were left offscreen, so it all seems eerily practiced. We never hear any talk of the rules of this deadly game that might demystify it, so the ease with which it is played is uncomfortably natural. There’s no debate over how it is going to work. It just does, and everyone accepts that with the powerlessness of those who haven’t eaten in too long.
Shauna puts Jackie’s necklace on Natalie before drawing a blade to her throat from behind. Natalie accepts her fate, but with a condition: Shauna must face her when she slices. Shauna hesitates, and Travis rushes to the rescue, tackling Shauna and urging Natalie to run. The girls, bloodthirsty, pursue Nat through the wintry landscape while Javi comes to her aid, offering to take her to his hiding spot.
While Lottie’s followers claim to know something about what the “wilderness” wants, Javi has actually learned its secrets. The only other person who has a sense of what he discovered is Ben, who uses Javi’s drawings to discover a cavern filled with tiny animal bones under a tree, where the young boy resided in apparent solitude.
And then Javi dies. The ice cracks open and he falls in as the weapon-wielding chasers catch up. “If you save him, the others will get you,” Misty tells Natalie as she draws her away from the hole. Natalie, realizing that Misty is right, stops fighting. Javi will become the next meal, we assume.
The legacy of these cannibalistic traditions bleeds into the present day action.
The contemporary scenes feature mostly a lot of exposition that we as an audience already know but the rest of the characters do not. After Shauna explains that Adam’s remains have been found, Van, not clued into the whole cover-up situation, throws away Shauna’s keys so she can’t drive home to Jeff. Lottie brings the group all into the “sharing shack,” which proves true to its name.
Shauna shares that Adam wasn’t actually blackmailing her before she murdered him, it was Jeff and Randy — and that she may also have shared too much with the police. (Speaking of sharing …) Tai shares that she was the one who hired Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma) to do research on her teammates to protect her political campaign. Misty shares that she kidnapped Jessica and then “took care of it.” And, of course, they all share how they helped Shauna cover up Adam’s killing. (We see the gruesome fruits of their labors in the images the cops show to Jeff in hopes of getting him to talk.)
After all these confessions, Lottie emerges with an idea and some beverages. One of the cups is spiked with phenobarbital. Lottie’s plan is another sacrifice. “We give it what it always wants,” she explains. “One of us.” Her rationale is that it — whatever it is — will help them survive the various travails they are enduring if they offer it another sacrifice.
She leaves who should die up to chance. That’s what the wilderness would want, she says. “We don’t get to decide,” she explains. “It chooses.”
But these women still seem to be doing a lot of projecting about what the “wilderness” is requesting — and, in turn, absolving themselves of any guilt related to their own actions. Natalie could have continued trying to save Javi, but she didn’t. That’s not the wilderness, that’s a choice. It’s Lottie who is presenting her friends with potential death. Not the wilderness.
The series has yet to convince me that there’s anything truly supernatural going on. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of desperate and frightened humans doing cruel things to save themselves while letting others suffer. It reminds me of Jackie’s death at the end of Season 1, which was the result of plain teen meanness rather than any sort of ghoulish presence.
The surviving Yellowjackets can blame the wilderness for only so much. At some point, they have to take responsibility for all the pain they’ve caused. Still, maybe the guilt would be worse than just drinking Lottie’s death potion.
More to chew on
I’m a general fan of the “Yellowjackets” music cues, but a couple in this episode felt a little too on the nose for me. Walter is listening to “Not While I’m Around” from “Sweeney Todd,” a musical about cannibalism. As Natalie tries to evade capture, we hear Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” in which Billy Corgan sings, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” Also maybe a little too apt.
That said: Nice house, Walter.
It’s nice that we finally know what was likely going on in the pilot’s opening sequence, even if we don’t know who was being chased. (I’m not sure that last detail is going to end up mattering.)
Callie’s Shawn Mendes poster in her bedroom is a very funny production design choice.
Melissa is reading a copy of “Sassy.” Long live “Sassy.”
I’m glad Misty finally called Mari out. Someone had to.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
