This week brought plenty of confessions but little healing.
Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Two Truths and a Lie’
“Giving voice to our darkest thoughts is how we gain access to our deepest truths,” the true believer Lisa tells Adult Natalie as a prompt during one of Lottie’s workshops. Indeed, Lottie’s methodology is proven right over the course of the fifth episode of “Yellowjackets,” where destructive secrets are wantonly shared. But there is little healing to come from these confessions, only more destruction.
Take, for instance, Misty.
Teen Misty is feeling especially loose lipped thanks to her friendship with her “bestie” Crystal. Some facts we learn about Misty: The three famous people she would invite to a slumber party are Plato, the “Grind” host Eric Nies and Jack Kevorkian because what he does is “so brave.” She hates deodorant. She once walked in on her parents having sex and wasn’t all that grossed out. And, of course, the one we already know: She destroyed the plane’s emergency transmitter the night after the crash so she could remain the Yellowjackets’ hero in crisis.
That last one doesn’t sit well with Crystal, whose name, it turns out, is actually Kristen. That’s the kind of secret that she shared with Misty, explaining that she never corrected her teammates when they mistakenly called her “Crystal the pistol” on the first day of practice. It’s a detail about her life that she revels in sharing with her best friend, something sort of embarrassing but not actually all that shameful. Misty misreads Crystal’s acceptance. Rather than celebrate their shared oddity when Misty utters the story about the transmitter, Crystal’s expression drops. Misty is the reason they are all stranded. Suddenly the game isn’t fun.
Misty tries to save face, pretending she’s just kidding, but Crystal knows better. “You’re not that good of an actress,” she says. Misty, facing social isolation once more, resorts to a threat, vowing to kill Crystal if she tells anyone. She doesn’t have to. Crystal stumbles backward and plummets to her death. When Misty returns to the cabin, she tells the group Crystal got lost in the raging storm that just descended on the wilderness knowing full well Crystal’s mangled body is at the foot of a cliff.
In the present, Walter Tattersall also knows that Misty isn’t a very good actress. Their dynamic mirrors Misty and Crystal’s, though Misty isn’t as willing a participant in the banter he’s trying to start. She reluctantly plays his game of “two truths and a lie” before getting distracted upon finding the gate to Lottie’s compound. When Natalie emerges, it’s not the reunion for which Misty had hoped: Natalie sends the betrayed and frustrated Misty away.
What Misty fails to recognize is she finally has someone sitting across from her who will accept her strangeness wholeheartedly. Walter has figured out she was likely involved in Adam Martin’s death, but he doesn’t really care. “I like you regardless of your extracurricular activities,” he says.
He’s had his own odd experience with killers — his grandma murdered his grandfather, apparently — and is bizarrely charmed by Misty’s nefariousness. This isn’t the same situation as Shauna’s daughter, Callie, and the creepy cop who is trying to pry clues out of her through bowling dates. Unless I’m mistaking his earnestness for something else, Walter says what he means.
But Misty rejects that. She’s offended that he thinks she’s a murderer and fails to see that she might finally have a weirdo who matches her, a bestie who’s even more sympathetic than Crystal, may she rest in peace. Instead, she leaves Walter behind and marches up to Lottie’s community with a new plan: She’s going to join up.
In that enclave, Natalie has been trying to unearth some secrets of her own. She finally manages to dig around Lottie’s office, and discovers boxes of personal documents about Lottie’s followers. To her it looks like a gold mine, but she’s quickly shut down when it turns out everyone relinquished that information willingly.
With Natalie despondent, Lottie turns the tables on her, encouraging Natalie to divulge what she’s been hiding — specifically, what she told Travis that led to his death. Using a technique from her “time away” — a euphemistic term for when she was institutionalized — Lottie flashes a light in Natalie’s eyes and coaxes out of her the story of the last time she saw Travis.
It’s a seedy tale in which Natalie and Travis went on a bender and Natalie overdosed. In her unconscious state, Natalie saw a vision of the Yellowjackets’ crash site, but none of them had survived. The mysterious figure known as the “antler queen” moves through the vessel among the corpses. When Natalie was revived she told Travis: “I saw it. I felt it. We brought it back. Trav, we brought it back with us.”
As she shares this, Lottie, terrified, looks over her shoulder and sees the shadow of that same person or creature. “Yellowjackets” viewers have theorized that Lottie was the “antler queen” because she dons a crown made of antlers at the “Doomcoming.” But now Lottie is the one haunted by that image. Is it her own shadow self that’s scaring her? Or is the “antler queen” even a single being? Is it instead the manifestation of the “darkness” all of the Yellowjackets carry?
That darkness has arrived at Adult Van’s apartment-slash-video store in the form of Taissa. Tai is aware she is placing a huge burden on Van by asking for her help. Meanwhile, Van has some hidden habits of her own, squirreling away oxycodone when she thinks Tai is asleep. And Tai is asleep when Van takes the drug. It’s the “other one” — Tai’s alter ego — who emerges in the darkness and kisses Van. “This isn’t where we are supposed to be,” she says.
It’s easy to think of the spirits plaguing these women and girls as evil, yet in the final moments of the hour we’re given an example of wilderness mysticism as a force for good. Pregnant Shauna has grown understandably suspicious of Lottie, who whispers to her baby in utero. But when Shauna and Tai are stranded in heavy snowfall they are seemingly guided by Lottie’s mantras about hearing the wind and the trees. They are able to make it back as Shauna goes into labor, her primal scream of pain ending the episode.
In an earlier scene, Lottie had told the fetus, “You are going to change everything.” Now the child is here, a new life entering the world replacing Crystal, who has left it. Bye, bestie. Hello, baby.
More to chew on
Adult Shauna’s Built to Spill T-shirt is a great costuming choice.
An interesting fact for those keeping track of where everyone was post-rescue: Tai and Van were still together when Shauna got married. They swapped out the guest book pen for a dirty novelty pen.
I think the creepiest character on the show might be Matt Saracusa, the adult detective who pretends to date a teen to solve a case. In addition to its general ickiness, I grew tired of that whole plotline this episode including Shauna’s fake tryst with Randy, the most useless character on the show.
The motif of videotape static has been with the show since the beginning thanks to the opening credits, but it’s being deployed more and more in the narrative. What does it mean?
Is Misty actually a murderer? Technically, she isn’t as far as we know, and maybe that’s why she’s so angry at Walter’s assumption. She’s definitely an accessory and you could probably charge her with manslaughter. But straight up murder? Not yet.
Does Crystal become the next meal?
Source: Television - nytimes.com
