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    The Yellowjackets Are Back. Here’s Where We Left Off.

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    The Showtime survival drama returns on Friday for Season 3. Memory a little fuzzy? Hint: There was a bunch of cannibalism and even more ’90s rock.Season 2 of Showtime’s “Lord of the Flies”-inspired survival drama, “Yellowjackets,” ended with a shocking death in the present timeline and a cabin fire in the 1990s one. But now that nearly two years have passed, you may be a little fuzzy on the details.Who burned down the cabin? How did Natalie die? What was going on with Taissa? And wasn’t there something about eating a raw human heart?Here’s what to remember about where we left the members of the cannibal soccer team from hell. Season 3 premieres on Friday.Misty, accidental serial killerBack in the ’90s, in the Canadian wilderness, Young Misty (Samantha Hanratty) had already demonstrated a dint for the psychotic in Season 1, when she smashed the plane’s emergency transmitter because she liked feeling essential. About midway through Season 2, she told her friend Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) what she did, and Crystal was horrified. Misty threatened her, and Crystal backtracked — right off a cliff to her death. It wouldn’t be Misty’s last accidental kill.Shauna’s babyTired and exhausted, Young Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) went into labor late in Season 2, but let’s be honest: This baby was never going to make it. Shauna was barely ingesting enough calories to sustain one person, let alone grow another. Her baby was stillborn.A half-starving Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) gave birth in the wilderness, which unsurprisingly didn’t go well. Kailey Schwerman/ShowtimeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the ‘Yellowjackets’ ‘Weirdos’ Fell in Love and Wrote a Hit Show

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      The married creators of “Yellowjackets” always had big screenwriting dreams. Their idea about witchy teen cannibals struck the right alchemy.Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson share a marriage, a house in Los Angeles and a hit TV series that they created together. But not a computer screen, at least not when it comes to doing interviews.“We learned pretty early that one screen is not quite enough to contain us, gesture-wise,” said Nickerson, stationed in the living room. True enough, the creators of “Yellowjackets,” the second season of which began streaming on Friday (and airs Sunday on Showtime), both like to talk with their hands as they discuss the dark, witty psychological horror thriller that gave them their breakthrough after years of working in writers’ rooms for shows like “Narcos” and “Dispatches From Elsewhere.”They also like to share ideas, batting possibilities and pitches back and forth, exploring ideas that might have a chance of rising above the din. “One of those conversations just started around the idea of a girls’ soccer team being lost in the woods,” Lyle said from an upstairs room. Not a meditation on the hell of high school, or the futility of trying to outrun one’s past. This is Rule No. 1 in the Lyle-Nickerson book: Character and situation come first, laying the seedbed for themes and big ideas.“It’s not like we immediately started having conversations around trauma or female friendship,” Nickerson said. “We just started talking about characters and everything grew from there. At least that’s my story.”“I think that’s right,” Lyle confirmed from her post.Whatever the origin, the results have resonated. Showtime has already ordered a third season of “Yellowjackets” and signed the couple to an overall deal. Online discussions overflow with speculation about what might happen next or, sometimes, what the heck is going on now. The surviving members of that New Jersey high school soccer team — whose plane crashes en route to nationals in 1996 and who resort to doing very bad things to survive — have developed an ardent fan base.That those bad things appear to have involved some measure of witchcraft and, as the Season 2 premiere confirmed, cannibalism, is part of the appeal. Their creators, themselves native New Jerseyans who met in 2005 and shared a dream of screenwriting, are just happy they found an idea that stuck.“We’re constantly pitching things at each other, and I feel like 80 percent of the time the other person will go, ‘Huh,’” Lyle said. “And then 20 percent of the time or less, it’s like, ‘Ooh, save that one.’”“Yellowjackets,” it seems safe to say, was an “Ooh.”“I used to spend all day just living in fear of the night because that’s when my imagination was going to run wild,” Nickerson said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLyle, 43, and Nickerson, 44, met at a party given by a mutual friend in Jersey City. The theme was “beer Christmas”: Revelers drink beer from cans and then hang the cans from the Christmas tree. (The festivities continue: The friend now lives in Long Beach, Calif.; Lyle and Nickerson’s production company is called Beer Christmas.)They had heard about each other from other mutual friends, but Nickerson was usually busy helping his father with the family fast-food stand on the Jersey Shore, serving up burgers, hot dogs and sweet sausage sandwiches. “I was free labor all summer long,” he said.They were both outsiders of sorts. Lyle was a horror movie fiend; in eighth grade she was in a band that played Liz Phair and Sebadoh covers. (“Yellowjackets” boasts a killer ’90s indie-rock soundtrack.) Nickerson was a bit of a loner. “I never really found a thing or a group-level identity or a place to feel like I fit,” he said. “By the end of high school, I was just ready to get out of there.”After they finally met, realized they had shared aspirations, and fell in love, they did the natural thing: moved to Los Angeles with a suitcase full of spec scripts for various TV comedies, including “30 Rock,” “My Name Is Earl” and “The Office.” None were made. They wrote a one-hour pilot inspired by one of their favorite shows, “Veronica Mars.” Finally, their agents told them to write an original pilot and make it as weird as they wanted.In response, they wrote a high school murder mystery. It didn’t get picked up, but it helped them find their voice and generated that elusive commodity: industry buzz. Soon they were writing for the CW vampire series “The Originals,” and then the Netflix cartel drama “Narcos.” They were on their way.That they broke through with a witchy story involving cannibalism makes some sense. Lyle, who has an arm tattoo of a palm-reading chart (both are into tarot cards), recalled trying to convince a video-store clerk to rent her the cult horror favorite “Dr. Giggles.” She was 11. Nickerson was too freaked out by horror to give it a chance until he was older. His own mind was terror enough.“I used to spend all day just living in fear of the night because that’s when my imagination was going to run wild,” he said.Shauna (Sophie Nélisse, center, with Courtney Eaton, left, and Jasmin Savoy Brown) gets the cannibalism started in the Season 2 premiere by snacking on her dead friend’s frozen ear.Kailey Schwerman/ShowtimeMelanie Lynskey, who plays the adult Shauna, praised Lyle and Nickerson’s complementary qualities. “They’re such a good team,” she said.Kimberley French/ShowtimeThere’s enough fear to go around in “Yellowjackets,” which, for all its sensational qualities, explores truths that resonate more broadly. As they developed the idea, the creators took long walks though Griffith Park in Los Angeles, talking about the characters and what they mean to one another. Deeper themes emerged.“A lot of the thematics really just grew out of trying to put these people in scenarios together and looking at their relationships,” Lyle said. “It just became quickly apparent that it would be really complicated, in hopefully a great way.”Complication, of course, comes standard in high school relationships, even those that don’t involve witchcraft or cannibalism. Tawny Cypress, who plays the adult version of Taissa, a survivor who grows up to become a state senator, described the story as universal. Her character experiences a frightening form of dissociative identity disorder, and winds up sacrificing the family dog in a cultish ritual. But less extreme versions of life can still be terrifying.“High school sucked for everybody,” Cypress said in a video call. “Nobody came out unscathed, and we carry that around with us still. These girls had a much bigger experience, but we all are stuck with things that formed us back then.”Karyn Kusama, an executive producer on the series and an accomplished film director (“Girlfight,” “Destroyer”), was even more specific.“This idea of girls feeling they need to destroy each other in order to survive felt very emotionally familiar to me,” she said in a video call. “I just thought it was an interesting thing to explore in real terms, and then allow the metaphor to be quite powerful and clean while the narrative event is extremely messy.”Season 1 hinted at the most extreme expression of that metaphor, a taboo subject that never really came to fruition: cannibalism. The pilot all but promised it, to the point that viewers might have fairly wondered: Who will be eaten? When? By whom? And is there hot sauce?“I don’t think people will be disappointed this season,” Lyle said in reference to the cannibalism teased by the first season of “Yellowjackets.” The Season 2 premiere has already begun to deliver. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesNickerson sounded a little sheepish about what he called the first season’s “lack of cannibalism.” But he swore they weren’t teasing. (They have since confirmed in interviews that the girls would eventually get their fill, and the Season 2 premiere gets things started when Shauna, played as a teen by Sophie Nélisse, makes a frozen snack of her dead best friend’s ear.)“It wasn’t that we set out to be like, ‘Well, there will be no cannibalism in the first season,’” he said. “It was more that it didn’t feel like we had gotten the characters to a place where that would feel organic. We wanted viewers to be with them as much as possible to make this seem like not a salacious choice, but the only choice.”Lyle added: “I don’t think people will be disappointed this season.”Lyle and Nickerson didn’t quite finish each other’s sentences when we spoke. But they came pretty close, glossing and elaborating on a point here, gently correcting there. It’s not all fun and games when they work at home, but they appear to complement each other in productive ways.Melanie Lynskey, who earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Adult Shauna, said she saw a definite pattern in the couple’s creative relationship.“Ashley’s so funny and so quick and kind of gathers her thoughts in a very businesslike way,” she said by phone. “And Bart is more emotional; he takes a minute to get to the thing. But along the way, there are all these great stop-offs, and they’re such a good team.”Cypress, a fellow New Jerseyan, was more succinct about the couple: “I [expletive] love those weirdos.” More

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      Melanie Lynskey on That Chilling ‘Yellowjackets’ Finale

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      The actress discussed her character’s cool under pressure, her favorite fan theories and one thing she insisted to writers that Shauna would never do.This interview contains major spoilers from the season finale of “Yellowjackets.”Melanie Lynskey and I are going to talk about the tragic final twist in the “Yellowjackets” season finale in a moment. But first, I’m still reeling from the opening minutes.Shauna, with an electric carving knife, in the bathtub?“I know, right?” said Lynskey, 44, who plays the adult version of Shauna on Showtime’s buzzy psychological horror series “Yellowjackets,” about a high school girls soccer team that becomes stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash in 1996. We’ve seen just enough to know that their time in the woods didn’t end well, especially not for those who wound up literally butchered and eaten by the survivors. But it’s pretty clear that surviving — which is to say, having been reduced to murder and cannibalism — took a toll as well.Case in point: the relative calm with which the adult Shauna, in the present day, dismembers her new boyfriend … to hide the evidence of having accidentally stabbed him to death with a different, nonelectric knife.“There are moments with this character when we have to remember that she’s operating on Autopilot,” Lynskey said of Shauna. “There’s a problem, and she’s just like, OK, let me get through this part of the problem until another problem arises. She’s just trying to keep one foot in front of the other.”Lynskey, a New Zealand actress whose Kiwi twang morphs into a flawless American accent on “Yellowjackets,” was calling from her daughter’s bedroom last week in Atlanta (“I’m hiding,” she explained), the city where she’s shooting the coming Hulu series “Candy.” In that series, she plays a woman on the other end of a blade: Betty Gore, a Wylie, Tex., woman who was murdered with an ax by her best friend, Candy Montgomery, in 1980.Lynskey as Shauna with Warren Kole, who plays Shauna’s husband, Jeff. “She’s scared to look too closely at ‘Who is this person I’m with?,’” Lynksey said of her character’s decision to marry him.  Kailey Schwerman/Showtime“I like things with a little bit of darkness,” Lynskey said. “I like seeing how normal people can get to a desperate point.”Lynskey’s high-profile roles in “Yellowjackets,” for which she earned a Critics Choice Award nomination, and in Adam McKay’s star-studded apocalyptic Netflix satire, “Don’t Look Up,” are the latest successes in a career that, in recent years, has included major roles in the HBO series “Togetherness” (2015-16); in Macon Blair’s 2017 critically beloved film, “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore”; and in the FX on Hulu historical series “Mrs. America” (2020).But although the parts and the budgets keep getting bigger, the roles are still the kind she loves to play: real women, wrinkles, curves and all.“A lot of women out there look like me,” Lynskey said of Shauna’s come-as-you-are appearance. “That was really important to me.”In an interview, she discussed her favorite fan theories, Shauna’s uncanny resolve and the one thing she told the writers her character would never do. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.First things first: Where does Shauna find the resolve to chop up her lover’s body in a bathtub? We even see it when she’s in the wilderness in high school, volunteering to slit the deer’s throat.I’m hoping that we meet members of her family so we can see why she is who she is. She seems like a completely self-sufficient person even before she’s stranded in this situation. I think there’s something inside her that’s a little bit scary even to her, but it feels like the most honest part of herself.It’s not just young Shauna who butchers animals — as an adult, she guts a rabbit in the kitchen. Are you squeamish when it comes to blood?I’m a vegetarian — I haven’t eaten meat since I was 10 years old. I didn’t want to have to do that with a real rabbit, so they made me this crazy prop rabbit — it was all magnets, sticking pieces together. It looked so real!How else are you like and not like Shauna?She’s able to switch into a cold, calculating veneer that I don’t know if I have — I guess I must, because it can come out of me. But she’s also someone who has a great capacity for love, so we’re alike in that way. She’s a lot more confident than I am, but she still has moments of self-doubt, which can lead her to make some of her biggest mistakes.What about when it comes to survival skills?If I’m going anywhere, I have to read every single TripAdvisor and Yelp review just to make sure the hotel is going to be as nice as I need it to be. I’m very particular, very princess-y. When I was a child, I went to nature camp for a few days, and the entire thing was torture. At the end of it, everyone in the class had to write a letter to the person who impressed them the most, and I got every letter because people were like: “You got through it. You cried the entire time, but somehow, you did it.”The director Ariel Kleiman with Lynskey and Peter Gadiot during production of the series. Gadiot plays Shauna’s lover, whose affair with her becomes complicated by a kitchen knife. Michael Courtney/ShowtimeLet’s talk about Jeff (Warren Kole). Why does Shauna stay with him?Before the wilderness, there was chemistry, and they really liked each other, but Shauna felt like it was temporary. And then she came back from this experience with a ton of survivor’s guilt. But she’s not dealing with any of it — she’s just stuffing it all down, and she feels like the responsible thing to do is to now marry Jeff. She’s scared to look too closely at “Who is this person I’m with?” in case she has to do something difficult. It’s a similar situation with Adam [the former lover in the bathtub, played by Peter Gadiot], where she just kind of jumps into things. She’s so scared of finding out something she doesn’t want to know that she just lets things happen to her.How much did you know about Shauna’s character going into the series?The writers had told me what happened to Jackie [Ella Purnell], because when she started appearing in front of me in flashbacks, I said I needed to know specifics. And I knew the trajectory of the Adam relationship. I knew the trajectory of the Jeff relationship and that he was the blackmailer. I think sometimes writers are scared that if an actor has all the information, they’re going to give things away in their performance, but it’s helpful for me to have so I can do something layered that’s fun for people to go back and watch.Such as?When Jeff and I are driving back from brunch with Jackie’s parents [in Episode 6], we’re talking about Jackie, and I say, “Do you wish you had ended up with her?” And he says, “No, I was just the high school boyfriend.” We’d never had a conversation about that, and that’s something he knew Jackie had said because he read Shauna’s journals. And so I was able to react to that moment like, That’s a bit interesting. I don’t know why he said that or how he knows that.To clarify, Jackie is for sure dead — she’s not pulling a Van?As far as I know. I don’t see how she comes back from [freezing to death]. [Laughs.] And I think Ella’s contract was always just a year.A slew of fan theories about Shauna have cropped up on social media. Do you have any favorites?It was so interesting to me that nobody was like, “What if Adam just likes her?” Part of it is that it’s a mystery show, and he’s a suspicious character. And part of it is that it’s an unconventional relationship where he’s more conventionally attractive than me, he’s younger than me, he’s thinner than me. So it’s very hard for people to accept that that might just be a relationship that they’re witnessing. And then there were some theories that were just so nuts — so many people were like, “He’s Shauna’s wilderness baby.” I wish I could remember all the crazy ones. “He’s Jackie” was a funny one.What kind of input do you have into your character?It’s not often, but there are times when I read something and am just like, “This doesn’t feel real to me.” When I was about to go on a date with Adam, they had me stealing a pair of my daughter’s underwear — like a thong — to wear. And I just was like, “Guys, first of all, as a mother, no.” That’s so gross. I know that Shauna doesn’t have boundaries, but that’s, like, a step too far. And, realistically, they wouldn’t fit me. There’s no woman in the world that’s going to watch that scene and be like, “I believe that she’s comfortably wearing those underpants.” But they’re very good about listening to me!Have they told you anything about Season 2?I know they haven’t even gotten into the writers’ room yet, so I want to give them a minute. But I definitely want to ask questions. I really think I probably drive them crazy. More