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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 5 Recap: Destructive Secrets

    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 onAdult 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? More

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    How Two ‘Yellowjackets’ Actresses Created the Same Character, Decades Apart

    In sharing a role on the Showtime series, Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher took cues from each other about never going for the obvious choice.Juliette Lewis: I first met Sophie in a big office building in Burbank before we shot the pilot [for the TV series “Yellowjackets”]. We were both like, “Oh, it’s you!” She plays a younger version of our character, Natalie, so she studied what I was doing, picking up my heaviness on set. The character is like a loaded weapon — there’s the possibility of danger at any time. Not every actor her age can make you feel that. I had that quality early on — one thing I was recognized for because of “Natural Born Killers” [the 1994 film in which Lewis played a violent fugitive] was that I could scare you. Similarly, Sophie carries herself as a rare bird because she can’t help it.culture banner More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 4 Recap: Hunter/Gatherer

    Teen Lottie goes out in search of prey as her allies back at the cabin become more and more like followers.Season 2, Episode 4: ‘Old Wounds’There’s a lot of driving in this week’s episode of “Yellowjackets.” The adult characters are on the road. Misty and Walter are searching for Natalie and the “purple people,” who they assume have taken her hostage. Shauna takes her daughter, Callie, into the middle of nowhere where she confesses the full extent of her crimes. Natalie sets out with Lisa (Nicole Maines), a member of Lottie’s group, with the ostensible goal of selling honey. And then there’s Taissa, who empties her gas tank on the way to an unknown destination. She hitchhikes the rest of the way there thanks to a kindly trucker.But all of these journeys end not in horror — as is typical in this show — but in something that maybe comes close to solace. Misty and Walter don’t spend the night together, but a montage showing them getting ready for bed indicates just how simpatico they are in their precise routines. There’s a moment when they both seem to consider reaching out before settling into their pillows.Shauna’s family is more stable than it has ever been once she tells Callie everything. Instead of recoiling at her mom’s confession of murder, Callie actually seems to trust her parents again.At the same time, Natalie realizes that she actually understands Lisa, a girl she previously stabbed with a fork. They have both been depressed and suicidal, and they end their day sharing a drink at a bar with Lisa’s pet fish, stolen from her overly critical mother’s house.And Taissa? Well, Taissa ends up in front of a new but familiar face: Adult Van (Lauren Ambrose). “Tai?” she says incredulously from behind the counter at a retro video store, her hair and scars unmistakable. “Hey, Van,” Taissa responds, hesitant, almost a little ashamed.The arrival of Ambrose has been one of the most eagerly anticipated aspects of the season, in part because Ambrose, best known for “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Six Feet Under,” seemed like perfect casting, given her red hair, her 1990s cred and her perfect deployment of sarcasm. We don’t get much of her here, but it’s a relief when Taissa’s trek leads to this cozy-seeming L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly shop.There’s a hope too that the arrival of Ambrose’s Van will help illuminate some of what’s going on with Tai, in both the past and the present. At this point, her story line has been reliant more on creepy vibes than on concrete progress. Introducing her old girlfriend may give us a better picture of what’s going on inside Tai’s head.Back in the wilderness in the 1990s, Tai’s instincts also lead to the return of another character: Javi. While Natalie and Lottie are embarking on their hunting competition — more on that shortly — Van cajoles Tai to keep searching for trees that bear the mark of the mysterious symbol that is plaguing (or helping) the survivors. Their investigation leads them to a bizarrely melted patch of snow, and then, out of nowhere, Javi appears darting through the forest. They grab him and bring him back to the cabin, where he is disoriented and unable to recognize his older brother, Travis.It’s a celebration tinged with suspicion. Travis starts to suspect that Natalie fooled him about Javi’s death, while Van tries to convince Tai of her own role in saving the younger boy. “There is something deep inside of you that is connected to all of this,” Van says, while Tai looks scared and doubtful.Teen Van, despite her sardonic demeanor, has become a true believer. She first bought into Lottie’s mysticism, and now she is trying to convince Tai and the rest of the girls of Tai’s potentially magical qualities. In the present, Tai has seemingly gone to Van for help, but, in the past, Van coaxes her to darker and darker places. Their dynamic has whiffs of toxicity.That sourness is seeping into all of the interactions in the cabin as some of the Yellowjackets look for meaning in their desolate lives. Mari (Alexa Barajas), for instance, has made Lottie the center of her entire belief system. In her mind, Lottie is the one who has been keeping them alive. Lottie slew the bear at the end of Season 1. Lottie embroidered the symbol onto Shauna’s baby blanket, which in Mari’s view resulted in that mass starling death, and therefore in more food. To Mari, Natalie’s skepticism toward Lottie is hindering their survival: When Natalie doesn’t accept Lottie’s blessing when she goes on a hunt, she is decreasing the likelihood of finding sustenance.So Natalie proposes a contest: She will compete versus Lottie for who can find food first. There are no winners. Natalie stumbles upon a frozen moose in the lake and runs back to get help, but the moose disappears into the icy water when the gang tries to dislodge it. Lottie, meanwhile, almost dies of hypothermia alone.Neither of the Lotties seem as sure of themselves as they once appeared — or as their followers are wont to believe they are. After ’90s Lottie sets out on her hunt, she finds one of the symbols carved into a tree. Placing her hand on it, she tries to connect with her surroundings. She gets nothing and is frustrated. Later, finding herself in front of the shrine where she laid the bear heart last season, she hesitantly cuts open her palm, hoping the blood will yield something.Again nothing, no food. Instead, she is led to a hallucination of Laura Lee’s plane, which takes her into a fantasy of a mall where her teammates gather and eat Chinese takeout as if nothing ever went wrong.Adult Lottie knows not to trust these visions. She goes to her psychiatrist to ask for an increase in her medication so that the visions might stop. But her regular doctor isn’t there, and this unfamiliar woman challenges her request. “I would urge you to reframe the way you are thinking about these visions,” she says. “The stress of constantly pushing them away could potentially cause more to surface. So maybe ask yourself: What do you think they are trying to tell you?”Lottie responds firmly. “Nothing,” she says. “Because they’re not real.”Does she really believe that? Or is that what she is telling herself? Later, she kneels by a tree stump and once again slices open her hand, letting the blood drip and asking, “Can this just be enough?” Last week she heard a voice say, “Il veut de sang,” which translates as “He wants blood” in French. Now she is giving “him” what he wants.As the other grown up Yellowjackets tentatively open up their circles and reach out for help, Lottie is retreating into herself. She knows the results will most likely be disastrous.More to chew onNot sure how Van’s business, called “While You Were Streaming,” stays afloat, but I’m all for the revival of physical media.Once again, a banger of a music cue: Misty’s and Walter’s nighty night routines are set to Sparks’s “Angst in My Pants”Akilah (Nia Sondaya) found a cute little mouse friend in the cabin, and I am almost positive something terrible will happen to that creature before the season is up.Lottie and Laura Lee were friends, yes, but I can’t help but think that there’s some other reason Laura Lee keeps showing up in her visions. I’m just not sure what it is yet.I’m not fully grossed out by Walter’s ham, egg, syrup and mustard taco. What does that say about me?I always appreciate a “Starlight Express” burn. Thank you, Misty. More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: Hunger Games

    Adult Shauna tries to fill the gaping hole inside. Teen Misty gives an interesting monologue.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Digestif’This week’s episode of “Yellowjackets” is a tale of two monologues.First, we have adult Shauna, pointing a gun at a carjacker to get her minivan back. “Have you ever peeled the skin off a human corpse?” she asks. “It’s not as easy as you might think. It’s really stuck on us, skin.”As she speaks, her eyes blaze with hunger. Maybe not quite a hunger for flesh, but the memory of that hunger is being funneled into her desire for something thrilling in her current life. She wants to kill, even if she doesn’t want to eat. “My hand wasn’t shaking because I was afraid,” she explains, countering the man’s earlier assumptions. “It was shaking because of how badly I wanted to do this.”Melanie Lynskey is phenomenal in the scene, her face a mixture of excitement and arousal. You can just about see the saliva forming around her lips as she contemplates (or resists) pulling the trigger. It’s not about the minivan or her daughter’s childhood toy inside. She has a blood lust. The threat is the closest she can come to getting what will satisfy her.And then there’s young Misty, in the woods, performing at Shauna’s depressing, post-cannibalism baby shower. Having tasted (and digested) the forbidden flesh, she, too, is looking for another way to fill her emptiness. Encouraged by her new friend Crystal, Misty decides to give Shauna the gift of theater, doing her best Sally Field in “Steel Magnolias” for her skeptical teammates.It’s a weird choice. “Did she really choose a scene about a dead daughter?” Tai wonders out loud. Misty squeals: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I can jog all the way to Texas and back but my daughter can’t,” invoking the sorrow of a woman who lost her child. Despite the initial skepticism, by the time Misty finishes, the other girls erupt in applause. Misty smiles. She is also being satiated in a way. Finally, she is getting more of that attention she so desires.Cleverly titled “Digestif,” this episode is shockingly less about the guilt of consuming Jackie’s corpse than one might think. Other than Taissa, who ate while technically asleep, the rest of the survivors have grimly come to terms with their actions. Natalie elects to bring what’s left of Jackie to the plane so she can be buried with the crash victims when the ground thaws. In her weariness, Natalie actually envies Jackie — “Way to make everyone jealous of you one last time,” she says — who will not have to endure the rest of the winter.There’s a bit of awkward discomfort regarding their cannibalism among the others, but also satisfaction. Misty and Crystal gab about how it wasn’t all that bad, and Crystal — that oddball — confesses it wasn’t the first time she had eaten a person. “I actually absorbed my identical twin in the womb,” she says. These two are giddy as if they had just shoplifted from the mall. The transgression is exciting rather than disturbing.The one person who remains hungry is Coach Scott, a.k.a. Ben, who didn’t partake and has now entered a fugue state, where he relives memories, or perhaps near-memories, of his time with an ex-boyfriend. At first, these scenes seem like straight flashbacks. Ben is resistant to committing to a relationship with Paul (​​François Arnaud) for fear of being outed. “You always say those girls are vicious little monsters,” Paul says, challenging Ben’s desire to stay with the team. Little did either of them know just how vicious the girls could be.But the more these sequences progress, the more they begin to seem like an alternate timeline, with Ben envisioning what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten on that plane. The moments between Ben and Paul are a little static. They feel like they come from another show, in which the dialogue and the actions are blunter. I started to wonder if that was an intentional choice by the showrunners. Before Ben descends into these fantasy memories, we see and hear the fuzz and sound of vintage TV static. He’s playing back these scenes as if rewinding a VCR. They have the schmaltz of a prime-time soap or a cheesy movie.Even just three hours into the new season, we can start to divide the Yellowjackets into who is aware of their own reality and who is not. Taissa — in the past and in the present — is not. In the ’90s, she follows the lead of the “man with no eyes” into the wilderness at night, not in possession of her own body. The current day Taissa is feeling that same force taking hold. With her wife in the hospital after the car accident Taissa caused, the shadow self is growing stronger, appearing in a bathroom mirror, contorting Taissa’s face.Something similar is happening to grown-up Lottie, who runs an entire enterprise on being in touch with one’s emotions but finds herself getting lost in her own head. Her latest hallucination comes courtesy of the bees she keeps on her commune. She has a vision of these creatures as dead, their hive filled with bloody honey. Lottie clearly identifies with the queen bee, and now she is besieged by an image of the hive’s demise, one that may foretell her own. She hears a voice say what sounds like “Il veut de sang,” French for “He wants blood,” before snapping out of the hallucination.On the other side of the spectrum are Shauna and Misty. Shauna is in full control of her faculties when she takes it upon herself to reclaim her family’s car, and Misty is still on the hunt for Natalie, now ensconced with Lottie. Now, however, Misty has an accomplice. Meet the brilliantly named Walter Tattersall, played by Elijah Wood, another message web sleuth who offers to help Misty in her investigation.Their interrogation of the doltish Randy (Jeff Holman) leads to some amusing “Cyrano”-like high jinks — even though Misty detests “Cyrano” — and Walter seems pleasant enough. Still, it’s hard to say whether he can be trusted. He comes clean, explaining that he didn’t bring his mother to the nursing home in order get Misty’s attention. Instead, he just recruited a random old lady. Misty is befuddled.“Maybe I’m just a bored Moriarty looking for his Sherlock,” he says.Wood has such an easy, cheery demeanor that you almost think he meant to say Watson, Sherlock’s partner. But no, he invokes Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest foe. What is his game plan here? Or is “Moriarty” actually the perfect reference for the kind of person who performs a monologue about a dead daughter at a baby shower?More to chew on:Jeff is so wonderfully characterized as a huge dork. He thinks strawberry lube is for “bisexuals and Goths.” His idea of a spontaneous trip is to go to Colonial Williamsburg and churn butter. Oh Jeff, you silly, naïve loser.Once again, this show is expertly deploying Tori Amos. This time it’s “Bells for Her,” a song about the dissolution of a female friendship. “Can’t stop what’s coming,” Amos sings. “Can’t stop what’s on its way.”The symbol the Yellowjackets find in the woods is getting quite a workout. In the ’90s, Taissa is drawn to it in her sleep, finding it carved into a tree. In the present, she draws it on her wife. Past Lottie embroiders it on a baby blanket for Shauna, which may or may not have triggered a mass bird death around their cabin. Are we getting closer to finding out who or what it is?Travis determines that Ben is acting “weird.” At risk of sounding like a teenager: Duh, dude. More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Shows Us the Teenage Girlhood We Were Hungry For

    In a cabin in the wilderness, a group of starving teenage girls, a teenage boy and one adult man wake to an unfamiliar smell. Their noses twitching in the air, they leave their thin blankets and head out into the snowy wild in socks and insufficient clothes. Outside, their friend, whose body they tried to cremate last night, has turned into smoked meat. They surround her corpse, girl-shaped but foodlike, like a pig from the barbecue pit. One of the girls stands near the charred flesh, knife in hand. “She wants us to,” she says. A few moments later, the feast begins.Thus “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s hit drama, answered, in the second episode of its second season, the question teased throughout its first: What and whom are these girls going to eat? Named for a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian Rockies en route to the 1996 national championships, “Yellowjackets” toggles between the team’s 19-month sojourn in the wilderness and the present day, when the surviving members struggle with the aftereffects of what happened to them. The show has become a sensation, garnering five million viewers per week, making it Showtime’s second-most-streamed show ever. In addition to the standard BuzzFeed meme roundups, the show has spawned exuberant fan fiction and forums that include suggested paper topics (“ ‘Yellowjackets’: Yellow Wallpaper for the 21st Century”) and frenzied theories about what, exactly, the Yellowjackets did in the woods.Plot mysteries abound: What happened to the hunter who died in the cabin where they shelter? Is there a malevolent spirit in the woods, and will it follow the girls to safety? But the show also grapples with questions of a more existential tenor, making it catnip for a demographic aging out of youth and into middle age, performing the excavations and re-evaluations that accompany midlife. Do people ever really change? Does trauma echo forever?As Showtime teased the second season (which began streaming in late March) and the internet forums buzzed with anticipation for the revelations promised therein, I headed to the frigid north to see for myself. The sky over British Columbia was ashen and spitting indifferent snow as I navigated the slush to the Vancouver soundstage where much of the show was filmed. On the way to the set, I listened to the official “Yellowjackets” playlist, groaning with pleasure as one after another 1990s jam issued forth. I was vibrating with excitement.I first came to the show as an exhausted mother with a free Showtime trial, repulsed and compelled by the unforgettable first scene of the pilot, written by the creators (and spouses) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and directed by Karyn Kusama. In it, a girl runs barefoot through the snow in a filmy nightie, blood in her tracks, until she falls into a pit and is impaled by sharpened sticks. Later, figures shrouded in animal pelts string her up naked and bleed her dry. It’s one of the most gruesome opening sequences I’ve ever seen on television, but “Yellowjackets” doesn’t sustain the wild pitch. One of the show’s winning qualities is the way it juxtaposes brutal violence with familiar scenes of soccer practice, futile groping in frilly bedrooms and the malaise of middle age, all against the soundtrack of the ’90s.Two hours and a rapid PCR test later, I sat in the dark of a tent, watching as two young women formed a kind of Pietà in a pool of warm yellow lamplight. One, Courtney Eaton, playing the character Lottie with eerie poise, lay on her side in a nest of blankets. The other, Sammi Hanratty, portraying the marvelously weird Misty, knelt behind, her frizzy blond hair aglow, bringing unspeakable news from beyond the cabin’s walls. Karyn Kusama was behind the camera, making minute, courteous corrections to the angles and expressions of the actors’ pliant faces over the course of two scenes. The spoilers fell thick as the manufactured Canadian snow blanketing the adjacent stage. I was watching the season finale unfold in real time.‘We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world.’It was the last few days of shooting, and many of the primary executives were also on hand: the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco, and the producer Drew Comins. Comins was immediately identifiable as the show’s hype man; “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” was his cheerful greeting when we were introduced. They gathered together in the tent to watch the shoot. “Karyn loves to live in the painting,” someone murmured, seeing the same Pietà in the light of the lamps.Kusama joined us for a moment between shots. Lately, she has enjoyed vindication following the commercial flop and subsequent cult ascension of her 2009 film, “Jennifer’s Body” (another representation of women doing upsetting things). I asked her about something she said in a previous interview, about the ongoingness of TV and the way it allowed celebrated characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper to not change — to occupy the uneasy Dantean position of being midway through the journey of life, but without Dante’s final ascent up to virtue and improvement. “Yellowjackets” claims its own form of ongoingness, giving female characters the same opportunities to flail in midlife, while anchoring them to a traumatic formative experience that made them heroes, of a sort, in their own lives. Kusama took on an oracular aspect in the dark as she spoke. “Any marginalized psyche is often positioned as an object, not a subject,” she said. The Yellowjackets “are characters who got through most of high school, learning that hard terrible lesson in female adolescence, that you’re not the subject of your own story.”The first episodes of the first season established this truth with a light touch, showing the girls leaving something nasty behind them: the guys yelling “Show us your tits,” the mean girls who prank call, alcoholic mothers, violent fathers. After the crash, the problem is simply the Yellowjackets, trying to survive. It’s the perfect canvas for Kusama, who was drawn to the idea of “living completely in your appetites and starvation.” Kusama believes questions of appetite “are very rich ideas for women: being hungry, being fed, feeding each other.” For her the show conveys “a very pure relationship to the metaphor,” and indeed these were the subjects of the day’s scenes, about which I now possessed sinister knowledge.When Kusama, who is also an executive producer, first met with Lyle and Nickerson to discuss the pilot, she likened it to a war story. She told me that the real wilderness of the show is “female interiority, female experience, female transformation and the presence of a kind of unchangeable chaos in women,” a delicious phrase. “It is progress to see ourselves change,” she said, “but the reality of many people’s lives is that the patterns we learn early are the patterns we enact and re-enact for years to come.” Part of the show’s inquiry, she said in the darkness, is “to what degree is positive change possible,” given that there is “very real anguish in their past.”As the sounds of activity outside the tent picked up and it was clear our time would soon come to an end, I asked Kusama about the challenge of exploitation that invariably lives in a show about cannibal teenage girls. “Yellowjackets” is in some ways a quintessential Dead Girl show, an idea explored by the writer Alice Bolin in her book on the subject to account for shows like “True Detective” and “Twin Peaks.” These mysteries are structured around beautiful, dead white girls and “the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with them. In “Yellowjackets,” it is the audience who steps into the inspector’s role, only to find our voyeurism thwarted, at least most of the time, by a conscientious editorial sensibility. It’s a fundamental conundrum of storytelling, Kusama said, “the urge to entertain and engage versus the urge to confront and provoke.” She approached her episodes with a firm rule: “None of this is a joke,” she told herself and her colleagues. It was imperative for her to treat these characters “with some degree of gravity, because otherwise I really wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”I walked through the extant sets — a remarkable recreation of the Canadian forest replete with the scent of real (salvaged) pine trees dangling from the rafters — past rooms of stacked up crates with labels like “antlers” and “fur.” I followed Lyle, Nickerson and Lisco to the warren of modular offices tucked above the soundstages. I admired Lyle’s outfit as we walked, an array of ’90s layers befitting the “Yellowjackets” universe: a leopard cardigan, a red animal-print skirt, black tights, boots. It was such a good outfit that I forgot to look at the men.We took off our masks and sat in a circle. Trucks bearing the material of filmmaking rumbled around the buildings on the roads below the window. I raised the topic of covertly dignified treatment of teenage girls. Lyle and Nickerson, who previously wrote for “Narcos,” Netflix’s drama about the life and death of Pablo Escobar, knew that they wanted to make a show about women. “But we didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” Lyle said. “So we were like, ‘Well, I guess we can drop them into the wilderness in a plane crash and see what happens.’” For Nickerson, the frame was less important than the development of the characters, to give them “the dignity of a point of view” and let them proceed from there.When I suggested that the first season was a bit of a bait and switch, because audiences drawn in by the cannibalistic first episode will find all kinds of other complex human dramas playing out, Lyle agreed. “That slightly salacious or plot-driven outset to the story with the plane crash and the cannibalism,” she said, is “a little bit of a Trojan horse to just make you care about these women.” She went on, “It’s interesting that you almost need something like that to tell a story about women that is hopefully nuanced and complicated.”Lisco, who previously worked on hits like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Halt and Catch Fire” and came on as a showrunner after Lyle and Nickerson sold “Yellowjackets,” spoke to the show’s juxtapositions as its strengths, its blend of the gruesome “reality of what they’re going through with real comedy, because the bizarre incongruities of life are with us always.” He thought people longed, perhaps because of the pandemic, “to feel something and feel the totality and richness of their human experiences.”“Yellowjackets” does have a little something for everyone. There’s a fundamental humor in the show’s timing: one moment of grotesque violence in the past, one moment of mundanity in the present, contrasts à la “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad,” but with teenage girls doing the things, broadening the innate disconnect. Gliding brashly and mostly successfully among horror, buddy detective, melodrama and light camp, the show also achieves something that I can only describe as the sometime triumph of Prime Time over Prestige, the marriage of surreality and strong character development within the confines of fast-paced entertainment doled out a week a time. It harks back to the golden age of weird prime-time shows like “Twin Peaks” or “Lost,” which delighted, shocked, titillated and annoyed, but never in quite the way audiences expected.Like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another fan favorite that trucked in teenage-girl archetypes, “Yellowjackets” is occasionally quippy and self-referential. “Wow. I’ve never been in a French farce before,” says one doomed character when he hides from a husband in a bedroom closet. As adult Misty (Christina Ricci) prepares to kill a nosy reporter (long story), she ponders who might play her in a movie adaptation. “Who’s the one in that thing about those rich ladies that kill that guy?” she asks guilelessly, a nod to “Big Little Lies,” one reference to which Comins compared the show during pitch meetings. “Big Little Lies” disguised a searing portrait of abuse as a piece of gossamer lifestyle porn. “Yellowjackets” performs a similar trick: It sneaks a thoughtful excavation of teenage girlhood and middle-aged floundering into its genre pleasures.Toward the end of the day, I visited costumes, where Amy Parris, who like me is nearing 40, kept a stack of ancient magazines as reference material: Seventeen and Sassy and YM, which could have been mine. One magazine contains a photo of a teenage Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood — who joins the show this season as Walter, one of Misty’s fellow citizen detectives from the true-crime forums — together at the height of their early fame. It’s a potent reminder of the psychic resonance the show holds for someone who grew up with these referents. I read some headlines aloud: “A ballerina and her eating disorder.” “So you think you want a nose job? Read this first.” We briefly observed how nasty it was to be alive and teenage in the 1990s. And yet these nostalgic artifacts opened a yawning chasm of feeling. Perhaps the real resonance of the show is the age of its present-day characters — early 40s, just tipped into the zone of midlife where women have historically become invisible, a tendency that popular culture dances with and occasionally fights against.Retrospection is in the air. Younger millennials, apparently, are rewatching “Girls” in record numbers to parse the just-vanished particulars of their early 20s. Before “Yellowjackets,” I binged “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and was totally caught up in the backward excavation of its hapless middle-aged characters. I exchanged texts with my peers about the promised reappearance of Aidan on “And Just Like That,” an unheimlich but irresistible return to “Sex and the City,” a show that gave my generation a formative if deeply inaccurate picture of what our adulthood might hold. Cultural offerings like “Impeachment” or “I, Tonya” take up the specifics of the 1990s’ sensational moments and examine them in a new light. What a time, then, for both of the “Yellowjackets” story lines: its murderers’ row of former icons — Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, now Elijah Wood — playing middle-aged roles, as well as the opportunity to see those characters as their past selves, a vicarious simultaneity.The show takes the common awfulnesses of teenage girlhood in that era (which of course persist today, with their own temporal inflection) — the unsettling sexual experiences or outright assaults; the casual racism; homophobia and misogyny; Kate Moss languishing in her underwear — and discreetly moves them out of the way. A primary love story in the woods is a queer one; the romance between Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a loving and fully realized relationship from the jump. The only adult man present, the team’s coach, Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), is gay, and his period-appropriate terror of being outed is understood and neutralized by the empathetic perspicacity of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), who navigates her own halting romance with Travis (Kevin Alves), the only teenage boy in the cabin. Unlike the characters of “Euphoria,” whose goal seems to be to show as much pretend-under-age boob as possible, those in “Yellowjackets” have access to a form of fundamental self-respect and agency that many middle-aged women took years to attain. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy, too.There’s something fundamentally melancholy, though, about all this looking back. Toward the end of the first season, in a wilderness interlude, Van is attacked by wolves, her face torn open. Back at the cabin, the girls work together to hold her down while one draws a curved needle through her cheek to stitch the wound. In the next moment, we see 40-something Taissa (Tawny Cypress), now at Shauna’s modest New Jersey ranch house, where Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) makes up her teenage daughter’s bed, beneath a poster that reads “Keep Calm You Can Still Marry Harry.” The two old friends lie in bed, and Shauna muses about what would have happened had they not crashed, had she gone to Brown the way she planned, where she would “write amazing papers on Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf” and fall in love with a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy.” Taissa, meanwhile, describes a litany of successes that actually came to pass: Howard University, “a bunch of beautiful women,” “first string on the soccer team,” Columbia Law. But achieving a dream can also become ash in the mouth. “Not a single one of those things felt real,” Taissa says. It was their time in the woods, when everything was terrible and vivid and somehow fundamental — and cheeks were stitched with twine — when feeling and reality were truly one.Or at least that’s what the show wants us to think at first. That’s certainly how the characters feel in the early episodes, quietly assenting to the fate suggested in their bad marriages, puzzling children and unfulfilling jobs. But then the gang gets back together, and their efforts to keep their shared trauma among them amount to a kind of quest. Their days become unpredictable and enlivened again. At some point, viewers sense that the women approach their present-day escapades with the same ferocity they brought to their exploits in the wilderness.From some angles, this vicarious pleasure might confirm our worst suspicions that for women, middle age signals the decline after the peak. But the notion of a miserable midlife turns out to be another bait and switch. “Yellowjackets,” then, becomes a deliciously macabre play on the midlife crisis. Certainly, healing and redemption appear to fall outside the boundaries of a “Yellowjackets” universe. So, like other women before them, these restless heroines begin to make the most of the diversions life finds for them, grim as their circumstances might be: sex, camaraderie, adventure and wild fun.Source images for opening artwork: Showtime, the New York Public Library, Russell Lee via the New York Public Library.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” which was a 2018 National Book Foundation “Five Under 35” honoree. Her novel “Mobility” is set to be published in August. Sarah Palmer is an artist, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition, “The Delirious Sun,” at Mrs. gallery in Maspeth, is on display until May 6. More

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

    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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    Lauren Ambrose Just Wants to Go to French Clown School

    The actress, who is joining the cast of “Yellowjackets,” talks about British sitcoms, the “On Being” podcast and gardening at night.“What creature is that?” Lauren Ambrose asked, craning her neck during a video interview from her home in the Berkshires. “I see this, like, crazy hawk sitting on a tree outside my window. It just caught my eye.”The setting was fitting, since Ambrose is about to become bonded with, and haunted by, the natural world. Joining the cast of “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s thriller about a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness and pushed to the extremes, she plays the adult version of Van, short for Vanessa, one of the lucky and savvy few to make it to middle age.Ambrose, who also stars in the Apple TV+ series “Servant,” was excited by the opportunity to help create a character (played in her teenage years by Liv Hewson) and by the women she said she’s grown up watching.“I love looking at the call sheet and seeing that the top chunk is all of these incredible women who I’ve admired and whose careers I’ve followed — who’ve influenced me so much as actors,” she said.“I’ve also never had the experience of being the fan of something and then going in and joining it,” Ambrose added.Before the show kicks off its second season on Sunday, she talked about what moves and comforts her, including crying at the French circus, her love of gardening and the podcast that puts her at ease. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment’There’s this guy Michael Lipson who’s one of the smartest men alive — a true sage. He worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and worked at Harlem Hospital in the pediatric AIDS unit. He’s a scholar and a teacher and he wrote this book “Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment,” which synthesizes his lifetime of wisdom and learning. It’s sort of this miraculous little thing. It’ll fill you.2Domi and JD BeckThey’re both young, both prodigies. My son just turned 16 and he’s a very serious jazz guitar player. We had a blast at their concert. In this attention economy, what I love about them is to see young people who have obviously logged so much practice. And that they’re making the music they want to make.3‘The Trip’This British sitcom gives me a feeling of being backstage or being at the bar after the play. I love it. It’s got everything I want. It’s got impressions and big ideas and ego. The egoism of being an actor is wonderful to laugh at. And it’s just painful and funny and sublime. There are people in my life who I speak to almost exclusively in lines from “The Trip.”4Cirque D’HiverWe were just in Paris and went to the French circus, and it was the best thing we did. The band was unbelievable, the acts were unbelievable. The clowning was, like, the greatest I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m such a nut, I was the only one there crying because I was so moved by the clowns, who are such geniuses in their silent storytelling. I’m like, I have to go to French clown school. Basically, it’s all I want to do, to be a clown in the French circus.5GardeningIt’s a big part of my life, and of my year. There were times last year while I was working on “Servant” when I was racing home and planting seeds with a headlamp at night. I was like, I’ve got to get this stuff in! It’s been a humbling venture, maybe the most humbling there is. Just watching the garden change throughout the seasons is an amazing thing. That first day when you get salad is kind of a holy day because there’s really nothing like it. It’s like a whole other food, salad from the garden.6Krista TippettI basically can’t imagine my life without “On Being.” She’s such an inspiration to me, and I love that her brand of journalism, her brand of interviewing, is a conversation. Krista holds the space and lets there be silences. For me, with traveling for work, it’s been really important. I get really carsick, and sometimes I’ll play the same episode over and over and let it drift in and out of my consciousness.7Children’s BooksOur kids are a little older now — 10 and 16 — but there are books that we’ve read thousands of times in our house. Some of them are so deeply in our DNA that sometimes we speak in children’s books, to the point where we have a game of who can guess what book that’s from? “Pippi Longstocking” by Astrid Lindgren, “Frog and Toad” by Arnold Lobel, “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak — these are essential in our family, not only the words but the imagery as well.8The Center for Humane TechnologyThe people behind this organization have an optimism that we can have a healthier relationship as a society to tech, which can be unhealthy and destructive to people’s lives and democracies. I am just so grateful for the work that they’re doing, especially as a mother of a teenager and a soon-to-be teenager.9Grateful LivingAs much as I eschew technology, there are some pretty great things out there. The top is grateful.org, which was started by an Austrian monk who purports that gratitude and noticing all of the small, tiny moments is the key to life. There are all kinds of wonderful practices and videos and blessings and mediations. A morning ritual for me, or as close to one as there is, is looking at the word for the day. It’s one of the great interweb experiences.10CatsWe’ve always had cats; they’ve taught my children and me gentleness. I love that a little tiny house cat has the exact same behaviors as a lion or tiger. I love the idea of living with a predator. And they’re just so funny. Each cat has such a distinct personality. I’m so grateful that life on earth includes the ability to inhabit the world with kitty cats. More

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    Melanie Lynskey on That Chilling ‘Yellowjackets’ Finale

    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