Season 1 of Yellowjackets, which wrapped on Jan. 16, is now available on Showtime. Below is a spoiler-free review.
It’s always been the challenge of a new TV series with an excellent pilot to live up to the promise of its introduction. Reality is that for a myriad of reasons, it’s more common to get diminishing returns and for the series to just disappear into the ratings mist. However, the Showtime original Yellowjackets has bucked the trend by only getting stronger throughout its 10-episode season. It’s earned its glowing critical accolades and audience word-of-mouth since its November premiere because it has masterfully paced out its mysteries within two timelines and leaned on its remarkable ensemble of actors to invest us in the shocking, heartbreaking, and downright bizarre lives of the Yellowjackets championship girls’ soccer team of 1996.
Executive producers Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and Jonathan Lisco prove that their high-concept premise has legs by their second episode, as they take the momentum of the deftly written and perfectly paced pilot, and continue it forward with their clever non-linear storytelling. Where Season 1 of The Witcher was hampered by the technique, this series proves that dense, non-linear storytelling can be relatively easy to track and engagingly enigmatic with careful construction. In fact, Yellowjackets makes it a formula feature of the show, using the past to inform the future, and vice versa.
The organic cross-cutting of narratives allows the writers to explore major themes or vital character traits over the decades, with stories passing the proverbial baton between actors embodying the same character in 1996 or 2021. Episodes are built around revealing the inherent truths of the characters, such as when young Taissa’s (Jasmin Savoy Brown) blunt leadership and controlling nature becomes clear as she coerces the uncertain survivors to hike together to find a water source. That ability to get her way continues into adulthood as older Taissa (Tawny Cypress) hijacks her peaceful family life to run as a candidate in an intrusive and all consuming Senate race.
Almost all of the core cast gets the same micro attention to detail as the stakes of the past peel back their true natures. That in turn allows us to, throughout the season, stitch together profiles of all of the characters, observing what traits have carried through over time and inversely, how they’ve exponentially changed coming out the other end of such a harrowing survival experience.
What’s also refreshing about the series is that the characters aren’t reduced to easy tropes. Sure, there are petty conflicts and social pecking order-based rivalries amongst the girls in the 1996 stories. But each character is also robustly expanded beyond the cliche and everyone is given the respect and depth of being portrayed as many things. The socially awkward Misty (Sammi Hanratty), for example, could just be the reductive weirdo who irritates everyone. Instead, Misty is also well read, sometimes heroic, and almost Machiavellian in divining the paths to her desires in both her youth and adulthood. Christina Ricci then carries that through into Misty’s now boring adulthood working at a senior living facility. The chipper surface remains, but for the survivors who know her better, she remains the ruthless “go-to gal” when it comes to getting things done.
Yellowjackets also manages to balance the mundane with a myriad of involving mysteries. The showrunners wisely establish just the right amount of unsettling questions about their post-crash environments and personalities to amp up the tension. They tease bad juju permeating the place that becomes their new home in the woods, and that team members like Lottie (Courtney Eaton), Laura Lee (Jane Widdop), and Tai might be conduits to something beyond. But nothing is pushed to be so high concept that the grounded plausibility of the show is sacrificed. In fact, everything spooky, from the runes littering the wilderness of the crash site to Tai’s generational connection to a female figure that has appeared to the women in her family, are equally presented with answers that could be anchored in the pragmatic, or the unknown.
And for everything else, like where the plane actually crash-landed, or exactly who made it out alive to be rescued, is cleverly hidden inside the pieces of story we have yet to see. The vignette nature of the flashbacks, and to a degree in the very focused present, assures that the writers can use our assumptions against us as they slowly drip-feed us answers throughout the season, when it best serves the overall story. That approach makes for a lot of “lean in” viewing, as we’re rewarded for paying attention to details within a frame or cataloging subtle character moments that pay off in smart ways.
There’s plenty of sudsy storytelling that is engaging too. From adult Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) dysfunctional marriage to Jeff (Warren Kole) and her temptation to cheat with a handsome stranger, Adam (Peter Gadiot), to adult Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) reckless relationship with sobriety that keeps her detached from emotional commitments, and the ignominy of high school reunions, there’s plenty of relatable, everyday storytelling to flesh out the characters in less fraught ways.
In fact, some of the best episodes of the season are the ones that frame the horrors of the crash with the horrors of everyday life and blend them together into something unexpected. Episode 6, "Saints," portrays a medical procedure in a way that television rarely ever does, and in a way that makes an impact that speaks to our times that maybe no other show could. The penultimate episode of the season, "Doomcoming," turns the sweet, teenage rite-of-passage prom experience into something altogether terrifying and transformative. And Episode 8, "Flight of the Bumblebee," takes a maligned TV trope and turns it on its head, setting the stage for a far more impactful storyline.
By the end of “Doomcoming,” it’s clear that there are many questions still left to answer. The show has only just sketched out the dynamics that will lead to the terrifying, faceless cannibalistic ritual introduced in the pilot episode, and that puts a lot of pressure on the finale to at least meet the oversized audience expectations. Gratefully, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” written by Lyle and Nickerson and directed by Eduardo Sánchez (The Blair Witch Project), rises to the occasion by making the events in 1996 and in 2021 feel equally vital. The episode answers some major questions in the past while ushering in some very unexpected new conundrums for adult Taissa, Shauna, Misty, and Natalie. The pathway for Season 2 clarifies itself and does what all great first seasons should: it leaves you wanting more.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3rpDW4L
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