Welllll…the cabin coulda been built by this guy…
I know, I know, the cabin in Yellowjackets is no mere log cabin, it’s fairly modern construction with windows and shit.
I finished this today. It had been on my to-watch list for a while but I kept forgetting and S2 starting this weekend gave me the motivation.
I loved it. I love creepy weird horror things and dark comedy and I’m close enough to the 96 girls’ age that it just hits me like a ton of bricks of nostalgia. The “current” stuff does too with middle-aged mundane life, but the teen stuff moreso.
One can’t help but wonder how one would do if it were them. I would not do well. I didn’t like most teenage girls when I was one and being trapped like that is like… most of my nightmares piled into one creepy fucking cabin. I do think I would have had some better ideas than they had. Like do they have HELP or SOS spelled out with rocks or logs on the shore of the lake? Did they take all the reflective and shiny things and hang them on the lakeshore and the roof of the cabin and nearby trees? Make a really large clearing and always have a smoky fire going? A low flying plane might spot those things. And if there isn’t anything, how could anyone find them?
It seems like Misty might come up with something so sensible, but did she and keep it to herself to sabotage further any rescue plans? It seems right up her alley. I was reading that she didn’t destroy a locator beacon but the black box data recorder. Did she know the difference? If so, did she destroy the data on purpose because she did something to fuck with the plane? Did she douse Laura Lee’s teddy bear with something to make it slow ignite?
I like, but also am SO frustrated with, the fact that we only know for sure that 5 people made it out alive. We think another one did, but we don’t know how many more (if there are more) and who they might be. And the one we think might be alive might be a fake name situation until we get to see that person. I love a good mystery.
The showrunners have been as cagey about things like this as they have been about the NUMBER of teens/adults present in that cabin back in the 90s.
It’s a great cast, and I’m intrigued enough to want to keep watching—but to some extent I resent the manipulation involved in keeping so many things from the viewers. Enough with the teasing us about cannibalism, for example…that’s gotten really old.
We’ll see if this show goes down in TV history as a Lost clone (with all the attendant frustration and disgust), or as something more substantive.
I think it’s possible to keep up the various mysteries and loose ends vague for a while and keep the show compelling. BUT I have spent a lot of time thinking about if it fails. I didn’t watch Lost but that’s the kind of thing I was thinking about. The X-Files did keep up the mystery over many seasons to some success, some failure. I can’t see this show lasting that many years, 2 movies, and a reboot, however. So I’m worried that it’s all red herrings and manipulation instead of giving me just enough to keep me hooked.
You’re definitely not the only one!
(Lost burned a LOT of good will for episodic-television mysteries.)
Tell me about it! My username comes from the fact that I emerged from perpetual lurkerdom to actually sign up on the SDMB in Spring of 2010 and participate in the ‘Lost’ show discussion thread in its last season. As that final season limped to the end, my username became an apropos description for the show writers, who clearly were not going to land the ending.
Anyway, Mrs. solost and I enjoyed S.1 of Yellowjackets and are looking forward to watching S.2. I hope they have an intricate recap, because I read a Yellowjackets ‘catchup’ article on AVClub.com and was surprised by how many plot threads I had forgotten, or only dimly remembered.
General question, which I’ll spoiler to be safe: was a supernatural element to the horrible stuff happening to the girls definitely established? It seemed to me for much of S.1 that, other than the psychic ability of the one girl, which seemed to definitely be real, much of the other seemingly supernatural stuff could be explained away by other means.
Ha, missed the edit window, but I just noticed I had already asked the same question in Dec. '21 in this same thread that I just asked, about the supernatural element to the show, and had already been answered by several posters. 
I guess memory is the first to go (or second or third, I can’t remember).
I blame this show for the terrible nightmare I had last night, some kind of survivor scenario but without snow. At least I didn’t get killed or die by misadventure.
I really liked how the premiere is giving some deeper detail into smaller things, even if it was just a touch. Like how Jeff is reacting, what it was like when the survivors were found.
And as the resident Super-Tori-Amos fan, I was prepared for her music to finally show up (its absence in S1 was super conspicuous to me because she was what I listened to the most by far in 1996). I was not, however, prepared for the context. Oh boy, that was some deeper detail I did not need.
Holy crap, I’ve always seen that as “soloist”.
It is 2 min, 40 sec.
It’s OK, we all make mistakes like that, Darrell_Garrison.
Well, S2E2 went darker faster than I expected it to.
I don’t believe Lottie’s story.
I agree with you. We’re plainly meant to find her claims to be suspicious. (And the showrunners haven’t yet come clean on the ‘Lottie’s supposed supernatural powers’ plotline.)
I thought the Big Development was handled really badly—it violated both the basics of physics and the basics of psychology.
PHYSICS: Okay, I get that they were trying to depict ‘mass of snow puts out the main, likely-to-cremate flames, and leaves only the smaller, slow-cooking flames.’
But that bier, burning “slowly” all night from the middle out, certainly would have collapsed, dumping the mostly-frozen corpse onto the ground (uncooked).
PSYCHOLOGY: Again, I get that the showrunners were trying to depict the kids resorting to delusion to avoid thinking about what they were actually doing.
But: ALL of them having the same delusional vision? All of them suddenly dressed in Roman garb, enjoying a Roman banquet? How is THAT supposed to work? (Is this supposed to be ‘Lottie’s powers’ again?)
In reality: assuming the corpse had actually been ‘slow-cooked to perfection’ (which I maintain wasn’t possible with the situation shown), possibly Shauna would have mumbled something about ‘I have to do this for my baby’ and grabbed some flesh, then the others, shamefaced and avoiding each other’s eyes, would have done the same. And they would have eaten until they couldn’t eat more, then slunk off—some to vomit; some to curl up into fetal position in the cabin.
They would NOT have had a shared-delusion party.
Anyway, to me it seemed like incredibly lazy writing. They were so intent on Blowing Up the Internet that they forgot to make their plot developments plausible.
My thoughts on Sherrerd’s observations:
Seems like you could hand-wave that outcome to have been caused or manipulated by a supernatural evil presence that wanted to metaphorically serve Jackie up on a silver platter to the girls. But the show is still playing things kind of close to the vest as to how much is supernatural and how much is simply 'Lord of the Flies" style descent into madness and desperation.
As a practical matter, I had more of an issue with the fact that they left Jackie’s jacket on. That must have been at least partially made of synthetic fibers, and cannot have done much for the flavor of the meat.
Also, cooking any creature without removing the internal organs, especially the intestines, would not result in a very healthy or appetizing meal, I don’t think.
Could be wrong, but my take on that was it wasn’t meant to be taken as a shared delusion, but just sort of a symbolic representation of the degeneracy they were descending into. Kind of poetic license on the part of the writers.
Quoting as little as possible so I can sidestep a need for spoilers:
Agreed. No need to take it too literally.
I also am in the camp that does not believe the show has firmly come down on the side of the supernatural—yet. I’d say the same thing about The Witch, for example. Yes, we are shown some things that if taken as literal representations of what is occurring outside the mind of any character, it would surely be supernatural. But there’s still the possibility that it’s more of a “fantastic realism” kind of thing, how someone who lived those experiences might try to describe their delusions and misconceptions to another as if they really happened, when in fact they did not.
Well, if that (the bit bolded by me in the quote) worked for the majority of viewers, okay.
Didn’t work for me, though. Maybe with different direction…but to me it looked as though this was intended to show a specific delusion that they were all experiencing.
In re the earlier points: yes, leaving both microbe-laden body parts (intestines etc.) and synthetic fibers in place would not have worked out well for those who’d partaken.
I just can’t dig it anymore. It’s veering into late-seasons Lost territory already…and at least that show gave us a wide array of wildly different characters with highly varied personalities and backgrounds. This show just has too many different subplots going on in both the 90s and the present-day timelines - a sure recipe for making a show muddled and unfocused - and combine that with the hallucinations and the “we’re never sure what’s REALLY real” dimension they introduce…ugh, it’s just flailing about in too many directions. I think it’s a shame because the premise has a lot of potential, it’s just poorly executed.
The haunting use of Tori Amos’ “Bells for Her” (“Can’t stop what’s coming/can’t stop what is on its way”) after “Cornflake Girl” a couple episodes ago is ruining the songs for me. Well, maybe not after all these decades but it is going to be hard not to picture this show because their use has been so striking that it might supplant my own feelings and memories.
I know a lot of people are annoyed by the “is it magic, is it group hallucination”, but I don’t mind it.
Season two is finished. Not so sure that the show is actually good anymore.
I was really thinking it was group psychosis, but in the season-ender, grown-up Shauna yells at the rest of the group something like “it’s not the spirit of the woods making us do this bad stuff, it’s US!”
Which either confirms the group psychosis theory, or…it’s a double-blind plot fakeout, and there will turn out to be a supernatural element.