Ladies of the flies
J. Oliver Conroy
Most people who have heard of the 1972 Andean disaster, in which a plane of Uruguayan rugby players and their supporters crashed into a frozen mountain, know that the survivors, trapped in a white landscape devoid of animals or vegetation, resorted to cannibalism. If you’ve read Piers Paul Read’s classic Alive or come in contact with any of the other books, films, and television series about the incident, you’ll know some of the other details: that the dwindling band also endured an avalanche; that two players scaled a mountain, without gear or adequate clothing, to reach help; that many of the devoutly Catholic passengers were only persuaded to eat their dead friends and families when they began to think of it as a kind of Holy Communion.
The creators of Yellowjackets, the scary and stylish Showtime drama now entering its second season, recognize that there’s something eternally potent here. Observing these harrowing crucibles from our easy chairs, we wonder: Would I be useful? Would I crack? Would I make the hard choices of survival, no matter how wrenching? After a global pandemic, audiences seem especially attuned to themes of survival and society on the brink: One of the most avidly discussed recent series, HBO’s The Last of Us, takes place after a fungus turns much of the world’s population into zombies and the rest into paranoid and warring groups. Unlike The Last of Us — whose nine-episode season, based on a video game, seemed to be composed almost entirely of backstory — Yellowjackets mostly delivers.
The first season introduced the titular Yellowjackets, a girls’ soccer team at a suburban New Jersey high school in 1996. In the style of the first season of True Detective, the show operates on two timelines. In the 1990s timeline, the teenage girls suffer a plane crash en route to a soccer match and find themselves alone in the Canadian wilderness. In another, present-day timeline, we meet some of the same characters as adults, back in civilization. From the existence of the adult characters, we know that at least some of the girls survived and were rescued — but not the specificities of how, which the show teases out with agonizing suspense.
The teenagers include Jackie (Ella Purnell), the Yellowjackets’ first-season queen bee, who struggled to adapt to the rigors of survival. Her best friend, the quiet and practical Shauna (Sophie Nelisse), does better, as does the oddball Misty (Sammi Hanratty), who thrives to the point of not necessarily wanting to be rescued. The normally coolheaded Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) has developed insomnia and perhaps something more unsettling. Her friend and girlfriend Van (Liv Hewson) looks out for her. Nat (Sophie Thatcher), a druggie outcast, has turned out to be a skilled hunter, while the schizophrenic Lottie (Courtney Eaton) seems to have the gift of prophecy. The girls are joined by Travis (Kevin Alves), the son of one of the coaches, and Ben (Steven Krueger), the only surviving adult.
For the adult versions of the characters, the show cleverly revived a number of beloved actresses known for their work in the 1980s and 1990s. Melanie Lynskey is the adult Shauna, living a frustrated suburban existence with her furniture-store-owner husband Jeff (Warren Kole). Christina Ricci is Misty, now an eccentric nurse and websleuth. Tawny Cypress is Taissa, who is struggling to keep dark rumors about her decades-old wilderness ordeal from derailing a political career. And Juliette Lewis is Nat, a recovering addict and a bit of a mess. The new season also introduces the adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) and adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) and a new character, Walter, a self-described “citizen detective” played by Elijah Wood.
To summarize everything going on would be too difficult, but suffice it to say that the first season started with the present-day characters receiving mysterious, unsigned postcards imprinted with a symbol from their time in the wilderness, which dredged up old memories and set in motion several mysteries that are only partly resolved at that season’s end. The second picks up soon after where the first left off.
Time is not on the teenage girls’ side: They’re still trapped in the wilderness, with winter arrived and food perilously hard to find. The pregnant Shauna is close to delivery. Lottie’s apparent ability as a seer has created a religious sect of sorts that threatens the cohesion of the group. In the present day, the adult Yellowjackets are startled to discover that Lottie, whom they thought had been consigned to a Swiss mental institution, is out in the world and thriving as the head of a cultish spiritual organization. Shauna and her friends are also panicking because police are on the verge of discovering a serious crime that they covered up last season.
The new season is even darker and more grisly than the first: It’s a drama whose horror elements, often coming in the form of hallucinations or dream sequences, are genuinely frightening and work to keep viewers off-kilter and unsure. Are the hints of the supernatural that we keep seeing products of the characters’ burgeoning madness, or is there actually something sinister and unworldly in those woods? But Yellowjackets’ truly skin-crawling grue may lie not in the supernatural but in the subgenre known as body horror. What could be more visceral, more terrifying, than feeling your own body starve to death? Or eating a dead friend? Or giving birth hundreds of miles from a doctor?
The new season isn’t perfect. Its tonal shifts can be jarring, with occasional comic or satiric elements coexisting uneasily with earnest or frightening ones. The subplot about Misty and her new semi-sidekick, Walter, might be trying a little too hard to charm us and lighten the mood. But the writers appear to understand what they owe their audience. In the first six episodes, at least some of the show’s lingering riddles are answered, and there is more plot in each episode than there was in the entire first season of The Last of Us.
Yellowjackets’ creators, the writing-producing couple Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, have said in interviews that they were inspired by a debate about Lord of the Flies. When an all-female adaptation of William Golding’s novel was mooted in 2017, critics were skeptical that girls would tolerate the same barbarity. (“An all-women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because … the plot of that book wouldn’t happen with all women,” Roxane Gay tweeted.) Lyle and Nickerson thought otherwise. Yellowjackets is a persuasive argument that stranded schoolgirls might fare slightly better than Golding’s boys, but not by much.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.