Yellowjackets: 2x05 Two Truths and a Lie.
How do you survive for more than a year in the wilderness? Survive, not just in the sense of food and shelter – survive, as in, stay sane enough to get up each morning to go through the motions of staying alive? Travis said it to Nat, that what Lottie is offering is something that everyone needs, a kind of spiritual sustenance that is maybe as important as the dwindling stores of bear meat. But Lottie, we see again and again, is figuring it out as she goes – it’s a very intuitive process, navigating what a spiritual practice that others can rely on looks like out in the woods, and we know now that whatever it ended up being, it cost her dearly, it scared her deeply, it haunts her still. In Two Truths and a Lie, we see what that practice looks like now. It’s meditative, like a collective communion with the world that surrounds them, some kind of idea of being in tune with the woods and with each other. What the girls perceive around them becomes part of them. The episode ends with the realisation that as much as this saved them – it appears to literally save Taissa and Shauna here, who are lost in a snowstorm and find their way back to the cabin through it – it has also invited something terrible in, something that followed them home.
It is interesting that the lines between those who follow Lottie and those who don’t are ever changing – the opponents are shrinking in numbers, and with Misty’s deep desire to belong, it has left only Shauna and Ben on the outs (and Javi, who is not talking after his return). Taissa has joined in because it’s what Van wants (“Happy wife happy life” she quips), and because whatever Lottie is doing appears to keep her sleepwalking at bay (unless, and here’s a darker thought, it’s not being kept at bay at all, and Van has embraced the other Taissa so fully that she has stopped letting her know about their shared adventures). Shauna and Ben are not aligned against Lottie’s disciples, because they are each atomised in their individual resistance against them – Ben off in his dream world, more and more on the outside of the group, and Shauna with a growing (reasonable) concern about everyone’s obsession with her unborn child, who they’ve decided is a boy. They chant about how he will change everything. Lottie whispers to him while Shauna sleeps. It would be creepy as hell under normal circumstances, but out in the wilderness, with everything that has happened, it feels like an existential threat to be reduced to being a vessel for a perceived savior.
There is such a profound tragedy in what happens with Crystal (Kristen!) and Misty in this episode, because out of all the girls, they feel like they have found something truly good out there that they both need. Up to the point where it all goes wrong, they cherish having found their person. They are both deeply weird in a way that only teenage girls can be, with their obsessions that only they share. Everyone else is annoyed by it (especially Mari, for whom dark things are coming, I think), and it doesn’t matter at all, because they have each other. It’s bestie magic, especially for Misty after her dark history with being bullied, with being so desperate to belong and be cherished that she destroyed their last and only hope of rescue. They share secrets, as teenage besties do, and it is fitting that Misty would think that telling Crystal a big, true one would be the right thing to do – how couldn’t it, when it has manufactured the context for their very friendship? Misty isn’t suffering out there, she is living her best life, not lonely for the first time ever. She doesn’t read the situation right because she has to believe that Crystal can contain all of her, including the truth that nobody else knows. They’re near a cliff when she tells Crystal about the emergency beacon, and it all goes wrong so fast that neither of them feels like they’re really on steady ground. And then Crystal falls – Misty doesn’t push her, but she probably would have because it would have been the only way out. We know what happens when Misty is cornered, because we have seen her cornered as an adult, and it never ends well for whoever thinks they have her under control. Maybe it explains why adult Misty clings so much to what she perceives as friendships, relationships that are always painfully one-sided and never reciprocated. The snowstorm covers up the crime, and nobody will ever know, but it leaves the question of how all of this would have turned out if Misty had never told the truth (and she tells no truths when Walter asks her for them, so desperate to know her, because by now she knows what will happen).
It feels like a mirror of Shauna somehow, who has been entirely unmoored since Jackie’s death – or maybe not since her death, but ever since her ghost stopped appearing to her, since she literally consumed her. Her fall-back option for a best friend out there, for someone who has her back without question, is Taissa, but Taissa is focusing on herself right now and that includes aligning with Lottie. Shauna also doesn’t feel like someone who would ever go to Natalie, the other person who isn’t on Lottie’s side. One of the quieter moments of the episode is one between Taissa and Akilah – a quiet friendship in the background – that starts with Akilah saying she felt comfortable joining in with Lottie’s circle because she saw Taissa do it. It’s a reminder that Taissa has a certain pull with people, that what she does is considered rational and reasonable (if it hadn’t been for Jackie’s certain star power, who else could have been captain?). They talk about magical belief and superstition, which, if you’ve ever spent any time around sports people, is a very realistic connection to make – it’s really just one step between believing that a certain order of putting on gear or wearing the same pair of socks for each game would ward of catastrophe and putting stock in what Lottie is teaching, because what’s the damage if it doesn’t make a difference? There’s always more to be lost than to be gained from not performing the ritual. It’s just in case (except maybe in this case, it has accidentally awoken an evil spirit that has wants and desires of its own).
We’ve gotten a few reunions on Yellowjackets, and they have all been emotionally complex because of past event, but I don’t think anything has ever been as intense as adult Van laying eyes on Taissa. Van – a person running a store that rents VHSs and VCR machines (and has to explain video tapes to Gen Z as an occupational hazard), guides customers towards great queer movies, and does all of that in a small unnamed town rather than a place where such a thing may be just quirky and hipster enough to earn her a living – looks at Taissa with so much love and fear at the same time. The years they’ve spent apart from each other feel like a presence between them, and all the ways in which something must have gone so wrong after their return that they couldn’t be together anymore. There’s not a moment where it feels like Van could ever turn Taissa way, regardless of how horrifying the truth is (she learns about Biscuit’s fate). I love that Van doesn’t talk much about her life here, that we have to infer what is going on with her from the little artefacts around her – tapes of films she loves everywhere, unpaid bills, the fact that she lives above the shop and earns a bit of money on the side by digitising other people’s happy family memories, of which she likely has few. The only thing she tells Taissa is that her mother died of cancer, but considering she uses this story to explain the oxy in her medicine cabinet, and that we later see her desperately dose herself when Taissa has fallen asleep, maybe that story isn’t even entirely true. There is a lot of pain here, and maybe a sense of someone whose life has stopped at a certain point, with a past encased in amber (we get the sense of Shauna living Jackie’s life, but Shauna has Cassie and Jeff!). Van, when she finds out that Taissa is sleepwalking again, immediately asks how bad it is, a hint that things must have gotten way worse out in the wilderness. And then, after Taissa sleeps, the other Taissa awakes and the first thing she does is kiss Van – does that mean that the other Taissa is living out Taissa’s desires (I think it's something Taissa would have wanted to do, but didn’t because of Simone and consideration for Van’s feelings – whatever they had is still palpable in the space between them), or that there was a connection between dark Taissa and Van that will emerge in the wilderness? Other Taissa says “This isn’t where we’re supposed to be”.
Natalie has stayed at Lottie’s compound because she is desperate to reveal her as a charlatan, because if she can prove that she is a con artist now, it would mean that she was one back then too. She finds the incriminating documents locked in her office, only to realize that all of her disciples are in on it – this is a cult, except everyone in it knows they’re in a cult. Whatever magical reveal she thought she could make fails, and so the only thing remaining is to follow Lottie’s suggestion to try a new hypnosis technique she has learned. Lottie brings Natalie back to the last time she saw Travis, when they fell off the wagon together and she had a near-death experience – a vivid hallucination of a plane crash that nobody survived, of a darkness that was there with them, or maybe in them, that they brought back when they thought they escaped. The antler queen appears – first in Natalie’s memory, then as a shadow on the floor. It’s everything that Lottie has feared. Maybe they are all not where they were supposed to be.
Random notes:
What happens between Misty and Crystal at the cliff feels like a warning not just for Walter, who veers very dangerously close to disaster when he reveals that he thinks she killed Adam Martin, even if he doesn’t hold it against her, but also for Natalie, who Misty feels betrays her when she insists on staying in the compound instead of being saved by her.
Misty’s third pick as a slumber party guest is euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian, which feels so perfectly tailored for seventeen-year-old Misty. Unapologetically weird!
Van referencing High Fidelity felt perfect (it’s a book about a fucked up kind of nostalgia, which perfectly describes both her own life and what she fears is happening with Taissa, until she finds out otherwise).
Callie! There were moments in this episode where it was so clear that she is Shauna’s daughter, a certain excitement over being part of a mystery (the way Shauna was immediately on board with her ruse, while Jeff looked on in horror, this weird way their family works), but other moments where she feels like a younger version of Jackie. She handily figures out who her date Jay is from his credit card receipt and immediately tries to do damage control, constructing a fake story about Shauna having an affair with Randy (poor Randy, always sucked in against his will). It all fails when Randy, instead of jerking off into a condom as requested, used strawberry lotion instead, and of course, a cop with an obsession deep enough to trick a teenager will investigate thoroughly. Also notable that Jay is a bit of a creep (clearly clearly in his 30s) but not creepy enough to kiss Callie, at least.
It's unclear why there is a riot grrrl band playing at a suburban New Jersey bowling alley but I'm into it!
Javi doesn’t talk to anyone, until he tells Coach Ben that his friend told him not to come back! What mysterious woman is out in the woods, talking to Javi?
I wonder what Natalie’s vision of the plane crash with no survivors means – where they all meant to die and didn’t, against all odds? Is this about re-balancing something that went wrong back then, when they made it out alive against all odds? Do they all have to go back to banish the darkness (and how will Shauna go back, who seems like she’s on an alternative adventure entirely?).
Shauna is definitely in labor by the end of the episode.
