Yellowjackets Season 2, Episode 1 Recap: Lend Me Your Ears

Welcome to the Yellowjackets 201 recap. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to type those words!!! I am so, so excited to be back recapping my favorite show on television and the main reason I won't stop talking about cannibalism in my everyday life. Before we get into the recap properly, I just want to remind regular Autostraddle readers that I write recaps a bit differently than some of the rest of our team. My recaps are not image-heavy, do not go perfectly chronologically, and rarely touch on every single thing that happens. I tend to focus on overarching themes and the points that standout the most to me and move around nonlinearly.

The Last Buzz section at the end is for any extraneous things I still want to touch on that don't fit in anywhere else in the recap. If there's something I didn't talk about in the recap that you want to talk about, hop on into the comments where I am very active and love to hear theories, predictions, and thoughts. Let's chat!

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Welcome back to Yellowjackets, where things have changed. It's winter! The meat from the bear slain by Teen Lottie is almost all gone! Adult Lottie is here! Teen Shauna sees dead people! WAIT IS THAT "SEVENTEEN" BY SHARON VAN ETTEN?

Yes, continuing its early-cemented legacy as having some of the best needledrops on television, Yellowjackets season two opens with one of my favorite #sadgirl musicians Sharon Van Etten crooning:

I know what you wanna sayI think that you’re all the sameConstantly being led astrayYou think you know somethin’ you don't

It looks…very cold out there. Nat and Travis ready themselves to head out to both look for game and for Javi, who has been missing ever since Shauna told him in a demon voice to run on the night of the Doomcoming "party." Those porn magazines they found when they first arrived at the cabin sure do come in handy as additional insulation under their animal pelts and cobbled-together winter fits! Everyone is doing great. Before they head out, they participate — somewhat hesitantly — in a lil ritual with Lottie where she draws on them with ash and makes them drink tea spiked with her blood. Lottie takes credit for the fact that they keep coming back alive and also makes sure to fingerpaint the Yellowjackets symbol — whose meaning we still don't really know — on the window. We’ll come back to Lottie!

I’m going to skip ahead a bit to my favorite scenes of the episode: Teen Shauna talking to Dead Jackie. We’ve seen Adult Shauna imagine and talk to dead Teen Jackie in season one. But now we see the origins of this haunting. As far as timelines in the premiere go, the wilderness timeline picks up two months after Jackie got freezer-burned to death following her explosive fight with Shauna that saw her banished from the cabin. The present day timeline hasn't moved forward as much, starting pretty much immediately after Nat is kidnapped from her motel room and after Adam has been killed and disposed of. There's a special third timeline, too, which I’ll get into. But for now, let's talk about Shauna in the shed with a diary, chatting it up with her dead best friend.

"i’ll tell you how i’m doing: NOT WELL BITCH!"

The smash cut from Shauna talking to an imagined alive Jackie to Jackie's lifeless, bluish corpse is so immediately haunting and really emphasizes just how off the deep end Shauna has gone, consumed by guilt and grief. We see Jackie filling out a game of MASH, and in the back of our minds we have to hold onto the reality that it's just Shauna playing the game…with herself…her traumatized brain slotting Jackie in. The explanation as to why Jackie had movies in her journal in season one that she would not have been alive to see is, of course, that these are actually Shauna's journals, that she is pretending to be her dead best friend in the margins of her life. I pretty much called this. The MASH page we see in season one is the game we watch unfold in this premiere:

"Jackie's" journal, in season one

After their relatively chill — but disturbing — game of MASH, Shauna later in the episode argues with Jackie's corpse about Jeff. "Jackie" wants to know how Shauna and Jeff started, and she uncovers that Shauna kissed Jeff first. This is all Shauna's inner turmoil bursting to the surface. She never got to confess any of of this to Jackie, so now she's confessing to her corpse. It's fucked up! The others in the cabin are concerned, but not enough to actually do anything about it, all a little unsure what to say to someone who is talking to their best friend, especially when that someone is pregnant with her dead best friend's boyfriend's baby. Things escalate between Shauna and her human popsicle of a bff, and she pushes the body. Jackie's ear falls off. Shauna panics and tries to reattach it, but when it becomes clear that's not happening, she pockets the ear.

It's time to consider the important question posed at the end of season one: Who the fuck is Lottie Matthews? As aforementioned, there's a third timeline in the premiere, and unlike going back to before the crash like season one sometimes does, we’re instead in 1998. We get our first brief glimpses into the actual rescue, some of the Yellowjackets emerging to a swarm of press wanting to know what happened to them out there. Teen Lottie's rich parents are concerned because she hasn't talked or eaten since the rescue. They put her in electroshock therapy, which triggers memories of that strange underground industrial tunnel thing she also hallucinated about during her lake baptism with Laura Lee (RIP). Where is this! Why is this! In what appears to be a mental institution, Teen Lottie consoles another patient by placing her hand on her chest and telling her to breathe. We see Lottie do this again in the past with Travis, easing him out of a panic attack brought on by the ongoing mystery of Javi's disappearance. Only, when she soothes Travis out of his panic, he gets a boner (and also sees a vision of the tree altar thing, with light puncturing it). I’m wondering if we’re going to end up getting a love triangle situation between Travis/Lottie/Nat, because television loves a love triangle, and Jackie's no longer around to drive a wedge between Travis and Nat. I’m also still holding onto hope that Lottie is queer.

"and that's why I believe if Jackie had only thought warm thoughts, she’d still be with us today"

Early in the episode, we meet Adult Lottie, played by new castmember Simone Kessell (who is mommi but I digress). Lottie has apparently taken her ability to place a hand on someone's chest and calm them down and turned it into…an empire? A cult? She's out in the woods — a different woods — giving motivational speeches to a bunch of people wearing purple about how no one can save them but themselves. We can check back in on Lottie when we eventually get to Adult Nat's whereabouts.

Adult Shauna is in a dark room being interrogated about the murder of Adam Martin. Well, it's a mock interrogation, being led by Misty inexplicably using a voice changer as she asks increasingly absurd questions. Shauna is not very good at answering said questions, prompting Misty to say: "The only thing you should ever say to the police is I want my lawyer. That's why I put it on the cookie." CUT TO:

Ah, Misty, I’ve missed thee.

As if that weren't enough, Misty also suggests Shauna take home a "punch kit" of the "Hawaiian 5-0 punch" that she made that is just Hawaiian punch with a cool name, and yes, she wants Shauna to take some in a container to go with a borrowed ladle. All of these women have a tendency to revert to teenage versions of themselves periodically, and this screams Teen Misty Desperate To Make Friends. Speaking of which, Teen Misty does make a new friend in the woods. She's still being frozen out by the team — but not quite as literally as Jackie was — for collectively poisoning everyone. But a gaggle of new girls from the JV team are introduced in the episode and include Crystal, a certified theater dork who goes around singing showtunes and volunteers herself as Misty's new vocal coach. Are we perhaps seeing the origins of Misty's love of showtunes?

Taissa and Nat were supposed to come to this little murder cover-up training session, but Nat is busy being kidnapped, and Taissa is busy buying a new dog named Steve for Sammy to smooth over the fact that Biscuit is missing and it's probably her fault. As we know, Biscuit is more than missing; he's missing his head. And when Taissa arrives at school to pick up Sammy and surprise him with Steve, Simone barges in to tell her to stay the fuck away from Sammy. She gives Tai an ultimatum: Quit public office and seek help for whatever caused her to behead a dog and create a creepy sacrificial altar in their basement or Simone and Sammy will no longer be in her life and she’ll go to the press.

The problem is that Tai doesn't know what Simone's talking about. She hasn't seen the altar in the basement yet. But when she goes home, she crawls through the vent just like Simone does in the season one finale. She sees the Blair Witch ass art project for herself, and when Steve runs in (protect Steve at all costs!) she picks him up and says: "This was a mistake. I’m gonna do better with you." It's such a fantastically unnerving horror moment, delivered expertly by Tawny Cypress who, in case you missed it, came out as queer in the Shudder LGBTQ horror docuseries Queer for Fear, and her coming out realization happened when she was a teen watching none other than her now-costar Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. Even though I’m worried about Taissa's sleepwalking, ever since we’ve had confirmation that "the bad one" is indeed her in some sort of fugue state, I’ve been thrilled about seeing more range from Cypress, who so often has to just play the "straight guy" in scenes. But we get to see her be funny, scary, and emotional in the spanse of this premiere.

funny!

scary!

Our lovebirds Teen Tai and Teen Van are also grappling with the complications brought on by Tai's sleepwalking, though thankfully there are no dogs to behead in the wilderness. The freeze also means Tai doesn't have easy access to dirt to shovel in her mouth either. PLUS, Van has come up with the perfect solution: She and Tai sleep quite literally bound together by rope in the attic so that Other Tai can't get up to any middle-of-the-night shenanigans. The only downside is that sometimes Other Tai yanks so hard that Van ends up with bloodied wrists ("Maybe I just want you to tie me up, ever think of that?" Van teases when daytime Taissa notices the wounds). At one point, Taissa wakes Van up by kissing her, but when she bites too hard on Van's lip, it's clear this is Other Tai, and Van's exclamations make her snap out of it. This indeed all seems more serious than just a simple case of trauma-induced sleepwalking. Taissa appears possessed, and we know her future self is capable of violence when in this state. But Van insists she’ll do whatever it takes to keep Tai safe, even if that means perpetual rope-burn of the wrists. In a very goth gay move, Van chooses to tell Tai she loves her for the first time by using the blood from her lip to fingerpaint I 💗 U on Taissa's arm. It would be cute if it weren't so spooky! But also it seems exactly like the kind of metal gay shit a head-over-heels teen would do, especially one surrounded by casual starvation and violence day in and day out. In any case, Taissa loves her back! And says so with her words rather than her blood.

Adult Nat's absence from the interrogation-cookie cake-Hawaiian punch party can be explained by the fact that she's chained to a bed somewhere very far away. Enter: Autostraddle fav Nicole Maines as Lisa! Lisa's the designated kidnapping supervisor for squirmy, screamy Natalie, who takes one look at her necklace with THE symbol on it and says she knows everything she needs to know. I still have questions, but oh well! Nat smooth-talks her way into getting close enough to Lisa to stab her in the face and the hand. Listen, never think you can outsmart one of the Yellowjackets. These women know how to survive, even if it means stabbing someone.

Nat breaks free and stumbles out of her cabin and into a community of more cabins. She eventually finds herself in a clearing in the woods where a bunch of people in animal masks are performing a ceremony by burying a naked man alive. There's Lottie in all her occult-y glory. Nat wants to bash her head in with a large stick, and no one doubts for a second she couldn't do it, but Lottie buys herself some time by saying she has a message for Nat from Travis. If there's one thing that’ll get Nat to back down, it's that.

"if you’re going to stab me in the face with a fork at least give me a cool scar"

Citizen Detective Misty is on the case of the missing Nat, showing up at the motel to investigate why her "best friend" hasn't been answering her calls and texts. She describes Nat thusly to the no-fucks-to-give motel manager: "Brunette, stunning, looks like she’d stab you." It's delivered perfectly by Christina Ricci, and it's also very prescient of Misty given that Nat does indeed do some stabbing in the episode.

While Teen Shauna is busy pacing around the cabin thumbing her dead best friend's ear in her pocket, Adult Shauna is busy covering up a murder. Indeed, as Misty suspects, the cover-up job is not complete. But Shauna doesn't tell her this and instead leans on her husband Jeff "There's No Book Club" Sadecki who might as well be working for the "McDonald's chicken nugget department" because he's "selling six pieces like it's his job," a joke he proudly makes before remembering it is indeed his job to sell furniture. Shauna remembers Adam had an art studio, and she's also for some reason still hanging onto his ID. She enlists Jeff to help her handle things.

Jeff and Shauna arrive at Adam's studio, and at first Jeff is in good spirits, cracking his little dad jokes, riding the high of selling all that furniture. But then things take a sharp turn when he sees Adam's art. It's all Shauna. Just endless paintings of Shauna. She looks stunning! But I imagine it's somewhat upsetting to be surrounded by artwork of your wife made by her dead lover she was cheating on you with. But the ever-loyal Jeff doesn't storm out, doesn't start a fight. Shauna seems to want a reaction from him, but he just looks sad. Then they have this exchange:

Shauna: The thought of you with someone else always scared me, but it also turned me on. Someone else's tongue in your mouth, their smell on you. I used to think that made me some kind of pervert.Jeff: What do you think now?Shauna: That I like being the way I am.

It's one of my favorite exchanges in the episode, because it so simply and searingly touches on the fucking disaster that arousal can sometimes feel like. Shauna's turn-on here tracks given that the thing that drew her to Jeff in the first place was the fact that he was not hers, that he specifically was Jackie's. While I do think sexuality evolves and shifts in life, I also believe that some of our specific arousals in adulthood are easy to trace back to younger years. But when we’re teens, we often act on such desires in the most chaotic and self-destructive ways. It's easy to draw a throughline from Shauna confessing she imagines him with other women back to Teen Shauna in the pilot asking Teen Jeff — her best friend's boyfriend at the time — to tell her he loves her during sex even if it's a lie. As Jeff puts it himself in season one, secrets have always been a part of who he is.

But still, even if it's tied up in what turns her on, it of course isn't fair for Shauna to have cheated on Jeff. She's not looking to be absolved here, but I think she is looking for a path forward with him, one where she's more honest about what it is she really wants. I find it mordantly hilarious that Shauna and Jeff are way more fixated on the affair than on the murder. Dead Adam looms over them, but not in the way you’d expect. Jeff takes his cue. He bends Shauna over and fucks her against a table of paintings. I’m left wondering if this is indeed what Shauna was looking for in that moment. We know she performed more of a dominant role with Adam. Does she want to be dominated by Jeff? Is she doing this because she thinks it’ll make him feel better? But also, she is ultimately the one in control of that moment in my eyes. I’m curious to see how things unfold between them; it sounds like they might explore more of her kinks within their marriage.

Shortly after they have sex and destroy Adam's paintings, we have the privilege of bearing witness to what is easily one of the best scenes of Yellowjackets — nay, all of television. Jeff sits alone in a parked car, clearly silently spiraling over the fact that he just fucked his wife in the art studio of the man she both had an affair with and also murdered. Who can blame him for needing A Moment™? His hand floats up to the phone on his dashboard, and he scrolls through music before stopping, very deliberately, on his song of choice to score this spiral. The dulcet tones of "LAST RESORT" BY PAPA ROACH fill the car, as Jeff air-drums and punches his way into some semblance of control over his life, which has indeed been cut into pieces. This scene is high art.

Jeff spends so much energy on his little parked car mental breakdown that he's covered in sweat by the time he joins Shauna for a little backyard barbecue of her teen journals and dead lover's license. They accidentally catch a tree on fire in the process of burning evidence, and I love when this show dips into suburban comedy of errors. Is it just me or is covering up a murder bringing Shauna and Jeff closer together? I’m smelling vow renewal!

Back in the cabin, Teen Shauna's still got a loose ear to consider. During the episode's final montage, scored by "Cornflake Girl" by Tori Amos, she paces with the ear in hand. "Things are getting kind of gross" Amos presciently sings. In the final shot, Shauna bites into the ear, and we cut to credits. And now we know why the episode is titled "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," and if you still don't get it, just scroll on back up to the top of this recap and look at the headline I gave it.

honestly looks kinda like a mushroom

My first thought: Finally, some cannibalism! We haven't technically seen cannibalism since the pilot, and we still don't know how much of that sequence is real or who they’re really eating. My second thought: There is something just so beautifully on-the-nose about Shauna consuming Jackie. I love when we see extreme expressions of the id on this show, and that's what this feels like. Sure, it could be partially stemming from just being pregnant and starving, but I think there's more to that when it comes to Shauna wanting to eat part of Jackie. She already had an unhealthy obsession with Jackie when she was alive; her death is bound to make it mutate and grow.

While I think both are deeply flawed and played a role in the dissolution of their friendship, my rewatch of season one really drove home just how unfairly Shauna treated Jackie. Shauna accuses Jackie of treating her like a sidekick, but Shauna contributes so much and gives so much weight to the slotting of each of them into specific roles of alpha and sidekick. She projects her insecurities onto Jackie, casts herself as inferior. Or maybe it's not that simple. Maybe Jackie pushed her in that direction after all. It's hard to parse it all out, and I feel myself bringing my own teenage baggage to the table in how I look at it. But that's what makes it so brilliant. I feel like one could make so many arguments as to why Shauna acts the way she does, why Jackie acted the way she did. My favorite mysteries to solve on Yellowjackets are always the unsolvable ones. The series has pushed its characters and story to the brink, making it so that one girl biting into another girl's ear isn't just believable on a logistical level of starvation but on a deeper, more psychological level, too. Remember: The horror of the very first seconds of this series does not rest in the fact that someone is being eaten but that she's being hunted. We’re only starting to see what these characters are capable of. We’re only starting to see the ripple effects of what they’ve lived through. Season two starts quietly, technically. There's nothing more tender than Sharon Van Etten. But she really does wail on "Seventeen." Even in its quietest moments, Yellowjackets feels like it's screaming.

Last Buzz:

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

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