‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: Eat or Be Eaten

Everyone’s losing it. 

Shauna just beat Lottie to the verge of death. Lottie continues having mystical visions. Taissa keeps seeing her shadow self smirking at her. Akilah’s been unwittingly treating a dessicated mouse corpse as a living pet for weeks. Mari (Alexa Barajas) sees blood pouring down the cabin walls. Javi can’t speak. (Not until the end of the episode anyway.) Gen (Mya Lowe) and Melissa (Jenna Burgess), the redshirts of the group, are fully in Lottie’s thrall. Misty is, well, Misty. It’s so bad that Ben, who nearly killed himself last episode, his handling things better than almost anybody. 

So when the plunge into collective madness comes, suddenly and without precedent or warning, it actually makes sense. Rather than heed Lottie’s request that they eat her body if she succumbs to her wounds, the group conduct The Lottery. They pull from a deck of cards, and whoever pulls the defaced Queen of Hearts dies so that the others might live.

Only it’s Natalie who pulls the card, so we know things don’t work out as planned. Shauna hesitates with her knife long enough for Travis to intervene, rescuing his former girlfriend, allowing her to escape into the wilderness. While several girls hold Travis at knifepoint, the rest — Shaun, Taissa, Misty, and Van among them, even leading them — grab weapons and run screaming and hooting after Nat. The visual, of a bunch of ostensibly normal teenage girls going completely insane and bloodthirsty with the flick of a switch, charging through the snow with murder on their minds, is fantastical and frightening.

Finally, finally — Yellowjackets has gone Lord of the Flies.

But again, things don’t work out as planned. Even as Coach Ben, working off various clues, tracks down the warm cavern beneath a tree where Javi weathered his months in the wilderness alone, Javi comes to Natalie’s rescue, speaking for the first time since his return and telling her he can bring her to a safe place no one else knows about.

Unfortunately, they have to cross the frozen lake to get to it. Not only does this make them easy to spot, it also leads them across thin ice, through which Javi falls into the freezing water below. And they all let him die.

Natalie tries to save him of course, but she’s pulled off and convinced to let nature take its course, which it does in seconds. Javi dies of hypothermia, and they pull out his body from the hole in the ice. We all know what will happen next.

“The wilderness has chosen,” Van, of all people, proclaims.

This is all terrific stuff, frankly. (Kudos to writers Sarah L. Thompson and Liz Phang; writers are responsible for all your favorite shows and deserve fair treatment and fair pay!) It really, really is about time that Yellowjackets got around to portraying its teenage characters as feral cannibals in the making; as I hoped and predicted, the combination of Shauna’s baby dying in the past and the whole gang reuniting in the present has marked a turning point for the show. None of them will ever be able to walk back what they were planning to do, and what they’re going to do instead. It’s the hidden shame beneath every interaction the adult characters have had.

Those adult characters have quite an episode on their hands too. Nothing nearly as momentous happens to them — they’re all safely ensconced on Lottie’s compound after all — but secret after secret comes out. Now, everyone knows Shauna murdered her lover and conspired with Misty and Natalie to dispose of the body, which they wound up doing a shit job of. They know Misty killed the private investigator, and they know Taissa was the one who hired her. They know Shauna’s husband Jeff was the blackmailer, and that Shauna used her slain lover as a scapegoat even after finding out the truth. 

Back home, after their place is searched by the cops, Jeff tells his daughter Callie that Shauna lost a baby — their baby — out in the wilderness. Callie, cruelly taunted by the shitty cop who went undercover with her to get at Shauna, wonders if she too is as messed up as her mom. (Big time kudos to actor Warren Kole, who for the first time is allowed to think, say, and do things that don’t fall strictly with in the “comical popular kid gone to seed is now a cucked husband” joke parameters to which his character had previously been confined. He makes Jeff feel like a real person, which considering the nature and quality of the adult-character material is a tall order.

Things culminate for the gang when Lottie, insisting that all their misfortunes stem from refusing to heed the supernatural force of the wilderness that they brought back to civilization with them, asks everyone to select a glass of wine, one of which contains poison. They need to sacrifice one of their own to placate this dark force, she says, and as always it’s not up to them who dies. “It chooses,” she insists, giving this episode its title.

The events of this episode leave things wide open for next week’s season finale. We don’t see who drinks what, or even if anyone drinks anything at all. We don’t see what they do with Javi’s corpse (though we can guess). We don’t know what Ben will do about the secret cave. We don’t know if the cops will arrest Shauna when she resurfaces from Lottie’s place. We don’t know if they’ll follow up with Misty’s ersatz ally, the apparently filth rich Walter, and his tip that he knows something about the murder case, or what he’ll do when he infiltrates Lottie’s compound, as he’s clearly planning to do. We’re no closer to answers about Taissa’s split personality (or that eyeless man she occasionally sees — remember him?), or the nature of the evil wilderness spirit, or the meaning of the symbols carved everywhere, or any of that. And when you’ve already been greenlit for a third season, you don’t necessarily need to cram all of it into one last episode this go-round.

Which can get a little frustrating. Now that we’re nearing the conclusion of this season, I can’t help but feel the show spun its wheels a bit. In the adult storyline, it’s certainly been satisfying to see everyone get back together, but the satisfaction pretty much ends there: They’ve mostly just sat around talking. The infamous Grownup Murder Hijinks aspect of the show seems destined/doomed to continue, alas. (Though at least now it’s less about a gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight coverup and more about avoiding prosecution and prison.) And it really wasn’t until the final minutes of this penultimate episode that the teenage storyline made the jump it needed to make. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it did!)

But time and time again the show hits a point where you’re like “OMG, is this it? This is it! Maybe this is it!”, and this is the biggest such point yet. Maybe from now on it’s going to devolve into the nightmare you saw in the cold open of the pilot. Maybe now every death will be taken seriously. Maybe the horror of what happened out there, of what they did out there, will pervade the whole thing instead of just being something the adult characters allude to when they’re angry. Maybe it will become an honest-to-god horror show, and a very good one at that. But that’s not for us to choose. It chooses.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.