SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the latest episode of Yellowjackets. If you have not yet watched it, proceed at your own risk!
The second season of Yellowjackets has been packed full of deeply consequential episodes for individual members of the high school soccer team stranded in the woods, and the most recent, "It Chooses," features the biggest moment of the run for Sophie Thatcher’s Natalie: after being chosen to sacrifice herself so that the rest of the girls can eat her dead body, she ends up letting Luciano Leroux’s Javi die in her place. The look of horror stricken across Nat’s face after the boy drowns says everything about her mental state – and it’s an event so massive that is going to change how Thatcher plays the character in the future.
As featured in the video at the top of this story, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sophie Thatcher this week during the Los Angeles press day for her upcoming movie The Boogeyman, and while most of the time was spent talking about the new Stephen King adaptation, I felt compelled to inquire about Natalie’s future. I asked if the events of Season 2 and "It Chooses" will change the way she approaches the role in Season 3, and she responded with authority in the affirmative. Said Thatcher,
Absolutely. This was like a huge turning point, and I think from here on, I mean, the guilt just keeps building and it just keeps getting worse. And she's just gonna have so much guilt within her that it makes sense why she's modern day Natalie. Like, she has to subdue her brain .
In a way, Yellowjackets fans should have known that something like this was on the way for young Natalie. After all, as alluded to by Sophie Thatcher, the adult version of Nat (played by Juliette Lewis) is a mess. Viewers have known about her substance abuse and temperament issues ever since the show’s pilot, and it’s been made very clear that her problems stem from the special horrors she witnessed/was a part of while in the wilderness.
Teen Nat has seen terrible things before now, and we expect that there are still many more terrors on the horizon, but letting Javi drown is a special kind of nightmare that rightfully will haunt her forever.
Per Sophie Thatcher, we’re going to see a very different Natalie in Yellowjackets Season 3, but, of course, we won’t have to wait until then to see the immediate fallout of Javi’s death. That’s coming this week, as "It Chooses" was just the penultimate episode of Season 2, setting up the finale – titled "Storytelling" and teased by Jasmin Savoy Brown to feature some twists.
You’ll need a Paramount+ subscription with Showtime if you want to watch it when it launches on the streaming service this Friday at midnight ET, but otherwise you can catch it when it airs on Showtime on Sunday, May 28 and join us in all of our speculation about the pit girl and questioning the identity of the Antler Queen.
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