Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet streamed Yellowjackets’ Season 3 finale with a Paramount+ subscription, or watched its linear airing on Showtime, so be warned!
With the conclusion of “Full Circle,” Yellowjackets at last answered its longest-running mystery: the identity of the Pit Girl whose death and subsequent consumption went a long way in building the darkly comedic horror series an early fandom. We knew it was coming, given the pit’s introduction in Episode 9 — which we learned a lot about from director Ben Semanoff — and Alexa Barajas’s Mari was an easy guess, but all of the connections back to the series premiere were still highly satisfying.
Anyone who goes back to the pilot episode will have tons of additional context to add onto that largely malicious and unnecessary hunt, and fans now know exactly why Misty’s glasses were cracked, and exactly why she was smiling when she removed her furry mask. (Because Natalie successfully escaped with the radio without anyone knowing.) And for the most part, I buy into and agree with co-creator Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s comments about applying new details to those scenes. As Lyle put it to THR:
If we simply retold the exact same story, it wouldn’t have had the same impact. Of course, we are telling the same story in terms of the plot points of what happens, but we wanted to create an experience for the viewers where they go, 'Oh, I understand now.' And, 'That’s not exactly the way I thought that it was playing out.' That was very fun for us, but it’s really a tricky puzzle to put together to make sure that you’re hitting the right beats and you’re being true to the story you originally told. But you’re also adding information in a way that feels really satisfying.
Ashley Lyle
To her point, I love the fact that viewers now know exactly who was under the Antler Queen veil — Shauna — and I also appreciate that the Season 3 finale upended my prior assumptions that Pit Girl wasn't the first victim of the Wilderness tribe. Those additional details weren't needed to make the scene work the first time, but they do inherently change one's viewing experience when going back and watching with updated knowledge.
But then Bart Nickerson shared his take on returning to the pilot's opener to fill in those blanks, and my optimistic feelings began to sour. As he put it:
So really, the only major flashes that the show has had — and they felt like flash-forwards — were those vignettes in the pilot [to the Pit Girl scene]. They were these flashes forward that we felt were the major subjective viewpoint. So it was about having our characters move into them and to give them meaning, but also maintain the subjective potency of those flash-pops. Because we’re not seeing anything that is necessarily entirely objective, even in the present-day storyline. Everything is rendered through subjective point of view, to a certain extent. So it was about having them feel different, but without robbing what was powerful about them in the first place.
In particular, his comments about objectivity and subjectivity broke open the floodgates on my already festering worries about everything that we've seen play out in this show so far, particularly when it comes to eventually getting meaningful answers to what the Wilderness is all about.
Why The Co-Creator's Comments About Objectivity Bother Me As A Yellowjackets Fanatic
Early on in Yellowjackets' run, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson tamped down assumptions that supernatural entities were guiding the events in the Wilderness, and that all still technically still feels like it could be the case, even if a lot of moments would need expositional massaging to make total sense. (You're not gonna make me believe a bunch of rare frogs croaked loud enough to give all of the survivors both physical and mental anguish.)
But the EP seems to be saying that viewers shouldn't ever taken for granted that what we're seeing in either the '90s timeline or the current-day timeline is absolute truth. Which is fine enough if we're talking about Teen Van meeting Adult Van before and after her heartbreaking death, since those involve literal impossibilities. But what if we're talking about the perceived guilt or innocence of Coach Ben, or what happened to Laura Lee during her failed solo flight?
All of a sudden, a vast majority of unquestionably fucked up moments from Yellowjackets' first three seasons can suddenly be explained away as, "Well that's just how the characters were interpreting that moment, and it's not what really happened." Which would be fine if it were the only alternate route to an explanation, but it's just the latest.
This is a show that also explores the concepts of mass hysterias, shared and hereditary traumas, various mental illnesses and psychedelics. That round-up could more or less explains Tai's duality (if not that No Eyes Man creepster), Lottie's myriad connections to nature, and certain other questions. So it kind of sucks that we can't even fully rely on what we're seeing to be verifiable truth.
I get that this idea of fractured objectivity is readily meant to be applied to the moment when Callie pushed Lottie down the stairs, and how much of that was first-degree intent and how much of it was a "Wild" impulse. But these other seemingly important moments begin to fall apart when even the omniscient observer is unreliable.
- Travis telling Shauna he still hears thoughts from Javi and Jackie, possibly including details he might not have known about
- How manic and unhinged Lottie actually was as she freaked Callie out about being a child of the Wilderness
- Crystal falling backwards off of the mountain without Misty pushing her
- Anything that happened the night Natalie died
- Anything involving Shauna's pregnancy and thereafter
Perhaps I'm taking this too far, and Bart Nickerson didn't mean to send me off the deep end with those assumptions. It's not like there are plenty of ways to misinterpret what he said, though. With a show like The Afterparty, the built-in concept show characters' actions and dialoque being reinterpreted in a variety of different ways depending on different witnesses' points of view.
That hasn't been the case thus far with Yellowjackets, however. And I don't really want to go into Season 4 questioning whether the snow is real or just subjective cold made whole. R.I.P. Mari, who no doubt deserved it more than Hannah did.
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