Yellowjackets

[Murdoch]

The first two episodes of Yellowjackets are free on Amazon Prime. I like the Lost vibes (a show which I think, for its first three seasons, is amongst the best series I've seen, the latter half of the show not so much) but am approaching with a lot of skepticism that it will continue holding my interest.

[jazzo]

The first two episodes of Yellowjackets are free on Amazon Prime. I like the Lost vibes (a show which I think, for its first three seasons, is amongst the best series I've seen, the latter half of the show not so much) but am approaching with a lot of skepticism that it will continue holding my interest.

You’re wise to be skeptical. I’ve never experienced such whiplash from my pleasant surprise and genuine intrigue with the first episode to my outright loathing of the show and most of its characters by the season 1 finale.

There will be no season 2, at least for this guy.

[Murdoch]

Yeah, I'm almost done with the season and it's like a bad YA novel mixed with Desperate Housewives. Splitting up the plot between the teenage survival years and later adult years is an interesting concept but for me all it does is deflate the tension when it suddenly cuts between the two time periods. The last two episodes were particularly bad:

SpoilerShow

the teenagers do shrooms and have some weird party after the religious girl dies in an explosion, and the adult Shauna is revealed as a savage murderer.

i don't really trust this show to hold it together for however many seasons it goes so I think this season will be my only one, too

[jazzo]

There were so many things I hated about the show towards the last half, that the only thing I could concentrate on was Sophie Nélisse’s terrific performance, which is better than the rest of the cast put together.

Between this and her work In The Kid Detective, Monsieur Lazhar and even 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, she is quickly proving to be one of the most commanding young performers working in the industry, north and south of the 49th parallel.

[swo17]

What about the actress from that Pavement video?

[brundlefly]

Yeah, I'm almost done with the season and it's like a bad YA novel mixed with Desperate Housewives. Splitting up the plot between the teenage survival years and later adult years is an interesting concept but for me all it does is deflate the tension when it suddenly cuts between the two time periods. The last two episodes were particularly bad:

SpoilerShow

the teenagers do shrooms and have some weird party after the religious girl dies in an explosion, and the adult Shauna is revealed as a savage murderer.

i don't really trust this show to hold it together for however many seasons it goes so I think this season will be my only one, too

The ninth episode finally delivers what I'd hoped the season had been all along, what was promised by that very promising first episode!

SpoilerShow

A pyschedelic femme-centric Lord of the Flies where they develop their own culture by combining older god local folk horror elements with sports team dynamics.

The show hurt itself by pulling in too many directions. It can be very funny, but its humor is all over the place (the wacky capers, Ricci's cartoonish pyschopath with the Michelle Pfeiffer Selena Kyle 'do). There are huge chunks (the political run esp.) that never feel like anything but time-filler. I always wanted it to be more openly darker, but in the end it wasn't Juliette Lewis' show, it's Melanie Lynskey's, and a lot of the show's tonal struggles fit well within the facets of her character. Who is a serious piece of work.

It has been a while since I've seen it (surprised there isn't discussion of this in TV of 2021) so I'm going to be fuzzy hammering at particulars. And I too have sustainability questions, mostly because I bristle whenever things threaten to err into a conspiracy intrigue thing.

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We're -- or I guess I'm, since you're out -- probably heading toward a cult drama where grown-up Shauna usurps grown-up Lottie as the leader and further realizes herself there. It's not like cult dramas are uncommon, now, but they're certainly not irrelevant.

The teen stuff is inherently more interesting than any of the adult stuff, a built-in problem the show itself recognizes by making everyone in the present mostly concerned with the past. There's a finite amount of material back there to build upon, and if the show struggled to delay the red meat until episode nine, who knows what pickings will be left back there come episode nineteen.

[Murdoch]

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I think I would have liked the Lord of the Flies moment if it felt more organic, but it made me question how things devolved so suddenly and turned a bunch of them into sex-starved huntresses. I believe by the ninth episode they'd been there a few weeks or a month but they all seemed healthy and well fed, and while they complained of food shortage, I didn't get a sense that tensions were reaching a boiling point (at least no more than when they first crashed). Instead, they decide to have a party, accidentally do shrooms and everything just goes off the rails.

But it wasn't so much the Lord of the Flies moment as the group chastising Jackie for having sex with Travis and then leaving her to die in the cold. I get they didn't like her not pitching in but that whole conflict felt like it came out of nowhere.

What's more, the mystical aspect of the story falls flat for me. There's the strange symbol and Lonnie's clairvoyance/powers, but the teenage years are mostly comprised of a love triangle and Misty lusting after the coach. When something dramatic does happen, like the wolf attack on the one girl or the propeller plane explosion, nothing really changes. They just go back to the cabin and continue to complain about food. The wolf attack that leaves a character permanently disfigured is given less attention than Natalie and Travis arguing over how many sexual partners each has had.

It's clear where the show's priorities lie, especially with how much emphasis is placed on Natalie and Travis's relationship. I keep comparing it to Lost, which is unfair to Yellowjackets, but that show knew how to build a mystery and here it feels like the writers are already struggling to fill airtime.

[brundlefly]

SpoilerShow

I think I would have liked the Lord of the Flies moment if it felt more organic, but it made me question how things devolved so suddenly and turned a bunch of them into sex-starved huntresses. I believe by the ninth episode they'd been there a few weeks or a month but they all seemed healthy and well fed, and while they complained of food shortage, I didn't get a sense that tensions were reaching a boiling point (at least no more than when they first crashed). Instead, they decide to have a party, accidentally do shrooms and everything just goes off the rails.

SpoilerShow

My eager anticipation no doubt added justification, but I was happy enough with the skeletal functionality that got us to the devolution. The show had been systematically stripping away means of escape and the YA fantasies until religious escapism was what remained. The self-sabotage that took away possibility of White Knight rescue. The accidents and attacks that took away notions of gung-ho adventurism. The betrayals that took away notions of soulmate partnership, the encroaching winter and depleted stores that revealed how thin the level of self-sufficiency had been. The mushrooms were a cheap accelerant/catalyst, and it probably would have been better had they been ingested at a real moment of desperation than as an offshoot of a misguided psychopath’s woo; but her character, the element of accident, and the tradition of the spiked punch bowl at prom were okay enough excuses. I just wanted to get there, so I will make excuses. And for me it felt like they’d been in the woods for months; it feels like timelines have been kept hazy on purpose. But the path was laid out if maybe the execution didn’t always serve it best.

SpoilerShow

But it wasn't so much the Lord of the Flies moment as the group chastising Jackie for having sex with Travis and then leaving her to die in the cold. I get they didn't like her not pitching in but that whole conflict felt like it came out of nowhere.

SpoilerShow

One of the things I wanted to see more of were the soccer team dynamics, on and off the field, and some crisp parallels with how the group acted in the wild. And I suspect they didn’t do enough to telegraph Jackie’s death because the show needs to tease who could still turn up in the present day storyline. But again, all the functionality of her sacrifice was there: She was the clear alpha in suburbia and clearly useless in the wild. She contributed nothing practical to the team anymore. Her boldest action was to attack the bond between the team’s most vital pieces, their hunters, and in the process try to claim the only virile male in the pack. Her closest ally, her soulmate partnership, was Shauna, but that’s built on a faultline of betrayal and Shauna’s book is definitely not its cover. (“I don’t even like soccer!” was so great that I want it on a t-shirt.) Back home Jackie had taken it upon herself to sacrifice the team’s weakest link; here she was the weakest link and dead weight and a threat.

What's more, the mystical aspect of the story falls flat for me. There's the strange symbol and Lonnie's clairvoyance/powers, but the teenage years are mostly comprised of a love triangle and Misty lusting after the coach. When something dramatic does happen, like the wolf attack on the one girl or the propeller plane explosion, nothing really changes. They just go back to the cabin and continue to complain about food. The wolf attack that leaves a character permanently disfigured is given less attention than Natalie and Travis arguing over how many sexual partners each has had.[/spoiler]

SpoilerShow

The mystical aspect hasn’t been defined enough to fall flat. It barely surfaces until the end of the season; it’s set up to be Season Two stuff as Lottie resurfaces. Natalie is gone, and now the Shauna-Lottie dynamic has to be explored. Am assuming Lottie’s messianic We Have to Go Back to the Island will lose to the more slippery Shauna while forcing her more brutal instincts to the surface. And it doesn’t even have to be mystical! I’d rather it wasn’t. I’m more interested in what culture develops around their desperation.

Sure, the dramatic losses probably deserve more focus – focus is one thing the show never feels like it has, even when it very well may. But they are/were redshirt characters, and the show was openly cavalier about redshirt deaths from its early episodes. “She’s never going to hear ‘Wonderwall’ again!” Hilarious. Am assuming Natalie’s present-day death will get more attention.

But all these kids have to eat every day, so that’s a thing. I too found all the “Who’s a virgin?” stuff annoying, but they are in high school. All that really mattered was that Shauna wasn’t and that didn't need that much time.

For me it’s more troubling how little Taissa, who is supposedly a central character, seems to matter.

It's clear where the show's priorities lie, especially with how much emphasis is placed on Natalie and Travis's relationship. I keep comparing it to Lost, which is unfair to Yellowjackets, but that show knew how to build a mystery and here it feels like the writers are already struggling to fill airtime.

I think it’s not only fair but instructive to compare Yellowjackets with Lost, with of course the understanding that Lost was one of the defining shows of this era. The newer show exists in its shadow and invites the comparison with its plane crash and split timelines. That may have gotten the show greenlit, who knows; networks have been struggling to catch that Lost lightning since before it left the air. All that puzzlebox product touting the promise of escalating mysteries rather than the simple hook of a survival story and the deeper hooks of well-drawn characters. Lost was gifted at both tease and substance, and as someone who dreaded its answers, I admired the way it grew its world on up to that tragic final season. And I was still 70% okay with the finale because it got its characters where they needed to go and because I buried my head while they dealt with that magic carrot/glowy hole nonsense.

Yellowjackets is not nearly as good, so far, at the things that mattered with Lost. It also doesn’t have the resources; just look at the quality of their respective plane crashes and the episode order – the whole of Yellowjackets’ first season consists of fewer than half the hours of Lost’s to tell its initial story. It feels like it’s still finding its voice and its balance while Lost had a sure sense out of the gate. But I think Yellowjackets with all its chaff may be less messy and more intriguing than it feels at first blush; it has a much different energy and balance and a bunch of engaging performers and seems to be going in a different direction. I’d never argue someone who isn’t feeling a show should stick around, but I do and am.

Reserve the right of course to take this all back should Season Two blow chunks.