‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 2 recap: Looks like meat’s back on the menu, girls!

Once you’ve had a taste, you can’t help but want more, right?

That’s certainly the case with Season 2 of Yellowjackets, both in the meta sense following last week’s excellent premiere, and in the context of a certain starving soccer team in the woods. And if last week’s episode ended with the earful of a payoff we were promised way back at the start of Season 1, this week’s episode—knowingly titled “Edible Complex”—shows that the team behind Yellowjackets is ready to double down and dig into the darkness. Yes, people are going to get eaten. 

Fans of the show’s central mystery—what’s with the symbol, is there something else out there with them—will not get many answers in “Edible Complex,” but rather a whole new set of questions and mysteries. This is arguably the series’ most horror-driven episode yet, from a flashback to the circumstances of Travis’s death to some truly bananas visions during a teen coital scene in the cabin, to the practical effects used in the climactic feast. 

The end result is a second entry that opens no shortage of doors to go through, and further builds the intrigue while ramping up all of the things that make Yellowjackets great. I wrote in last week’s recap about the novelty of this entirely original property and story, and that while we can guess its direction, no one truly knows where it’s going to go. The show’s team has reportedly planned out five seasons, so I have a feeling there are going to be a lot more questions before we get any answers.

This episode opens with everyone’s favourite gal pals—Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) and Jackie’s corpse (Ella Purnell)—having a slumber party, complete with hair-braiding to hide a missing ear. Even post-death, the girls’ friendship, and the teenage tensions grounding it, continues to be the emotional core of the show. “You only had sex with [Jeff] so you could imagine being me,” Jackie says in one particularly biting instance of truth-telling. Meanwhile, the rest of the stranded teens are bickering about someone shitting in the piss bucket—a problem I admittedly hadn’t considered with winter cabin living. 

Later that night, Van (Liv Hewson) awakes to find Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) missing. A frantic search through the snow finds the latter sleepwalking to the edge of a cliff with no recollection of how she got there past going to sleep after taking out the aforementioned bucket. Most interestingly, it appears Tai was following a vision of the mysterious suit-clad figure pictured first briefly in the first season’s opening credits and a few other times throughout the series—another mystery to unravel.

In the present day, Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is on a coffee bender, evidently trying to avoid falling asleep for fear of what she might do. When her young son Sammy apparently shows up after school, wanting to see her, I could sense something was up. Also, was that an image of her eating dirt on the TV briefly behind her? Something is going on.

When her wife Simone arrives to pick him up, he’s mysteriously gone. The pair set out on a frantic car search, before a call from the school reveals that Sammy has been there the whole time—and Taissa definitely isn’t as okay as she thinks she is. The episode’s end, with Tai spacing out at the wheel and a jarring car crash, suggests that real-world impacts are coming.

Elsewhere in the present, Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) daughter Callie is still suspiciously digging into Adam’s disappearance. When one-time-Nat-one-night-stand cop Kevyn Tan (Alex Wyndham) shows up asking questions, Callie helps Shauna out of the situation. However, she may end up hurting her mom without even knowing it, as she bonds with a mysterious mustached stranger at a bar who is actually a cop colleague of Kevyn’s undercover. Misty (Christina Ricci) continues her own detective work, including her first real-life contact with fellow citizen detective “PuttingTheSickinForensics” (Elijah Wood). 

Nat (Juliette Lewis) gets plenty of exposition from adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) at her cult—sorry, “intentional community turning suffering into strength so we can live as our best selves”—including that all of the clothes are obviously not purple, they’re heliotrope. Lottie unpacks for Nat what she claims happened to Travis before his death. Apparently he called her, claiming the “wilderness” had come back, and he needed a near-death experience for answers. While she tried to talk him out of it, the whole self-hanging from a crane was ultimately an accident from a malfunctioning button, and she couldn’t save him. 

Peppered into this account from Lottie’s perspective is also a whole whack of spooky shit, including a vision of the late Laura Lee in the lake, along with a shrieking zombified version of the devoutly Christian teammate. It’s a genuinely frightening sequence fans will be unpacking in the coming weeks as we search for answers to these compounding mysteries. 

Speaking of compounding mysteries, it’s unlikely that Nat’s faking of Javi’s death in the ’90s storyline will lead to anything good. Obviously trying to get Travis to give up his fruitless search, she plants a bloody piece of Javi’s pants in the snow to convince him that his brother is gone. But Lottie’s convinced he’s still alive, leading to a confrontation amongst the group. Afterward, in another mysterious and horrifying sequence, Nat and Travis have sex, accompanied by increasingly spooky visions of Lottie. The act culminates in something—though the thing itself is still a mystery—whooshing down from the sky and dropping a pile of snow on Jackie’s cremation bed.

That’s because yes, the rest of the group has finally had enough of Shauna’s deep-freeze gal pal dish sessions. Taissa’s discovery of Jackie’s corpse done up with braids and makeup is the final straw, leading to a confrontation between Tai and Shauna/Lottie about getting rid of Jackie’s corpse. This week’s news broke that the show will submit Nélisse in the Lead Actress Emmy category rather than Supporting, and this scene suggests she could give the rest of the category a run for their money. The shifting emotions of hurt, guilt, hunger and anger across her face are truly remarkable, and foreshadow an intriguing journey for Shauna to come.

The group decides to ultimately say goodbye to Jackie, cremating her. Lottie removes Jackie’s heart-shaped necklace—the one also worn by the dead girl from way back in the series’ opening scene—and gives it to Shauna. Then after paying her respects, including the heartbreaking line familiar to anyone who was way too close with their best friend: “I don’t even know where you end and I begin,” Shauna lights the pyre and says goodbye.

But, it turns out she’s going to carry more of Jackie with her than just a bite of ear and a necklace. Because after that mysterious wind drops a pile of snow on Jackie’s blazing resting place, the coals start to simmer down from a burning crisp to a pleasant roast. And with them comes a wafting smell that draws the entire group back out into the yard, where Jackie is now roughly the shade of a grocery-store rotisserie chicken. 

In another inspired vision sequence, the group is shown at a Grecian feast, complete with golden circlets, a lavish spread and plenty of laughter. In its final moments, the episode cuts between this scene and the group approaching Jackie, Shauna with her knife drawn. And while it’s unsurprising, considering the raw-ear amuse-bouche she had last episode, that Shauna makes the first cut and bite, saying it’s what Jackie wants them to do, the ravenousness with which everyone else joins in is still shocking. 

Everyone that is, except for the remaining adult in the room—Coach Ben, still hobbled from his leg amputation last season, watches on with a look of horror and disgust as the group descends on Jackie’s corpse. 

Ben’s nervous look from behind the cabin—and our knowledge that he doesn’t make it back from the crash—suggest the one-legged coach may be the next course. 

Other thoughts from the hive

🐝 “So you lied to be a feminist?” Callie is out here asking the important questions.

🐝There are some genuinely funny moments from Lottie’s cult, including a mismade smoothie and some excellence nonsense therapist speak: “You’re in the vice grip of your trauma” is an all-timer.

🐝The Mazzy Star Nonstop Banger Musical Direction Award: An episode relatively light on needle drops still delivers another banger right at the end, this time with Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls.” I guess the smell in “I’ve got the smell of a local man/ Who’s got the loneliest feeling” is roast Jackie.

🐝So, what direction do we actually think this is going? Ghosts? Aliens? The horror of teen experience? All of the visions in this episode suggest that something supernatural has to be at fault. But then again, powerful emotions can lead to seeing a lot of things that aren’t there. Yellowjackets has been compared to Lost in the sense of its central mystery, and much like with that show, I think we have a long way to go before we’re going to get any concrete answers. 

🐝Misty making eyes at Elijah Wood’s character when he shows up at her workplace suggest some very weird and wonderful romance on the horizon, and I’m here for it. More romanticizing dorky guys in high socks and shorts, please!

🐝Nat cutting her own leg to fake Javi’s blood surely is going discovered by Travis at some point, right? Like, if anyone’s seeing her with her pants off, it’s going to be him.

New episodes of Yellowjackets are available streaming in Canada and the U.S. on Fridays, and air live on Showtime Sunday nights at 9 p.m. EDT.