The worst thing in the world may happen to you, and you could find yourself in a situation where you have done the worst thing possible, and you still have to get up in the morning and make yourself breakfast, despite your madness, misery, and agony. You must still wash, put on a face of normalcy for the day, and re-enter life as it unfolds around you. The surviving Yellowjackets are navigating adulthood on dissociative autopilot, and after spending the first season of the show attempting to draw conclusions based on information provided by completely untrustworthy narrators, it’s still unclear what happened out there in the wilderness of their crash site, or even what’s happening now beyond how it’s framed in their shell-like minds. There have been some startling recalls, but there are a few realities we can be assured of: There was an airplane crash. The accident resulted in the deaths of many people. Other people went on with their lives, both within and outside of the woods. It has not yet been established that any catastrophe survivors chose not to be rescued and remain in that cabin in the present day, but I would not be shocked if they did. This is particularly true in the case of Lottie Matthews. But, dead or alive, rescued or not, no one emerged unhurt from that wilderness.
The Yellowjackets are shown the morning after “Doomcoming” cleaning up the shards of the celebration that got away from them while high on shrooms and hormones. Misty, who was kicked out of the group for trying to poison Ben again and accidentally infecting everyone else, stood in front of the cabin, reading a book that attracted my curiosity and led to an hour-long Google search. I tried to expand a screenshot of the book in order to view the author’s name, but I couldn’t. The title, on the other hand, is The Magus. When I typed this word into Google, it was as if a whole new world of context opened up in front of my eyes, directly tied to the most mystical aspects of Yellowjackets’ narrative thread and symbolism. According to Wikipedia, The Magus was written in 1965 by John Fowles and is about “a young British graduate who is teaching English on a little Greek island… and is caught in the psychological illusions of a skilled trickster.” There’s also a book called The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer by Francis Barrett, which was originally published in 1801 and contains symbols that mimic the designs carved in the trees, cabin floor, and painted in red in a hidden spot in Taissa’s basement above their family dog’s severed skull. Francis Barrett was an occultist who studied chemistry and philosophy as well as occultism. He was regarded as an outcast who taught magical skills from his apartment. His most famous work, The Magus, is about “the natural magic of plants and stones, magnetism, talismanic magic, alchemy, numerology, and the elements.” Misty has begun to take unusual books from the cottage where they had been staying. Plant books, survival literature, and now this sort of stuff has made its way into her reading list. It makes me wonder whether Lottie is the genuine Antler Queen or if she is only a pawn put in motion by Misty’s influence.
During their press tours for Yellowjackets’ first season, both Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis remarked that their characters are expert manipulators and that you shouldn’t believe anything they say or do. Juliette Lewis has also said that her character Natalie was presented to her as a chameleon, something she wishes she had seen more of. That tendency, though, seems to be quite obvious in this finale, when she appears lot softer and more adaptable than in any of the prior episodes. All of this tells me that if the flashbacks in this program are recollections of these survivors, and we can’t trust their memories, how can we determine what’s true and what’s not? That’s part of the enjoyment. Isn’t that right?
This show’s ability to inject really LOL comedy into horrible circumstances deserves recognition, and this episode is a shining example of it. Misty, Shauna, Natalie, and Taissa gather to problem-solve together for the first time in 25 years, and it’s “just like riding a very nasty, screwed up bike,” Shauna says while cutting up the remains of her deceased lover. Misty grabs a large quantity of luminal-proof oxygenated bleach, gloves, and everything else they’d need to dispose of the corpse without being detected at work. She’s ready to do so while pretending to come in to get her Tupperware container, which allows for a wonderful cannibalism joke, “Do you intend on bringing home leftovers?” Once Adam has been properly trimmed, Misty offers to lend Shauna the shovel she keeps in her vehicle (shudder), but she makes it clear that she will want it back. She instructs Shauna to place Adam’s corpse in a suitcase and bury it in a specified location, and then she takes home the remnants, Adam’s head and hands, which she disposes of by placing them in the cremation casket of her recently dead patient Gloria.
The death of Shauna’s boyfriend, with all of the grim realities that come with it, seemed to help Natalie come to grips with the truth that Travis most likely did kill himself. We subsequently find that Lottie was the one who emptied his bank account after his death, which, together with the symbols discovered where he was hanging, leads me to believe that he became engaged in the same cult that Lottie, Misty, Van, and Taissa were/are. If we’re to accept that there is a true cult and not simply a fictional one — and it appears quite real when a number of individuals dressed in cult pajamas and necklaces with the cabin symbol storm into Natalie’s hotel room and drag her away just as she is ready to shoot herself in the head. The moment is similar to when Misty barged in to stop her from using coke. Just in the nick of time. Maybe she has more monitoring than simply the Ylang Ylang spy owl in there?
The last 20 minutes of this finale rocked me to a level I haven’t felt since the first time I saw Midsommar. Jackie and Shauna argue at the cabin over Shauna’s betrayal by Jeff and Jackie’s long-term abuse of Shauna as a mere sidekick. Shauna kicks Jackie out of the cabin, and we witness her laboring to start a fire for herself, which she never does. In what seems to be a split dream scene, we witness Shauna fantasizing that she walked out to bring Jackie in from the cold, despite the fact that she never did. We watch Jackie in her dying moments as a cherished member of the team and Shauna’s closest friend. She sips hot cocoa, Laura Lee comes over, and her actual body is outside dying in the cold, which feels just like falling asleep.
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• I couldn’t quite make out what Lottie says at the end, as she hands up the bear heart to her strange tree stump and Misty and Van kneel behind her. It sounded like a “belle of darkness, set us free,” so I Googled it, only to find lyrics to a Hillsong church hymn called “Relentless.” What about you, Justin Bieber? What about you?
• “Duck, shut the fuck up. “You’re an adult.” — Allie, the class of ’96 class chair for their 25th high-school reunion, is having the time of her life.
• “You women are having a good time!” — Misty’s farewell to two coworkers, one of whom is plainly a male.
• “I just had the most bizarre case of déjà vu!” – Misty, wringing a bloody towel out.
• “Are you quoting Beaches right now at me?” —Shauna
• Jessica received what she deserved. Everyone is aware that smoking is harmful to one’s health.
• Taissa’s cult gift of her child’s doll and that wretched dog’s head was made of heavy metal.
• I about died when the “who’s this man” from the start credits appeared during Jackie’s Midsommar scene and said, “So delighted you’re joining us, we’ve been waiting for you.” Is he the man who died in the attic? Or is he just the incarnation of the “cult leader” that Jackie’s dying brain implanted in her mind?
• What happened to Javi on “Doomcoming” night?
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