Warning: This story contains spoilers from season 2 of Yellowjackets.
No going back now. Yellowjackets took things to the next level by having the stranded group finally feast on their first human meal — which turned out to be Jackie (Ella Purnell).
During the new episode, which aired on Friday, March 31, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) kept speaking to her late friend as if she was still alive. After Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) found Jackie’s corpse covered in makeup and moved, she decided that they would cremate her to help Shauna move on. Although Shauna initially parted ways with Jackie, a mysterious gust of wind blew a ton of snow just as the body was perfectly cooked by the fire.
The girls (and Travis) noted that the smell was calling to them to feast on their friend. Yellowjackets introduced a sequence that shifted back and forth between the group’s brutal meal and a hallucination of the girls decked out in Renaissance attire enjoying fruit and wine. Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), however, watched in horror as his students satisfied their hunger.
Before the hit Showtime series returned for its second season, showrunner Jonathan Lisco confirmed that viewers would finally see the moment the group descends into cannibalism.
“If we do our job right, the eating of a person will not be the most transgressive thing that these young women do in the wilderness,” he told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
The screenwriter said it was important to build up to the dark turn, adding, “If season 1 was about our teen characters learning to adapt to their harsh surroundings, season 2 is where it all just really explodes. Each one of them is gonna make choices that they never dreamed possible. And, and as we cut forward 25 years, we’re gonna watch those terrible actions surface in ways that I would say irrevocably changed the fate of their lives.”
Nélisse, 23, previously hinted that fans weren’t ready for the twists and turns in season. “There’s scenes in season 2 that are graphic, to say the least, and I remember just doing it, and [the cast] all sat and looked at each other, and we were like ‘What the f—k are we doing. Like, literally, what the fuck are we doing,” the actress, who plays teen Shauna, said during a panel in December 2022. “You’ll look at it, and you’ll understand, but I don’t think you’ve ever seen such a scene in TV before.”
According to the Canada native, the season will continue to build-up to an unexpected pay off. “When I read this specific episode, I remember being terrified,” Nélisse told Variety that same month. “Episode 6 — it gets very intense. I read it, and I was like, very excited, and then immediately sobbed. I was talking to my psychologist, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it, I’m not good enough for this.’ I was freaking out.”
Scroll on for a breakdown of what each character went through in the new Yellowjackets episode:
