Yellowjackets review: Greg and Zanna’s verdict on season two

Melanie Lynskey in Yellowjackets, season 2.

Greg and Zanna review the second season of a series chock-full of mystery and New Zealanders.

SCORES

Seasons: 2

Actors from Aotearoa: 2

Reviewers with Covid: 2

HE SAW

I watched the first season of Yellowjackets a couple of months ago, on the weekend I got Covid and Zanna banished me to the basement to isolate. My feelings towards the show were complicated, because I liked the fact it helped distract me from my illness but at times I couldn’t hear the dialogue over my groaning and couldn’t see the screen because of my writhing.

With the benefit of my retrospective relatively good health, I can say the first season was excellent, succeeding as a compelling and amusing narrative on both the teenagers-stranded-in-the-jungle timeline and the adults-dealing-with-their-trauma timeline. Both stories were strong enough that they would have worked as separate shows, but the way they played off and sparked against each other elevated it to something original and brilliant. The concept was strong - and that’s half the battle - but it was also excellently executed. Lurking in the background were the multiple questions forming the show’s overriding mystery: did the teenagers eat someone? Who? And, if so, why have they gone to such great lengths to lie about it and cover it up, particularly when the real-life teenage plane crash cannibals who sparked the idea for the show were upfront about it from the get-go?

I had watched it without Zanna because it was scary and she hates scary stuff, but two days after my diagnosis, when she tested positive and I stumbled back upstairs, semi-conscious, and collapsed back into the bosom of my family, she told me I shouldn’t have. “But you hate scary stuff!” I assume I protested, but I was too delirious to know what her counter-argument was.

We’re now both healthy and are three-and-a-half episodes into the second season. The cannibalism question has already been settled but new mysteries are arising and flowering all over the place, the show’s off-kilter humour remains intact, and there are now double the number of New Zealanders in lead roles. There’s a greater supernatural element than in the first season, but there are already suggestions that what appear to be weird powers might be mental illness, which adds complexity to the omnipresent intrigue.

As important as the content is the context: Zanna’s resentment of my viewing the first season alone, my guilt at having done so, the intermingling of my memories of season one with my memories of the worst illness I have endured in years. It’s a toxic brew, perfect for watching a show that’s increasingly strange and unsettling, and about the unravelling of relationships in the face of severe stress and mental illness.

SHE SAW

Greg had irregularly made murmurings about wanting to watch Yellowjackets - as had I - but due to its location on my disturbometer, a night on which I was enthusiastic about watching it hadn’t yet occurred. Which isn’t the same as giving him carte blanche to watch it alone, which he did while away one weekend for work or something. When the opportunity to review season two came along, I jumped at the chance to throw him under the bus for committing mutual-entertainment adultery.

It’s a strange role reversal for us to watch this show together, because I’m usually the one explaining to Greg who everyone is. I don’t know how he made it through the first series without me because it’s a large ensemble cast existing over two timelines: one in 1996 when a plane carrying a high school girls’ soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness - hello, Alive - and one in the present day following the survivors. The actors playing the high schoolers don’t look especially similar to their adult counterparts, so for a man who is self-diagnosed as face-blind, it must’ve been a chaotic watch.

It stars a brilliant young cast alongside Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress and, this season, fellow New Zealander Simone Kessell. Greg told me Kessell’s character, a witchy, self-help guru cult leader, is new this season but he doesn’t know whether or not her younger self was in the first season (she was). His lonely binge turned out to be of very little use to me.

The central mystery across the series is: what happened out there? We know that they eventually get rescued, that not everyone made it out and that they went through an unspeakable ordeal that has scarred and bonded them for life. It’s a very compelling premise that appeals to our morbid fascination with survivalism, which is also responsible for an unthinkable 44 seasons of the reality show Survivor.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the tone of the show. There’s the tragedy of the plane crash and the trauma carried through to the present day, a foreboding and mysterious mystical/supernatural element and then intermittent comic relief from Ricci’s character who is a musical theatre-loving Nancy Drew trying to uncover a current day mystery, now with Elijah Wood in tow.

It works. I’m hooked. And not only because of the 90s soundtrack precisely pitched at our demographic. I want to know what else could’ve happened out there - cannibalism obviously but what else? I want to continue to question where I’d draw the line: what wouldn’t I do to survive? I want to get mildly ill and binge-watch the rest of the series in bed.

Yellowjackets is streaming now on Neon.