We last saw the Yellowjackets — the all-girl soccer team whose plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness in the mid-1990s — huddled in a dilapidated cabin, shocked by the death of Jackie from hypothermia, and on the brink of starvation. Now human popsicle Jackie is being stored in an outdoor shed where her pregnant best friend, Shauna, is keeping vigil and gazing hungrily at her flesh.
Meanwhile in the parallel present-day timeline, the now fortysomething survivors continue to be haunted by their pasts: stay-at-home mom Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is wrestling with the aftershocks of her affair with an artist whom she later murdered; Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is living alone, her wife and young son having left after her sleepwalking took a dark turn; and, after a failed suicide attempt, Natalie (Juliette Lewis) has been kidnapped and has woken up at a wellness retreat run by Lottie (Simone Kessell) who, since her pseudo-mystical teen years, appears to have gone full guru.
A schlocky mash-up of Lord of the Flies and Desperate Housewives, with a sprinkling of The Wicker Man, the time-hopping Yellowjackets’ appeal lies both in its clever blending of genres and in its fashionable tapping of 1990s nostalgia, making it chime not just with teen viewers but their PJ Harvey-loving parents (the soundtrack is terrific).
The second season has its work cut out to keep up with the multiple and increasingly confusing plotlines. But if the present-day machinations feel contrived, the tensions between the teen survivors, exacerbated by hunger and some questionable hygiene habits, are ratcheting up nicely, aided by spicy dialogue.
Just as compelling are occasional flash-forwards to the survivors’ arrival home following their rescue, where they are mobbed by a media keen to know exactly what took place in the woods. A fleeting scene of one of their number undergoing electroshock treatment suggests acclimatisation was far from straightforward. In this sharply entertaining and addictive series, the scars from the past run deep.
★★★★☆
Weekly on Paramount Plus from March 24 in the UK and on Showtime in the US from March 26
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