For Lorelai Gilmore, the first snow of the year is always a joyous occasion. She claims she can smell snow and believes that it’s magical, and it reminds her of cozy times. Conversely, on Yellowjackets, the first snow of the year is a harbinger of doom. As the first flakes fell on a distraught Natalie during this episode, I truly wondered if any of the surviving Yellowjackets watched Gilmore Girls when it premiered in 2000, and whether or not they threw heavy objects at the TV every time Lorelai started smiling like a goon at the snowy sky.
In the wilderness, snow basically equals death. The first time the Yellowjackets saw snow after the crash was the night that Jackie froze in her sleep outside of the cabin. Now, as the group faces down another brutal winter, courtesy of Shauna’s megalomaniac tendencies, there’s sure to be more death to come.
The penultimate episode of the season focuses heavily on Shauna and how her destructive impulses have affected all of the people in her orbit. As a character, she’s not actually featured much in the present-day story line, but her actions have had a ripple effect that brought the rest of the surviving Yellowjackets to Melissa’s doorstep. I will pause to say that Tai, Misty, and Van all head to Melissa’s house voluntarily, but Shauna’s mutilation of Melissa has seemingly tipped the Yellowjacket-in-hiding back over from “normal, boring life” mode and back into stealth wilderness mode.
In the wilderness, Shauna continues to terrorize the group for her own gains. The only people who aren’t distraught about her decision to keep them all hostage are Tai and Lottie. In a brief aside with Van, Tai explains her decision to stay, saying she doesn’t want to stay forever, just until “loose ends” — a.k.a. Hannah and Kodi — are dealt with. (Presumably she means they need to be killed in order to stay quiet about the Ben-B-Q, but how will they hike out without Kodi? Thanks to Hannah, this is also a question that needs answering by the end of the episode.) Van knows there’s probably going to be another hunt soon, and Tai urges her to keep practicing with the cards so that they don’t get chosen in the next round, whenever that may be. Van begrudgingly accepts this, and somehow even ends up on Team Shauna when she calls a meeting later in the episode. But she doesn’t stop noodling with the broken sat phone.
Shauna is fully relishing her role as captor to these girls and even has a little fun toying with Melissa. When Shauna confronts Melissa about getting too chatty with Hannah, Melissa holds her ground and then storms out of the hut. Shauna is furious at this show of disrespect, so she points the gun at Melissa in front of everyone. With the exception of a few lame shouts from the peanut gallery, no one really tries to stop this from happening. In a display of awful cruelty, Shauna aims and shoots … grazing Melissa’s jean jacket and laughing when Melissa wets herself in terror. In an act of kindness, Van covers up Melissa and ushers her away. (An act of kindness that will be conveniently forgotten by Melissa in the adult timeline.) Shauna smirks to herself; she might just be pure evil at this point.
Behind the scenes of Shauna’s hostile takeover of the camp, Natalie works to mastermind an escape. Mari, Gen, and Akilah chat, and Akilah says that she hopes she dies first if they end up staying because she can’t do another winter out in the woods. This brings up an interesting point. There are still a handful of girls in the wilderness that we haven’t seen in the present, specifically these three girls. If Mari doesn’t end up being Pit Girl, what happens to this trio before the group is finally rescued? Could there be another adult Yellowjacket waiting in the wings? Can I put in a request for an adult Akilah, please?
The wilderness is large, and there are lots of places to hide things. So we also see Misty sneaking away to check on the sat phone and Travis messing with the pit that Ben found earlier in the season. Instead of just murdering Lottie, he’s set up spikes in the bottom of the pit and covered it over with branches and leaves. This seems like the cruelest way to kill, but Travis isn’t exactly of sound mind. He asks Lottie to wander into the forest to check out a mystical source with him, and then watches as she walks over the pit and doesn’t fall. This feels like it’s meant to signal that Lottie is so important to the wilderness that It won’t let her die, but it could also be that Lottie’s deliberate and measured steps don’t cause the blanket of branches to fall. Either way, now we have a completed pit, but no girl. Yet.
In the present day, the Yellowjackets are still arguing over who killed Lottie. After Shauna force-feeds Melissa her own flesh, Melissa spits it back in Shauna’s face and escapes. However, she then runs out of gas on the side of the highway. There’s a pretty hilarious sequence where Misty, Tai, and Van stumble upon Melissa, capture her, and bring her back to her house, but then everything kind of just goes downhill from there.
Once they’re at Melissa’s house, blame gets tossed around for Lottie’s death, with Shauna pointing fingers at Melissa and then Misty pointing fingers at Shauna. When Shauna presents an alibi for being in the city on the day of Lottie’s death, Misty leaves to go do more detective work. Walter picks her up in a helicopter (weird) and brings her to his house, where he serves her a double chocolate martini and lets her peruse the contents of Lottie’s phone. Something Misty sees on the phone causes her to have a strong reaction, but I guess we’ll have to wait until the finale to find out what she saw.
Back at Melissa’s, Shauna, Tai, and Van argue about what to do with Melissa. They reveal that Shauna killed a man named Adam, a fact that seems to shock Melissa. They tie her up and consider killing her, but then Melissa pulls the vent to her flue, flooding the house with carbon monoxide. Everyone passes out except for Van, who has been outside breathing from her oxygen tank. When she comes back in, she plays the hero, dragging Tai out and giving her the oxygen, which somehow exiles the “Other” from Tai’s brain and brings back the Tai she fell in love with. Sorry not sorry, but this little reverie is anticlimactic, and the entire Tai-not-Tai plotline was a huge, unnecessary snooze. In fact, Van’s entire arc this season was pretty lame. This episode attempts to wrap all of the nothing up in a nice bow, but despite Lauren Ambrose’s best efforts to sell what’s happening, it all verges on the nonsensical and, even worse, boring.
One saving grace is that it’s truly fun to see adult Van chatting with her teen counterpart. As Van starts to succumb to her cancer, we get a bunch of scenes where Ambrose and Liv Hewson get to verbally spar throughout the episode, and I love that for them (and for all of us). At the top of the episode, teen Van talks to her adult self about The Goonies and finding the “X” that marks the spot. Van wakes up, declares, “Goonies never say die,” and then makes Tai follow her out of the hospital. She knows she doesn’t have much time, but it’s unclear what she means to do. I guess she’s motivated by potentially killing Melissa as a sacrifice and buying herself more time?
As Van confronts Melissa in the poison-filled house, she tells her what she plans to do. Ambrose and Hilary Swank do what they can with this hollow dialogue, but we’ve heard it all before. Maybe there was an entity in the wilderness, but maybe not! And maybe a sacrifice will help the situation, or maybe they’re all just delusional psychopaths! No matter. Van can’t bring herself to go through with killing Melissa, so Melissa takes the wheel and kills Van instead. The reason she does this is completely unclear, so there’s no catharsis or even sadness when we see Van ascend to the afterlife in the airplane.
Van gets another moment to chat with her teen self, where she asks why she sent her on the Goonies chase. Teen Van responds that this is just how their story goes, and then she cryptically says, “Surviving this was never the reward,” to which Van responds, “If this isn’t the ending, then tell me what happens.” She doesn’t get a response. Are we getting some sort of Lost purgatory situation where the group convenes in the afterlife? Because other than that, I don’t see how this isn’t the end of Van.
Tai is heartbroken. She collapses on the floor next to Van and sobs while Shauna looks on. The body count for adult Yellowjackets now stands at four, and there are four left. It’s starting to feel like And Then There Were None up in this piece, and that there will only be one Yellowjacket standing by the end of all of this, but who will it be? And why do I think that it’ll be Shauna? For what it is worth, Shauna’s family is actually thriving without her. In her absence, Jeff lands the furniture gig with the Joels and then bonds with Callie over a joint. Their dialogue concerning Shauna is a bit repetitive, but it’s starting to feel like they’re realizing they are better off without her.
The wilderness contingent also feels — very strongly! — that they’d be better off without Shauna. History repeats, I guess. Or maybe Shauna should stop being such a controlling bitch. Natalie secretly gives Hannah a knife and tells her to cut herself and Kodi free after dark. Then, they’ll all run for it. However, that night, Shauna’s spidey senses tingle and she finds Hannah and Kodi mid-escape. In a frantic bid to save her own life, Hannah tells Shauna that Kodi had the knife and then brutally stabs him in the eye, killing him instantly. Good-bye, Joel McHale, we hardly knew your character.
Hannah comes up with a story about how she wants to be a part of what the Yellowjackets have built in the wilderness. So she’s either batshit insane or she’s working an angle. For her part, Shauna does seem impressed with this woman’s ability to kill her traveling companion in cold blood. We don’t know what’s to become of Hannah, though, because the scene cuts away to the rest of the girls anxiously waiting in a clearing. Melissa runs to them, telling them that the escape plan has gone bad, and everyone disperses. Everyone except for Natalie. Alone and heartbroken, Natalie lifts her tear-streaked face to the heavens as snow begins to flurry down, a moment that delivers one of the most arresting visuals of the series.
However, in this moment of despair, a glimmer of hope emerges. Natalie sees a bobbing light in the distance and follows it. It’s Misty. She’s checking out the transponder. Natalie is horrified to learn that Misty knew where the transponder was this whole time, but Misty is all smiles. “I know how to get us home!” she cries. So perhaps Lorelai Gilmore was right. Maybe the snow is magical, after all.
Buzz, Buzz, Buzz
• All this talk of snow is making me wonder if Lorelai Gilmore would have survived in the wilderness. Despite the glaring lack of coffee, I think she would have thrived. Rory, on the other hand, wouldn’t have had a chance in hell.
• Is it just me, or was there some sexual tension between Shauna and Kodi before Hannah knifed him in the eyeball? Like, Shauna was looking at him like a piece of hunky meat in that pen, right?
• Tai admonishing Shauna for attacking Melissa, saying, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you turned her arm into sashimi,” is a super-funny line. These cannibals and their jokes!