Yellowjackets Episode 306 Recap: A Brutal Chapter With a Killer Cliffhanger

Welcome to Autostraddle’s Yellowjackets 306 recap, where we will be discussing the episode “Thanksgiving (Canada),” which ends on perhaps the biggest cliffhanger in Yellowjackets history! Let’s get on with it then! The episode was written by Libby Hill and Emily St. James and directed by Pete Chatmon. Catch up on past recaps and also be sure to COMMENT and preface your comment with a couple sentences of filler before saying any spoilers so that they don’t appear in the comments previews on the homepage. Something to note: My usual workaround for screenshotting an episode without just capturing a blank screen is NOT WORKING, so right now there are only promo photos used below, which is not the usual vibe of my recaps. I am working on a fix, and if anyone has one, let me know because I’ll go back in and add!

The first time I saw the end of this episode of Yellowjackets, I practically had to get down and do push-ups? That’s how jacked up I was from the sheer shock of it all. As I say above, it’s easily the biggest cliffhanger Yellowjackets has left us on. What a cliff we find ourselves on! We’re talking KristenCrystal Falling To Her Death-style cliff!!!!!

But first, we must start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, both according to The Sound of Music and in the context of this episode, which starts strong! Shauna rolls up to her house with her squeaky brakes and her head full of voices: Jackie’s from the freezer, Misty telling her about Lottie’s death, the dulcet and haunting tones of “Queen of Hearts.”

Shauna tells Jeff that Lottie died and that she thinks she was murdered. Callie comes in, looking shocked but also…does she? My favorite theory of the moment is that Callie had something to do with this, but let’s circle back to that.

Callie finally hands Shauna the tape she intercepted from the porch and says she thinks she fucked up by not doing so sooner. The brakes, the freezer, Lottie’s death, and now this tape? Shauna connects the dots whether they’re connected dots or not: “Someone is trying to kill us.”

Okay, let me just say up top here that this is easily one of the hardest-to-watch episodes of Yellowjackets ever. It might also be one of my favorites of the season. The writers are making good on their promise that this would be one of the most intense and morbid seasons yet. Previously, I considered Shauna’s birthing episode to be the hardest to watch, but I think this one takes the cannibal cake! And it’s all because of the tragedy of Coach Benjamin Scott.

I know, I know! How could it get even more tragic than it has already been? Well, Yellowjackets doesn’t let up the gas at all on his bleak as fuck arc for Ben, who has basically been on a doomed downspiral since the beginning of the story. In his first scene of this episode, he’s tied up in the animal pen, looking worse for wear, but it’s going to get so much worse.

His ankle, freshly cut by Melissa by Shauna’s orders, is infected. Nat brings him food. She says he was spared. “So, what, someone has a bullshit vision, and I get to suffer indefinitely?” Ben asks. “Wow, what a miracle.” She tells him alive is better than dead, and he tells her to look around. He’s a prisoner. It is no way to live. He asks, for the first time of the episode, for her to kill him. She refuses. She feels that taking away the girls’ hope of going home would be to fail them as their leader. “You won’t always feel like this,” she says. “I promise.” It’s a macabre omen for how the episode will end.

What follows is a devastating montage of Ben asking her to mercy kill him day in and day out every time she brings him food to eat. He tries all sorts of tactics. None of them work. It’s no wonder Adult Natalie is so haunted; all of this with Ben, perhaps even more than her father and more than Javi’s death, is something that would forever alter you. Ben becomes dirtier and more haggard every time. Nat becomes angrier. She does not want to kill him. She knows she probably has to kill him.

His final tactic? He tries to confess to the cabin fire. He tries to goad her into enacting revenge, but that has never been who Nat is. It does break her, but not in the way he wants. She says she won’t bring him meals anymore and that it’ll have to be a split duty added to the chore list they draw cards for.

Van and Tai are going about chores of their own when Van observes it’s getting cold at night already. “We’re going to have to spend another winter here,” she says. Tai points out that at least they’re more prepared this time.

The two wilderness dykes look over at the…other, freshly minted wilderness dykes! Melissa hurriedly follows Shauna out of their shelter and throws her arm around her. “Do you think Mel has to wear Jackie’s clothes when they make out?” Van asks. “She definitely makes Mel call her Shipman,” Tai says, referring to Jackie regularly having called Shauna by her last name. I chortled. I’m glad we’re textually recognizing the sapphic yearning between Shauna and Jackie. I like to imagine this has been an ongoing joke between Tai and Van even before the Melissa of it all. Gays love to speculate about other gays. Melissa pauses and waves at Tai and Van as if she’s happy to be in their special gay club.

Van mockingly says hi back to Melissa, and Tai tells her to be nice. They aren’t hurting anyone, and at least Shauna looks…well, not quite happy. We cut to Shauna whittling a large stick with her knife and sitting like a butch. Tai says she does seem better. “Better” is pretty relative when it comes to Shauna.

Misty tries to charm a forensics guy named Karl into testing biological material found from under Lottie’s nails. She’s still on her Citizen Detective beat of course. She’s also still rocking Nat’s leather jacket. Walter texts to try to ask if she said something to Shauna, who isn’t answering him.

Shauna is busy hiding her family away from probably an imagined killer! I’m not yet convinced someone is actually hunting the Yellowjackets again! They check into a motel — specifically, the Jolly Hitcher, which is the hotel chain owned and operated by The Joels — and, even here, the Parents of the Year make Callie go to “her room” so they can talk about murder and stuff. Jeff asks what’s on the tape, and Shauna says she truly doesn’t know.

Shauna tells Jeff she will take care of it but that she needs Jeff to trust her. Jeff agrees to this very quickly! That’s Jeff: loyal to a fault. He asks when the last time she ate was, and she acts dizzy — emphasis on acts. Jeff goes off to get her snacks from the vending machine, and she springs into action. She calls Tai trying to get ahold of Van. “You know Van and I aren’t friends like that,” Shauna says when Tai, who is in the middle of a massage, asks why she doesn’t just call Van. I’m going to remember this line, because while sure we have seen plenty of instances of Van and Shauna not getting along in the wilderness, this implies to me that there’s an even bigger chasm that opens between them, a line crossed that there’s no coming back from even as they’re adults.

Tai hands Van the phone, and we pull back to see Tai and Van in some sort of luxury hotel, both wearing robes. Tai did ask Van if she wanted a change of scenery at the end of last episode. I guess by that she meant a bougie staycation! Shauna describes the tape to Van and asks if she can play it, and Van, analog queen that she is, boasts she can play any and all unidentified tapes. It’s a DAT tape, which stands for Digital Audio Tape, which was introduced in 1987 by Sony, which released its final DAT product in 1995 — all of which to say, it’s not a super common form of tape. Callie definitely wouldn’t have known how to play it, though I’m sure someone her age would have just Googled it.

Van says she can drop off a DAT player later in the week, but Shauna stresses it’s more urgent than that. She wants her to hand deliver it ASAP. Van tells Tai she feels like Shauna has finally cracked, but it seems Shauna is not the only one cracking! Tai receives her room service delivery, complete with a rare filet mignon, a bacon cheeseburger, and two Maine lobsters. “Did I somehow manage to knock you up?” Van says, with perfect delivery from Lauren Ambrose.

But in all seriousness, something is off. When we met Tai in season one, she didn’t eat meat. What is going on now? Van tries to confront her and points out it doesn’t seem like she cares about anything other than self-care, even with Lottie dying and Shauna spiraling out. Tai spins it all as being about losing her family and her career. She just wants to feel good to feel something. Van says she understands being in a live-for-the-moment kind of place. I mean, yeah, both characters have been doing that for much of this season. But I’m convinced something deeper is happening to Tai, namely that she’s not Tai at all.

Tai asks her who even uses DAT tapes, and Van says in her experience it’s weird garage bands and serious birders and, her face shifts. She’s clearly realizing something. She tells Tai to get dressed immediately. Does anyone with audio knowledge know who else might use DAT tapes? Sound off in the comments!

In the wilderness, Travis approaches Akilah who observes she and Lottie disappeared the day before. He’s wondering if she went to the caves again, and she says she did and she’s only seeing what the wilderness allows her to see. He expresses concern. I still feel like he lied about her being the chosen one just to get Lottie off his back. I also wonder if a Travis/Akilah romance is blooming? Am I the only one picking up on that energy?

Mari apparently drew the Feed Ben card, so she brings him his meal. She realizes he has been on a hunger strike, which I definitely saw coming. Mari, Nat, Tai, and Akilah all meet to discuss. Akilah shares some of her recent visions, and they’re all of things from home, but Tai correctly points out they all sound like memories, not premonitions. They decide they need to convince to eat, and Lottie has an idea. All of Lottie’s ideas lately are BAD! But just you wait for how bad this one is! And I mean bad in the evil sense.

In a quick transition scene, Adult Misty is approached by a limo sent by Walter who hands her Lottie’s trash.

Back in the wilderness, Nat approaches Misty, who feels like she failed Ben. “I’ve kept him alive before, I can do it again,” Misty says. Nat tries to convince her not to do whatever she’s about to do, but Misty stays firm. You’re going to wish Nat fought harder to stop her. But if there’s one thing that’s clear from this episode, it’s that Nat doesn’t really hold any power over the group anymore.

In Tai’s basement, Van goes through her boxes of stuff. Even just seeing Tai’s basement gives me flashbacks to what Simone once discovered there. I’m already on edge! Yellowjackets then leans into supernatural horror here, the lights flickering ominously. Then a landline phone in one of the cardboard boxes, which can’t possibly be plugged in, rings and flashes red lights. Van answers it, and Tai’s voice is on the other end, saying “I can’t” and “help” amid static before the line cuts. Taissa then comes bounding down the stairs asking her about box cutters.

It’s a tight but effective horror scene, driving home the fact that Tai is being possessed by Other Tai and struggling to get out. I love possession narratives, and I do think this one is likely operating on an allegorical level, a way to explore the strategies Tai uses to suppress trauma.

Misty scours through Lottie’s trash and finds a takeout container from Bamboo Cafe, a restaurant that’s lowly rated and doesn’t have vegetarian options and wonders why she would have eaten from there. She stakes out the place and sees none other than Nicole Maines’ Lisa working as a bike delivery girl for the restaurant.

The in-universe reality television series Repo Divorcees MUST have started as an inside joke in the writers room, and I’m loving it as a lover of trashy reality. Jeff and Callie are watching it with snacks in the hotel bed when Shauna gets a call from Van that they’re on the way with the DAT player.

Callie and Jeff want to know where Shauna is going, and she tells them she’s going to find out what’s on the tape. Jeff wants to go with, and so does Callie, but Shauna shoots them both down. “If I’m being completely honest, we haven’t always been the best at keeping you safe,” Shauna says. “We’re trying to do better,” Jeff says very sincerely. These two!

Callie hugs her mom, but it’s all just a way to slip her phone while it’s recording audio into her mom’s bag. She wants to know what’s on that tape, too, and she got her scheming skills from her mother.

If this is the hardest episode of the series to watch, this is the hardest scene to watch. Misty and a group of the others mask up to force feed Ben using a makeshift feeding tube. I actually could only watch this scene once, whereas I tend to watch episodes twice for these recaps. But it’s too brutal; I had to look away, and that rarely happens to me!

Misty, Travis, Van, and Shauna take off their masks, leaving Ben behind coughing up blood. Misty wonders if he kept it all down, and Shauna says they’ll get better at it, a harrowing line. They intend to keep doing this over and over. Ben is right: It is no way to live. It is deeply emblematic of our carceral system, which the Yellowjackets have remade in the wilderness to chilling effect.

Lottie — whose idea this was I’m pretty sure?! — is at the base of a tree begging for the wilderness to talk to her. She hears Akilah, who wants to go into the cave and see if there’s anything she missed, suddenly doubting her visions in the face of what they’ve led to with Ben.

Tai, Van, and Shauna gather in Tai’s car to listen to what’s on the tape. It’s someone’s voice saying “testing, testing, one two three, oh my god, what is this?” That’s all we get for now.

Misty approaches Lisa during a delivery, and Lisa is rightfully terrified, given that Misty had been trying to kill her when she accidentally killed Nat. Misty tells Lisa she’s trying to figure out who killed Lottie, and Lisa is amused. “You think I did it?” she asks. Misty points out Lottie took all her money and her freedom. The motive is right there. “Yeah, I was in a cult that ruined my life, I don’t recommend it,” Lisa says. “But murder? Not all of us turn our trauma into stabby-stabby.” I’m glad we’re acknowledging just how predatory Lottie’s cult was, something only Nat and Shauna seemed to notice last season. Lisa does agree to tell Misty what she knows, but only if they stay out in the open.

Back in the car, shouts and strange noises can be heard on the tape, along with a woman screaming “NO!” Van shuts off the tape. “The only people that even know about this are either us or dead,” Van says. Tai suggests they destroy it, and Van points out it’s probably not the only copy. Shauna points out it came to her house specifically and was part of a series of events specifically targeting her. She realizes Callie’s phone is in her bag recording and takes it out to delete the voice memo. IT’S GOING TO BE IN RECENTLY DELETED, SHAUNA!!!!! IS THIS YOUR FIRST RODEO? She exits the car.

What was on that tape!! Clearly it’s something bad that happened that we haven’t even seen yet. But can it really be something from the wilderness? How would it be recorded?

In the cave, Akilah has a vision of a claymation bear arriving at camp and growing a third eye. There are also flashes of the group doing some sort of ritual. Akilah breaks down, saying she doesn’t know what any of it means. Girl, neither do I!

Nat wakes up in the middle of the night in anguish. She leaves her shelter with a knife. Travis tries to stop her, but this time, she has made up her mind. She has to do this. They can’t keep torturing him. Travis relents and says he’ll keep watch. The sun will be up soon.

Nat goes into the pen. Ben whispers a thank you that is so heartbreakingly earnest. She stabs him in the chest and stays with him until he dies. In the morning, she stumbles out with a bloody knife and wipes a bloody handprint on her cheek. Misty screams “what did you do?!” before accusing her of murder and calling on her to be “arrested.” Again, they’re just replicating these evil, violent systems. “I kept a promise,” Nat says when the others ask what she did.

Misty goes to Ben’s lifeless body and kisses him, one final violation. Ben didn’t deserve any of this. What they did to him is unfathomable, and yet I think we still haven’t seen the extent of the horrors they enacted in the wilderness. For one, this seemingly doesn’t have anything to do with what was on the DAT tape.

The mob surrounds Nat. Tai tries to call for another trial, but Shauna doesn’t want another trial. Lottie steps in and says Shauna will lead them. It’s exactly what Shauna has wanted, and she immediately steps up with a rallying speech. Something about it is giving Kendall Roy!

“When people die out here, we honor them,” Shauna says, which is a cute way to say “we eat them.” Natalie’s punishment? Shauna is going to make her carve up and prepare Ben’s body for the feast. Shauna’s practically salivating at this cruelty.

In the present, Jeff and Callie are playing poker on the motel bed for candy when Shauna returns and asks to speak with Vallie for one of their “special mother-daughter chats.” Shauna accuses her of recording the conversation, and Callie says she has a right to know what’s coming to them. Shauna says she’s a child, and Callie says “I’m the same age you were.” Points! Made!

“I just want to be close to you,” Callie says. “I thought you wanted that, too.”

Being close with Shauna, though, is a doomed thing. Also, does Callie want to be close to her mother to the extent she would commit murder just to be like her? Something to think about!

Sure enough, Callie finds the recording in her recently deleteds. SHAUNA, STUDY UP ON TECH PRIVACY AND SECURITY!!!!

In the wilderness, Shauna shows Nat how to prepare Ben’s body.

Out in public, Lisa tells Misty that Lottie gave her the $50,000. So that suggests Lisa is the one Lottie was meeting up with to apologize to. Misty tries to defend her friendship with Nat to Lisa, who says to start with her friends in her investigation of Lottie’s death. Lisa reveals Tai and Lottie met up the day Lottie died.

Tain bolts awake in the middle of the night and shouts “Van, you’ve gotta help me!” When Van tries to rattle her, her face morphs into a sinister expression and she settles back into bed. It’s a battle of the Tais, and Other Tai is WINNING. Personally, I would not be able to continue to sleep in the same bed as my lover after this horrifying sequence, but Van apparently has no fear.

Misty texts Tai that she wants to meet up. Karl sends Misty back the DNA results, but she doesn’t have samples to compare it against, so she begrudgingly sends it to Walter to see if he has any luck with it.

It’s nighttime in the wilderness, and the girls all sit around a fire draped in their finest furs. Shauna is holding court, and Van tells Tai she was right: Shauna does seem better. They all eat bits of Ben off their plates.

Misty starts humming, and Lottie says this is wrong, isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. She hears laughter and whispering that isn’t there, and then she shouts at the top of her lungs. Something screams back.

The wilderness keeps screeching, and Lottie joins it. She commands the others to sing. Their shouts along with those of the wilderness amalgamate into the score for the series. They start dancing around the fire. When the music cuts out though, it’s just a bunch of teens screaming into the void. Lottie pauses, thinks she sees Ben standing in the distance. More of them stop and notice something.

Or, someone. Lottie shouts “no!” and we cut to at least one man and someone next to him stepping forward and saying “hello.” This…does not seem like a hallucination. The man looks down and sees Ben’s head on a spike. “What the fuck?” We cut to the credits.

If we are to believe these people are real — and again, I don’t think the moment has a group hallucination quality to it — then holy shit. Someone found the girls in the wilderness! But we also know they live through another winter out there, so what happens to these people? Do they use them to eventually secure a rescue but also kill them because they’re witnesses to their little cannibalism ritual with Ben? Does something go wrong with their attempts to get out of the wilderness with them? WHO ARE THEY? HIKERS? DO THEY HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE DAT TAPE?

For now, we know very little. But I welcome any and all theories and speculation. For now, I’m just reeling! This season is keeping us on our fucking toes. This is one of the biggest plot twists yet, and I can’t wait to see if it’s earned.

But also, whew, as much as I love it, I don’t think I want to watch that episode ever again. It’s such a harrowing reality that the girls think they’re preserving hope by torturing Ben when really they are destroying it. By the end, it’s like they’ve gone fully feral for real, having destroyed the last of their humanity by ending his life in such a prolonged and unnecessary way.

RIP Ben Scott. You were actually a pretty good dude.

Last Buzz:

• IS THAT ROBBY FROM NEW GIRL? (It is.)
• “And you know how I feel about cops now.” Jeff said ACAB, hell yeah brother.
• “Plus, Jeff’s already in his sleeping boxers.”
• “I took an oath. And vacation days at work.”