Hello and welcome to your Yellowjackets 302 recap! If you’re actually looking for the recap of the season three premiere, you can find that here. Come back when you’ve seen the second episode, which also dropped today on streaming. I swear if anyone tries to tell me the headline of this recap is a spoiler, I will scream! I don’t say who is gay! It’s a very vague question that could mean ANYTHING! I also strategically picked the featured photo so as not to spoil anything (you already know Tai and Van are gay!!!), though spoilers certainly do abound if you read any further, so you’ve been warned now. Please hop in the comments to get the conversation about the episode going! This is “Dislocation,” written by Rich Monahan and Ameni Rozsa and directed by Bille Woodruff.
THERE’S SO MUCH TO DISCUSS BUT ALL I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IS THAT KISS!
Okay, but fine, I will refrain and save the best for last. Just know that I have bravely had to sit on this reveal for WEEKS since watching my screener, and the whole time I’ve been like “Autostraddle readers are gonna be so gagged.”
“Dislocation” opens with Mari screaming from the pit she accidentally fell into after Coach Scott set a trap to catch food. He caught a lot more than he bargained for. Now Mari knows he’s alive, making her a liability. She also has a dislocated knee, which he has to coach her through realigning. Nothing like a bit of bone crunching sound effects to kick off an episode of Yellowjackets!
“Dislocation” really is a perfect title for this episode. There’s its physical meaning, referring to the displacement of bone. But there’s also its more sociopolitical meaning: a disruption to an established order. We can see dislocations in many parts of this episode.
Before we cut to the title sequence, Shauna visits the grave of her dead baby, removes the corpse from the group burial grounds and places him somewhere more private that only she knows about. We hear an echo of her words from last season: “it’s me and you against the world.” Teen Shauna, indeed, doesn’t really have many alliances at this moment, alone on an island with her grief and the haunting absence of her baby. In her ongoing attempts to broker peace between Shauna and Mari, Nat asks Shauna to join her in a search party. Shauna’s response? “Fuck Mari.” Yeah, Nat is a bit out of her league when it comes to fixing this one.
In the Sadecki household, Shauna attempts to be a normal housewife, making a green smoothie for Jeff that she plops a few random whole blueberries into? Even these small attempts at normalcy seem like Shauna’s wearing a weird costume. Jeff reminds her they have dinner with a couple of hotel hotshots tonight who he’s trying to land a furniture contract with. Shauna, far worse at lying in her adult years, struggles to come up with an excuse to get out of it, but before she can think of one at all, there’s a knock at the door.
Lottie is back! And Shauna pretty much slams the door in her face, literally saying “take your shit and get off my lawn.” Shauna can’t believe she would show up here after everything that happened at the compound, especially the whole part where her daughter shot Lottie and saw Nat die. Lottie agrees Callie never should have been there…but wasn’t that Jeff’s fault for bringing her? Simone Kessell and Courtney Eaton have the least aligned performances of all the pairs, but they’re both great in their own ways, and Kessell is especially funny in little moments like this one.
Callie walks in on this mess and insists Lottie should stay. She tells her mom she has such “I want to speak to the manager energy,” to which Shauna responds “I do fucking not.” (She does.) The Sadeckis have a family meeting where they remind Callie how dangerous Lottie is and she subsequently reminds them how dangerous they are. Callie spins some story about wanting to help someone who’s unwell and also seek forgiveness, but I’m sure Callie has an angle here, because Callie is becoming her mother’s daughter more and more every episode. Sure enough, she has a motive of her own, which we’ll get into.
Van is on Tai’s couch singing karaoke when Tai walks in. Van says she’s feeling bad about the dine and dash incident (and she doesn’t even know about the server having a heart attack!) so she proposes going to the restaurant to settle up. Tai and Van then flirt with each other, Tai feeling Van up teasingly looking for a wire. As they kiss, Van accidentally steps on a glass and pierces her foot. Is it just me or is bad stuff happening every time these two get together? First Tai seeing the man without eyes and now Van getting a puncture wound! They agree that Van will go to urgent care and Tai will go settle up with the restaurant. I’m stressed!
Walter is still trying to take care of Misty by bringing her a tray of hangover cures and suggesting calisthenics to flush the toxins. He remains chipper in the face of her depressive funk and misdirected anger. Walter tells her he feels like her “friends” don’t actually care about or support her. He’s not wrong! But Misty doesn’t want to hear it, and while she respects his commitment to cage maintenance (he reminds her they’re supposed to clean Caligula’s cage together on Wednesdays), she doesn’t think he really gets her, and she’s convinced that Shauna and Tai do.
“Sometimes I forget you can’t possibly understand relationships forged in life-and-death experiences,” Misty tells him. “See, us survivors, we’re not sitting around keeping some petty log of who needed what when. Our bond just runs deeper than that.” She’s correct about the fact that the Adult Yellowjackets understand each other on a very deep level, but she mistakes that understanding for unconditional love and genuine care whereas Shauna and Tai are more interested in self-preservation. They’re bound by their trauma (though not trauma bonded, one of the most misused psychological terms these days, a personal pet peeve of mine), but that doesn’t mean they’re safe together. I mean, just look at what happened the last time they were all together.
Back in the wilderness, Teen Misty and Teen Nat are looking for Mari. Tai and Van are searching, too, though on their own. Travis wants to join, but Lottie is very pushy about their mushroom therapy sessions, foreshadowing some of Lottie’s cult leader future. Misty asks Nat if she thinks Coach Scott is really dead and if he really burned the cabin down. Nat evades the questions and also downplays her friendship with him. Later, when they stumble upon one of Coach Scott’s hunting traps, Nat tries to distract Misty from looking at it, but she spots it anyway. Nat redirects them, making Misty very suspicious of what Nat knows and supporting my theory Nat absolutely knows Coach Scott is alive. He did ask her to join him by splitting off from the others at the end of last season, and she may have gone with him if she hadn’t just watched Javi die in her place.
Mari, trying to bargain with Coach Scott from the pit, asks how she’s supposed to get out, especially given the screaming they heard the night before. So, they heard it, too. It wasn’t just the participants in the solstice ritual. I still think it could be some sort of shared auditory illusion or misinterpretation of normal nature sounds as something bigger and badder. Mari pivots to a new strategy other than making him feel bad for her and says she never believed he burned the cabin down. Coach Scott’s reaction to this makes it seem very much like he for real did NOT burn the cabin down! He doesn’t even know it burnt down! And he may be gay, but he’s a sporty gay not a theater gay. I don’t think his acting is good enough that he’d play stupid about this. I think he really didn’t know.
As they look for Mari, Tai tells Van she feels like Nat failed them by not letting them look for Coach Scott. Van asks Tai if she wishes she’d been named the leader in Nat’s place, and well, yeah of course Tai feels that way even if she won’t admit it outright. Van says the wilderness doesn’t want to be governed. She’s correct! And not because of some supernatural force but because nature has its own agenda beyond us as humans, and often the human impulse to try to control it or dominate it leads to violence and chaos. The wilderness is trying to survive just like the Yellowjackets are. It’s probably only a matter of time before I write an entire piece about Yellowjackets and climate change, so consider this a teaser!
Van and Tai hear screaming and realize it’s Travis. He’s hallucinating as Lottie asks him to describe what he’s seeing. He starts choking her when she pushes too hard, and Tai and Van pull him off her. This is a particularly tough scene to watch in the context of Travis’ final moments of life, which were spent with Lottie. He wanted to get close to the experience of letting the wilderness in, and it ended up killing him as Lottie watched. When we first saw that scene last season, it felt a little strange and untethered, but this season three scene grounds it a bit more in their past dynamic and drug-fueled experiments together.
Later in the episode, Coach Scott helps Mari out of the pit but then ties her up to take her as prisoner, pointing out that she’ll just go running back to the others and tell them he’s still alive. If they all think he burned the cabin down, he knows he’s a dead man if they find him. He has seen what the group’s mob mentality leads to, and Javi’s death was the last straw. He leads Mari blindfolded back to the cave where he has been hiding out. It’s in the cave near the end of the episode when he hands her a mug full of hot chocolate. Okay, so maybe his survival box discovery was real after all and not a hallucination. But…he’s not exactly out of the hallucination hole entirely. As Mari drinks her hot chocolate, she overhears him talking to…no one. Is it his boyfriend Paul? Or a new hallucination entirely?
Adult Misty perks up when she gets a call from Shauna asking her to come over, but it’s not the friends hang she wanted. She realizes something is off and asks if it’s an intervention and if Walter called to share about her recent drinking. But no, it isn’t that. They have no idea what she’s talking about. Shauna only called Misty so she could be a “babysitter” for Lottie and Callie and keep them from being alone together. All of Walter’s words came true: The other Yellowjackets only call Misty when they need something.
When Tai arrives at the restaurant, she offers to pay cash, obviously not wanting a dine and dash scandal to be traced back to her. It’s a cashless restaurant though, so she presents her credit card, and the woman at the register says she needs to get her manager since she’s just filling in and doesn’t know how to ring it up. Then Tai notices a makeshift memorial set up with candles and a photo of their server from the night before. Another server informs her he died of a heart attack while on shift, and Tai realizes the consequences of her and Van’s actions and quickly grabs her credit card and gets the hell out. I bet she wishes she had Jessica Roberts around to fix this one! (RIP)
While reorganizing Shauna and Jeff’s cupboards, Misty berates Lottie, frustrated with her for the same reasons Shauna is. Lottie apparently has not let up on the whole wilderness getting what it wants thing. She still thinks they performed some sort of ritual bound to the past the night Natalie died. She asserts her beliefs are rooted in her faith and not in any kind of psychiatric hallucination.
Callie creeps around the corner, clearly eavesdropping. She whips out some alcohol, wanting to get the party started. “What are afraid of exactly, my mom?” Callie asks when Misty tries to shut it down. “To be fair, we’re all afraid of your mom,” Lotties says. No kidding! Shauna might literally be the scariest Yellowjacket, and they’re ALL SCARY!!!! Misty makes the mistake of confessing she has never been to a sleepover (“What was our time out in the wilderness besides one really long, really cold sleepover?”), and Callie uses Misty’s lifelong desperation to be part of group to manipulate into this “sleepover” between two unhinged adults and a teen girl. What could possibly go wrong!
Speaking of going wrong, Jeff and Shauna’s dinner with the hotel dudes is a disaster from the start. They’re dicks, and Jeff is forced to suck up to them even though he clearly has no idea what tapas are (oh, Jeff). Shauna spends much of the meal texting under the table, trying to check in with Misty. She’s not doing a very good job of even pretending to be interested in these guys. When they go off to greet someone they know, Shauna refers to them as “the Joels” to Jeff even though only one of them is named Joel. She’s so right though; they both have Joel energy.
At the sleepover from hell, Misty and Lottie are wearing animal skincare masks which, even though they look cartoonish, are oddly reminiscent of the fact that they wore animal masks during hunting rituals in the wilderness. Callie proposes a game of truth or dare. Here was her real motive. She wants the answers to questions her mother won’t give her. Lottie chooses dares, and Callie wastes no time: “I want to know what really happened out there.” She’s not talking about in 1995; she means out in the woods the night she witnessed Lottie about to ritual-kill her mom. Misty tries to intervene and asks for a dare. Callie dares her to chug her cocktail…a cocktail that Callie just made with cherry-flavored allergy medicine instead of grenadine. Misty promptly passes out, leaving Callie alone with Lottie, her endgame all along because if anyone is going to actually answer her questions, it’s Lottie.
After running out of the restaurant, Tai wanders into a late-night church service and drops the matchbook from the restaurant into a prayer candle in front of a Mary statue (between the first two episodes, we get a lot of Catholic imagery, which is fitting given the cannibalistic undertones of transubstantiation). (I believe someone in the comments before has gone long on the Catholic symbolism utilized throughout the series, so if that was you, would love to hear more from you again!)
In another restaurant where people are having a bad time (though not as bad a time as the dead server), Jeff is probably learning what tapas are while Shauna goes to the bathroom so she can try to contact Misty. While in a stall, she hears someone enter and sees their shadow standing right in front of her door. The lights cut out, and Shauna springs into survival mode, splaying her keys in her fingers and ready to attack. But there’s no one there, just a phone left behind on a toilet that starts ringing and playing “Queen of Hearts” by Juice Newton…an upbeat but ultimately eerie song given the whole queen-of-hearts-card-in-the-wilderness situation.
Shauna turns the phone in to the bar and then returns to the table with Jeff and the Joels, who start not so nicely turning Jeff down. Shauna intervenes and asks Joel what his dad does. Joel dodges the question and says he’s retired. Shauna asks what he used to do and eventually extracts from Joel that his dad worked in luxury real estate. Earlier in the episode, Joel insisted he and his business partner were “humble motherfuckers” and “self-made,” which was already clearly untrue, but Shauna masterfully exposes them as nepo losers. Of course, this isn’t going to land Jeff any contracts, so he’s rightfully pissed off with her. But it does land a round of applause from ME!
In the wilderness, Travis is struggling big time, traumatized from his hallucinations. Akilah offers him a duck to hold onto, and he clings to it. “It actually told me that it didn’t want me,” Travis tells Lottie, who insists he needs to keep connecting with the wilderness. “Someone else here is already closer to it. It’s why the animals trust her.” He’s talking about Akilah, who is indeed the animal whisperer in the wilderness (and at least they’re alive ones this time and not a rotted dead mouse!). Now, I don’t necessarily think the wilderness “told” this to Travis. I think he’s just trying to get Lottie to shift her focus away from him onto someone else, and Akilah is a solid target given her affinity for animals.
Misty and Nat return from searching for Mari, and Misty tells Shauna she thinks Nat knows where Coach Scott is. Shauna tells her not to tell anyone else, clearly wanting to keep this in her backpocket to deploy at some later time.
Back in present day, Callie and Lottie are watching a campy reality television show called Repo Divorcees and doing each other’s hair when Shauna and Jeff get home. Misty, still half asleep, pukes on Shauna’s kitchen island. Successful sleepover! Misty returns home to Walter fixing up Caligula’s cage. She’s super drunk again, and he’s worried. He goes in on her “friends” again, and she yells at him to stop air quoting her friendships. Misty starts describing everything Walter has been doing for her over the past several days, and it all sounds…exactly like how Misty treated Natalie a lot of the time. She was always following her around and trying to “help,” even when Natalie insisted she didn’t need her help. And if we go back even further, Misty did the same to Coach Scott, too. She doesn’t like this behavior turned back around on her, even though she’s desperate for reciprocal friendship.
At Tai’s place, Van gets home from the doctor and asks her how it went at the restaurant. Tai lies and says it was good and straightforward. Now, we know Tai is lying, but why does it sound like Van is also lying about going to urgent care?
Okay, it’s time!
We end the episode by jumping back and forth between Shauna in the present and Shauna in the past. In the present, she calls the restaurant to see if anyone picked up the phone. She wants information about whose phone it is, but as usual, she bungles her way through her lies. She also asks to speak to the manager, fulfilling Callie’s accusation.
In the past, Shauna visits her baby’s grave again but feels as if she’s being followed. She pulls out a knife and demands that whoever it is “get out here.” It’s Melissa, and she says she was just keeping an eye on her. “No one has any right to my baby,” Shauna threatens her.
“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to you,” Melissa says. “You are, you’re so resilient and that’s so important out here.”
“Everyone’s afraid of you, you know, but I’m like, I’m not,” Melissa says. Shauna shoves her against a tree and holds her knife up to her throat. As Shauna’s threatening to kill Melissa, Melissa leans in for a short kiss. This elicited a big gay gasp from my wife and I the first time we saw it. Shauna pulls back, looking surprised. But then she goes right back in for a full make out. This elicited literal SCREAMS from my wife and I.
More! Queers! On! Yellowjackets! SHAUNA! IS! CONFIRMED! QUEER!
This is thrilling, for a number reasons. First of all, back when JV Melissa didn’t even have many lines at all, I took one look at that girl and said gay. I’m sure we all did. Second of all, a queer Shauna recontextualizes and deepens her character arc, particularly when it comes to her dynamic with Jackie, which I’ll get into in a bit. Third of all, I think the splicing together of Shauna’s phone call to the restaurant about the cell phone with this surprise kiss scene suggests the two are somehow connected. The logical theory here is that the person who has been following Shauna (perhaps the person who left the package with the tape inside it last episode, too?) is Adult Melissa. And I very much think this is who Hilary Swank could be playing, based on appearances alone. Has Hilary Swank come back to stalk and torment her wilderness ex-girlfriend?! Incredible turn of events!
Now, I’ve grown a bit tired through the years of television series that wait until a season finale or even a few seasons in to “reveal” that a character is gay or queer. It can feel lazy or under-baked, especially if that queerness isn’t foreshadowed ahead of time or if it somehow coincides with a major plot twist as well. But this isn’t that at all. For starters, Teen Shauna has always seemed a little bit queer, so yes this moment has technically been foreshadowed. Her desire to be with Jeff as a teenager had less to do with Jeff and more to do with wanting to “become” or be possessed by Jackie. Their entire friendship was so homoerotic that whole essays have been written about it on Autostraddle (see: Shauna, Jackie, and Those Sapphic Gazes on Yellowjackets and All Girls Want To Eat Each Other).
Was Shauna in love with Jackie? I think that question is too basic actually, too reductive. I think Shauna desired Jackie, a desire that led her to absorb parts of Jackie, first by stealing her boyfriend and asking him to pretend to love her and culminated in her literally consuming Jackie’s flesh. I felt this way before Shauna kissed Melissa, but this just emphasizes it further. It also adds some texture to Shauna’s “failures” at trying to fit into a picture-perfect domestic life in the future. I don’t think she’s fully a lesbian who is stuck in a life of compulsory heterosexuality, but I do think she is a bisexual/queer woman who is constantly forcing herself to live against her truest nature and desires. We’ve seen her experiment sexually in the past, though in a straight context with Adam. We saw in glimpses of their texts as well as physical moments between them that they had a dom/sub dynamic, and while that isn’t inherently queer in and of itself, I think all these things are connected and point toward an interior life Shauna desperately tries to quiet.
Shauna as an adult represses a lot, but we even see threads of repression when she’s a teen, her unwillingness to ever tell Jackie the full truth about anything eating away at their friendship. In the present, it’s possible she associates her queerness with the wilderness and therefore pushes it away, prescribing herself this Jersey housewife life that was never meant for her. But that life has been dislocating for a while now. Adam did it. Reconnecting with the Yellowjackets did it. And her past is all catching up to her now, quite literally if Melissa really is the one following her around. Shauna says in this episode that she can’t wait for things to get back to normal, but the life she’s talking about isn’t her “normal” at all.
Dislocation: a disruption to an established order. There’s more queerness in the wilderness than we initially believed.
Things are shifting in other ways, too. Nat’s power over the others is being called into question. In the present day, Callie is out-maneuvering her mother for the first time. Adult Misty is completely adrift, far from her usual position of control. And something is undeniably dislocated between the adult versions of Tai and Van, whose romance keeps leading to violence. No doubt more dislocations are on the horizon.
But also, I mean, did we really think there were only two queers on the girls soccer team? Let’s be so for real.
Last Buzz:
- Forgot to mention this incredibly important detail: “Criminal” by Fiona Apple is playing diegetically during Callie/Lottie/Misty’s sleepover.
- Shauna calling Lottie a “Goop sorceress” 😭
- I love that there are multiple moments in this episode where characters correctly guess what other characters are going to say, like Callie foreshadowing Shauna asking to speak to the manager (and correctly guessing that she asked Lottie to get off her lawn) and also Shauna perfectly predicting the hotel guys would say “It’s not a hotel room; it’s an experience.”
- “Can we play light as a feather stiff as a board? I’ve always been really curious about that science.” MISTY.
- “Oh I do think about it.” I love this line reading from Sarah Desjardins.
- “Does your stock fuck, Jeff?” I HATE THESE GUYS SHAUNA WAS RIGHT TO GET THEIR NEPO ASSES.
- Wait, actually now that I’m thinking about it, very funny for Yellowjackets to be making fun of the name Joel when Joel McHale was added to this season.
- Didn’t quite catch this moment from the premiere until I rewatched with subtitles, but okay Mari, come through with the foreshadowing!
- Here is where I remind you these recaps are free, but they are also generously supported by AF Media memberships, because all the work we do is! Only $4 a month!
