Buckle up, because it's time to return to Camp Yellowjackets.
Season 1's finale saw the girls deal with some major drama and an even bigger, more terrifying, reveal. After confronting her bestie Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) over Shauna's affair with (and impending pregnancy by) Jeff (Jack DePew), our former queen bee Jackie (Ella Purnell) decides to get some fresh air by spending the very chilly night outdoors. Unfortunately, the part where Jackie goes back inside and drinks hot chocolate with her teammates is a dying hallucination, and the team discovers Jackie's frozen body the next morning.
Season 2 picks up almost two months later. Yup, it's officially winter in these here woods, which means one thing — our gals are about to embark on their journey into cannibalism.
The Yellowjackets are right in the middle of a freezing winter. They're starving. They're depressed. But on the bright side, they have a new meat shed, and Shauna's managed to find some comfort by pulling a Norman Bates. Shauna's refused to let the other girls get rid of Jackie's body. Instead, she's propped up Jackie's corpse in the group's makeshift meat shed, which both slows down its decomposition and leaves her with ample time to chat with her dead friend.
But putting Shauna's serial killer-y behavior aside for a moment, Yellowjackets might be giving us its first major clue into how the team's cannibalism begins. True, the group has nowhere else to put Jackie's body. And they're all trying to let Shauna grieve in her own special way. But whether or not they're aware of it yet, this decision is also keeping their only source of meat relatively fresh. And given the success rate of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis's (Kevin Alves) hunting endeavors, no four-legged friends are about to join Jackie in the shed anytime soon.
Adding to the foreshadowing is Shauna's fateful taste of flesh at the end of the first episode. While playing house with Jackie's body, Shauna accidentally jostles the corpse too hard, prompting Jackie's ear to fall off. What does she do with it? Well, she keeps it in her pocket, letting it sit there and gather lint while tempting her the entire episode, until she finally gives in and eats it right up — raw, uncooked, chewy cartilage and all. If that isn't a major signal that the Yellowjackets — or at least Shauna — are about to eat Jackie's body, then I don't know what is.
The team is starving, and all the clues so far — from Jackie's new, uh, living quarters to Shauna sinking her teeth into meat for the first time in a while — point to the inevitable: Jackie's about to be served up for dinner on a silver platter, bones and all.
Shauna might keep her ear snack a secret. And there is a possibility the team might not eat Jackie. But with all the foreshadowing in this episode, it all seems very unlikely. In the off-chance they don't eat Jackie, then it's terrifying to think how far they'll let Shauna's imaginary conversations go. That might be an entire rabbit hole on its own. (And we know how Shauna feels about rabbits!)
All this theorizing means one thing: It's officially Yellowjackets season. It's time to nitpick every frame for any clue, and my bets are on this dreaded meat shed. Who knows? Maybe another body will be joining Jackie in there soon.
The first episode of Yellowjackets Season 2 is now streaming on Showtime. (opens in a new tab)
