‘Yellowjackets’ Endgame: Will Callie Kill Shauna?

The third season finale of Yellowjackets answered a lot of questions. The Pit Girl from the series premiere was indeed Mari, though the hunt for her was a ruse to allow Natalie to escape with the satellite phone and call for rescue. The Wilderness is just, like, our primal urges or whatever! And Callie was the one who pushed Lottie to her death. The show isn’t just laying additional track for a story that’s going nowhere fast anymore. It’s setting the stage for its endgame — the team’s exit from the woods in the past, and the repercussions of Shauna’s villainy in the present. And I can’t help but think there’s only one way for this story to end…

Callie is totally going to kill Shauna, right?

After all, this has always been a show about teens killing (and eating) people. That’s what we signed up for! But Yellowjackets is also about the Yellowjackets themselves dying — and the question of who made it out of the woods alive. I joked last week that there might be some sort of Final Destination riff going on, but I am starting to think that the big-picture endgame of the series is just that. Nobody survives. After all this time, destiny has come knocking, and every single Yellowjacket who made it out of the woods will die. Tai, Misty, Melissa, Shauna, and whoever else we’ve yet to meet — we’re just waiting to see how they die and in what order.

In the finale, Tai tells Misty that she blames Shauna for everything that’s gone wrong in the past and present (which is fair!), and it seems like the pair are preparing to team up against Shauna. That would be an obvious path to Shauna’s downfall, but it doesn’t quite work. Shauna may be the worst, but Tai and Misty are hardly blameless. Tai has a whole-ass alternate personality built to do her dog-killing dirty work, and Misty, in addition to multiple murders, is the reason the team didn’t get rescued in the first place! Neither of them have a leg to stand on when it comes to meting out justice, but that hardly matters. This season proved that Shauna is more than a match for her former teammates (except for Natalie — oh if only Juliette Lewis could come back and kill her!). Shauna is ruthless, paranoid, and has a big honking victim complex where her conscience should be, which is why she thrived in the woods. Hell, she vibed her way onto the damn Antler Queen throne!

If all the adult survivors are going to die by the series’ end, then I’d predict Shauna would be the last one standing, and that means it’s going to take an outsider — not another survivor — to kill her. The thing is, Shauna has also always been the engineer of her own suffering. Everything wrong in her life she did to herself, even if she casts the blame elsewhere. So it makes sense that whatever takes her down, it’s going to come from her - and in the case of Callie, I mean that literally.

By now it’s clear that Callie’s beef with her mother is about more than just the secrets Shauna’s kept. It wasn’t until Lottie declared that Callie is just like her mom (“but more”) that Callie snapped and shoved her down those concrete stairs. The girl lit up like a Christmas tree when her dad started trash-talking Shauna to his would-be business partners, and she’s used her “accidental” foray into homicide to drive a wedge between her parents, isolating Shauna. Callie is such an accomplished liar that it’s hard to tell when she’s telling the truth, but when she passes up the opportunity to ask Lottie what really happened in the woods and instead asks if Shauna doesn’t love her, it may be our first genuine glimpse at what drives Callie. She wants to understand her mother, and that will make her understand herself. She just may not like what she finds.

I’ve always wondered why Shauna’s family got so much screentime when Tai’s wife and child, for example, have been whittled down to a single appearance each season — a reminder that they still exist and nothing more. For a show that is so focused on the adult survivors, Callie and Jeff stand out as exceptions. Sure, we could chalk it up to Shauna being the linchpin of the narrative, but what if it’s more than that? If Shauna is going to die, then Callie is the only one that makes sense to do the deed. Lottie claimed she saw “It” in Callie - that primal violence that guided the Yellowjackets in the woods. She’s got the emotional damage, resentment, and ruthlessness to match her mother, and unlike Shauna she doesn’t need to be stranded in the woods to hone it. Living with Shauna did it for her. And if she’s as much like Shauna as Lottie claimed, then Callie will do what Shauna would do: Blame her mother for the way she turned out and destroy her for it.

Lottie said that Callie is the “child of that place” and maybe this is what she meant. Callie will finish the work that place started. She’ll hunt the hunter — and she’s already started backing Shauna into a corner.