'Yellowjackets' Season Three Returns With Sleepovers, Stalking, And Ducks

Yellowjackets returned for its third season this weekend, and it came out of the gate with two whole episodes that did a lot of legwork reminding viewers of where we left our survivors. Can you believe last season aired almost two years ago? Remember how Misty killed Natalie in the present, and the cabin burned down in the past? It hardly matters, though, because what the new season makes clear is that the show is ready to barrel off in new directions toward fresh mysteries. Mysteries like …

Is Present-Misty OK?
Not really! She accidentally killed her best friend for the second time, and the only person sticking around to help her is Walter. I guess they’re dating now? And he’s maybe living with her? He’s always there, and a bit suffocating, but I dig it because he matches her freak so well. He almost out-freaks her, and again: Misty is a murderess. Anyway, Walter finds the key to Natalie’s storage unit in hopes it will give Misty something to get out of bed for. So she skips Natalie’s sad, weird funeral to dig through her friend’s boxes of junk, takes Natalie’s leather jacket as a keepsake, then chugs seven (!) shots of whiskey at a bar and threatens to light some guys’ crotches on fire. Thus begins another mystery of the season: Does Misty have a drinking problem? Probably not, but she does spend a lot of time drunk, which we’ll come back to.

Who Burned Down The Cabin?
Last season, Coach Ben decided that babysitting a bunch of cannibals wasn’t working for him, so he packed off to Javi’s secret survival cave — but before he left, it sure did seem like he set the cabin on fire. Turns out, though, that maybe he didn’t? This season, Ben finds a hidden bunker full of supplies, and after emptying it he decides to leave the bunker open as a booby trap for food. Instead, he captures Mari, who falls in after getting mad at Shauna and storming off through the woods. Ben helps her reset her dislocated knee, then kinda sorta kidnaps her because although he claims he didn’t start the fire or even know it happened, he doesn’t want her to go back to her teammates and tell them where he is. After all, they think he did try to kill them, and they tend to eat people. Fair enough.

What’s interesting is that Natalie seems to know that Ben is alive and well and is intentionally steering her friends away from any traces of him to protect him, all while lying and saying he couldn’t have possibly survived the winter. Misty figures out that Natalie is hiding something, and shares her suspicions with Shauna, so Ben better watch his back.

If Ben didn’t start the fire, then we’re looking at a few options. The Wilderness stirring up trouble, or maybe simple bad luck (it’s not like a bunch of New Jersey teens have a lot of experience maintaining a fireplace 24/7). One of the other teammates is going extra murder-y, perhaps? Is there another party in the woods? The answer almost doesn’t matter, because the Yellowjackets seem to be doing just fine without their cabin anyway!

Will The Yellowjackets Eat Anybody Else, Or…?
For the moment, it doesn’t seem like it. Season three finds the team thriving in springtime. The cabin burned for a few weeks, which I’m sure kept the girls warm through the end of winter, and then they built some idyllic huts and found some ducks and settled into life as foragers and hunters. The only drama is interpersonal. There’s the Shauna/Mari feud, which Natalie eventually has to wade into, and then there’s Lottie, who is worried because the Wilderness has stopped talking to her. Instead, she realizes it may be communicating with Travis. So she makes him trip balls on shrooms and tell her what he hears (mostly trees screaming, though that may have been Mari falling in that hole).

Travis pretty quickly realizes this is messed up, so he tries to convince Lottie that the resident duck-wrangler, Akilah, is the one who is most connected to the Wilderness. Which is rude because Akilah gave him an emotional support duck named Mortimer and now she’s going to have Lottie all over her ass.

How Long Is Lottie Staying?
In the present, Lottie shows up on Shauna’s doorstep and asks to crash, which is one of the more banana-pants things that happened in the premiere considering she tried to hunt Shauna last season. Apparently, Lottie just checked herself out of the psych ward and decided that Shauna owed her for blowing up her guru gig. It’s clear, though, that this is likely more about Callie than Shauna. Last season Lottie seemed particularly taken with Shauna’s daughter, calling her “powerful”, and now she seems to want to get to know the girl better. Callie is also keen to get Lottie talking, as she’s still trying to get somebody to dish about what happened in the woods all those years ago. Shauna is smart enough to call Misty over to babysit when she and Jeff go out for a dinner meeting, but Callie’s no slouch either: She woos Misty with promises of a sleepover, then gets her pass-out drunk (courtesy of some nighttime cold medicine). See, I told you we weren’t done with Misty’s drinking yet!

Last season we started to see how past events were mirrored in the present, from Misty’s accidental murders to the hunts and sacrifices that crown a new Antler Queen. Now we’re witnessing teen Lottie manipulate her friends to commune with the Wilderness, and I’m wondering if she’s setting her sights on Callie in the present for the same purpose.

Who Is Stalking Shauna?
In the present, a shadowy figure leaves a package for Shauna, containing a tape which Callie finds and hides. Later at the restaurant, Shauna is followed into the bathroom and discovers a phone with a photo from the lake in the woods. She turns it over to the restaurant staff, then calls later to find out that a woman came to retrieve the phone. Admittedly that’s not much to go on, but in the past we learn that Shauna is getting closer to fellow teammate Melissa in that special Shauna way: She holds a knife to Melissa’s throat and threatens her, only to wind up making out! Does teen Shauna get a girlfriend, and is Melissa stalking Shauna now?

What About Tai And Van?
Oh yeah, they’re still together in the present. Tai didn’t become a senator, and didn’t reconcile with her wife, so she’s figuring out who she is now while also reconnecting with Van, who has terminal cancer. Tai plans a date at a fancy restaurant, and when it’s clear neither of them are enjoying it, she decides to dine and dash for the thrill. Unfortunately, the waiter tries to chase them and suffers a heart attack in the process. When Tai goes to the restaurant to pay up the next day and learns that her childish antics had a very real victim, she’s stunned - and decides not to share it with Van. Considering Tai had one of her creepy hallucinations after their escape, it’s also reasonable to assume that something Wilderness-y played a part in the death.

Will We Ever Figure Out What The Wilderness Is?
Who knows! But we should be finding out more about what it means that Shauna is the Antler Queen in the present, and what impact Natalie’s death may have had (after all, Lottie claimed it “pleased” the Wilderness). For now, it appears that the surviving Yellowjackets are enjoying some peace and prosperity in both the past and the present, and if that’s due to the goodwill of the supernatural force hanging over all of them… well, it probably will run out eventually.

It also looks like we have three new survivors — Mari, Akilah, and Melissa — stepping into the spotlight in the past, as well as one seriously adorable duck named Mortimer that I have a really good feeling about. He’s gonna be fine, right? This is a show full of cannibals and murderers, but not absolute monsters. The duck will be FINE, RIGHT?