Yellowjackets Season 2 Theories Roundup

The return of Yellowjackets hails the comeback of mystery-box television—and it’s been a cult hit in more ways than one. For the next two months, rabid fans will gather around weekly to debate all kinds of crazy theories and explanations and extrapolations about what exactly is going on in this terrifying show. Because we count ourselves among said rabid fans, the least we could do is compile a comprehensive breakdown of the biggest Yellowjackets theories with the advent of the new season. The Season Two premiere threw plenty of wrenches into the lives of the Wiskayok High survivors, and made it clear that none of our questions will be answered just yet. We’ll just have to keep thinking up things to ask while we wait.

The (Frozen) Ghost of Wilderness Past

We’ll start with the most obvious question: is Jackie actually a ghost, or just a figment of Shauna’s imagination? The way Episode One depicts things, it seems pretty clear that Shauna is just chatting to Jackie’s frozen body as if she’s talking to the real thing, the way anyone in an incredibly stressful situation—say, stuck in the wilderness with a group of teen girls poised to go Lord of the Flies mode at any second—would look for comfort in odd places. It appears as if she’s using “Jackie” to dissect her own guilt about how things went so wrong between the two of them, though even her memory of Jackie turns out as spiteful and argumentative as the real thing. You would be too, if your best friend cast you out to freeze to death in the snow.

A Note About the Supernatural

This brings me to the alternative possibility that something supernatural is going on. There is a very weird, very sinister presence in these woods, that multiple characters have already felt or encountered. At the moment of Jackie’s death in the Season One finale, as she’s imagining her teammates welcoming her back into the warmth of the cabin, she sees what could be the ghost of the man who died inside the cabin. The scene immediately cuts to Shauna waking up in a panic, implying that this could have been her dream—or she could have sensed something terrible happening inside the cabin that woke her up. If she can see ghosts, why wouldn’t she be able to contact Jackie from beyond the veil? Is that what drives her to eat the ear that fell off of Jackie’s corpse?

We Need to Talk About Taissa

Since the midnight dirt-eating in Season One, we’ve known that something is up with Taissa, both in the past and in the present. When her wife, Simone, confronts her about the witchy shrine underneath their apartment Taissa apparently used to win her senate race (RIP Biscuit), Taissa seems genuinely distraught—as if she doesn’t know what Simone is talking about. It could be that she’s really just upset that Simone is in the middle of taking her son away from her, or maybe she’s being truthful. It certainly seems that way, when she crawls down into the basement herself to see what Simone found, telling her new victim—excuse me, dog—that, “This was a mistake.” But whose?

In 1996, to stop Taissa from sleepwalking outside the cabin, she and her girlfriend, Van, tie their wrists together at night. It seems to be working fine until, toward the end of the premiere, Taissa seems to bite Van’s lip bloody in her sleep. Back in Season One, it’s implied that Taissa is the person that her son sees scuttling around their yard and climbing trees at night. But when he talks to her about it, he assures Taissa that she’s “not the bad one.” Does she have a Jekyll and Hyde-style split personality, one of whom only emerges at night? Does this come from the trauma she experienced as a teen in the woods, or was this something she was already dealing with before she got there?

What’s Up With Lottie?

To top things off, Lottie, in both the past and the present, seems to know lots of things she shouldn’t. Now long off of her antipsychotic drugs, she’s been having visions that could only be described as prophetic—or full of enough vague imagery that one could make an argument that they are. She seems weirdly okay with Shauna hanging out with Jackie’s corpse, as if she knows either that it’s therapeutic for Shauna or that Shauna is actually communicating with some sort of entity. She’s able to calm people down just by touching them and saying a few encouraging words. (Classic cult leader stuff.) She tells Travis, very confidently, that his little brother Javi, who disappeared in the middle of the first season, is still alive.

When Natalie tells her she shouldn’t be putting false hope into Travis’ head, Lottie shoots back, “There’s no such thing as false hope.” Does she just mean that having hope is important, or is she telling Natalie that she really does know this impossible piece of information? Similarly, in the present timeline, adult Lottie stops Natalie cold when she tells her she has a message for her from Travis. We all know Travis is dead, either by suicide or more nefarious causes, so what could Lottie mean by this? Is it a message from beyond? Or is it something Travis must have left behind before his death? The only way to find out is to keep tuning in.