‘Yellowjackets’ creators on Season 3 finale and why they’re banking on another season
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This article contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “Yellowjackets.”
“I can hear you.”
The Season 3 finale of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” on Friday ended with four significant words that have been out of reach but looming over the group of teenage survivors since the events of the plane crash that set the show in motion. Beneath the sound of Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge,” young Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), at long last, made contact with the outside world just as the chaos from shifting dynamics and power struggles back in the wilderness is becoming more severe.
“We’re out here. ... Can anyone hear me?” she screams from a snowy mountain peak into a satellite phone, which belonged to the researchers who stumbled upon the group on a trip to study frogs and was repaired with a cord from the transponder that Misty had destroyed after the crash. She received the muffled four-word confirmation over static crackles.
But with some of the yellowjackets apprehensive about a return to home and normal life, is their rescue actually imminent? A fourth season has not officially been announced, but “Yellowjackets” creators and showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have long said they pitched a five-season plan for the series.
“We are kind of banking on another season,” Nickerson says. “So, sorry, if we do get canceled; if we pulled a total ‘My So-Called Life’ where we’re just ending. But there are worse things than to go down in history as another ‘My So-Called Life.’”
The Times spoke with Lyle and Nickerson about Season 3’s dramatic conclusion. Here’s an edited excerpt of the conversation.
Was it always going to be Natalie making that triumphant call? And am I naive to think this is the triumphant call?
Lyle: I don’t think you’re naive. They very much are making contact officially with the outside world, and in this case, purposefully; obviously they made contact with the outside world earlier, and it goes very sideways. There’s a line very early on, I think it’s in Season 1, where the women say, “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Natalie.” So this was always something, in terms of their salvation, if you want to call it that — although what comes later, it might be up for debate — but [with] their rescue, we always knew that it would be Natalie who was the tip of the spear and the person who got them back home.
Nickerson: Just to clarify, while you are not naive to think that, I don’t know how straight a line from that moment to rescue, will be something that we’ll get to answer in Season 4.
It’s been almost two years since the ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale. Here’s everything you need to know for Season 3.
The show, so far, has existed in two timelines — the past in the wilderness and the present as the past haunts them. I assume a third timeline, at some point, would touch on readjusting to life after the rescue. What interests you about that transition period and are those details you’ve known since the beginning to guide you, or are you figuring that out as you go? How relationships shift in that period?
Lyle: It’s something that we’ve talked about in the writers’ room and, from the very beginning, Bart and I knew that was a piece of the story we wanted to eventually explore. We always go back to the movie “Castaway” and how I found it a little bit frustrating. And I love that movie. He gets rescued and they kind of time jump; they just go right past the period of readjustment. Whereas, to our minds, that’s an incredibly fascinating story to tell. These girls have changed remarkably, for better or for worse, in their time out there, especially because of their age. They’re so malleable to begin with and they’ve become very different people. And to see those people readjust to a world that is almost — I wouldn’t say insignificant to them; it’s obviously very significant — foreign to them now in a way that we think would be really ripe for storytelling and to dig deeper into their characters.
Nickerson: Just trying to think of how to say this without giving any kind of spoilers, but there’s also something very interesting about getting the opportunity to do the end of a story that is actually the beginning. You’re always in the middle of your story to a certain extent, and getting to do what feels like the end of something that the audience is so in on the joke that, “Oh my God, this is actually just the beginning of this whole other story that we’ve now seen,” is a fun narrative challenge.
Who is Antler Queen — Sophie — and who is Pit Girl — Mar — have been questions since the pilot. Is it safe to say the finale of Season 3 answers that?
Lyle: That’s safe to say, yes.
Nickerson: Well. It answers half of it. Ash, do you disagree?
Lyle: It’s safe to say we have definitively answered who Pit Girl is.
Nickerson: Oh, sorry, you mean Antler Queen in the pilot, who was sitting there. Of course, I immediately went to the metaphoric. That’s my mistake.
We see how the brutality of the life they’ve had to live in the wilderness has affected them. They’re not all eager to be rescued. Some would rather stay. Unpack the psychological response to trauma that you were interested in exploring, and how you were guided by who was feeling what.
Lyle: The question that we pose in the pilot is: Can they put the past behind them? I think that where we find them in the very first episode is as a group of women who have really tried to put the past behind them, and what they have learned over the course of the show is that it is maybe not possible in the way that they had hoped. Each of them has had a very different kind of response. As we move forward in the present-day story, the way that those coping mechanisms fail and what replaces them will be equally different and hopefully complex and interesting to explore.
Nickerson: Obviously post-traumatic stress and trauma are these very complicated, multilayered things, but one thing that we’ve always been interested in is the extent to which people, on a psychological and physiological level, are able to adapt to these different high-stakes, dangerous situations. At least a part of post-traumatic stress is a positive adaptive strategy to survive. Part of that kind of wiring that gets flipped, being able to take in a wider spectrum of experience and not wanting to lose that, is also part of what we wanted to play with. There is a new normal and that’s a home and how boring regular life can appear to be; it was just a bit that we wanted to play with in the show at large.
The penultimate episode of ‘Yellowjackets’ offers a creative vision of trauma’s aftereffects unlike anything else on TV. Here’s what it means.
It’s been interesting to see how fans react to Shauna now. Taissa, at one point, says that the worst of what they’ve gone through then and now is fueled by her.
Lyle: I think people forget that when we meet Shauna, in past and present, she is chasing transgressiveness. In the past, she’s cheating with her best friend’s boyfriend; in the present, she’s masturbating in her daughter’s room and killing rabbits in the garden. And Melanie [Lynskey, who plays older Shauna] is so game. When we got to Episodes 8 and 9, she was like, “Let’s go!” We’ve always been huge fans of “Breaking Bad.” It’s almost easy to forget that when “Breaking Bad” started, Bryan Cranston had been the dad in “Malcolm in the Middle”; he was so funny and so charming and so sweet and nice and sort of hapless-seeming. To take that actor and to turn him into The One Who Knocks is just such an exciting journey. So it’s been very satisfying to take [Melanie, through Shauna] to the point where we’re like, “Oh no, wait a second...”
It’s also been interesting to see, through her family, how much is passed down or absorbed through Callie. As we see in the finale, Callie is responsible for Lottie’s death. What intrigued you about the Shauna-Callie dynamic and Jeff’s decision to get himself and Callie some distance from Shauna?
Lyle: I think an important question is, how much are you beholden to your family? How much are you beholden to who you are genetically? It’s definitely a question that has risen to the forefront for Callie. Am I my mother? Am I my mother’s daughter? What does that mean?
Nickerson: [With Jeff], that really grew out of wanting to tell the Shauna story and to bring her to a point where the person that knows her the best in the world, has always been so accepting, to have that person, not turn on her, but no longer be able to extend that benefit of the doubt. That was really about trying to isolate Shauna. It was like, “Oh why, God. Et tu, Jeff?” He was also unable to co-sign this anymore.
Lyle: Shauna has lost something very, very important to her by the end of the season. But she’s also been freed in a way. In the beginning of this season, we see her really making a go of being a better wife and a better mother — and those are costumes or masks that just don’t really fit her. While I think the loss of her family is profound, and she will feel it profoundly, I think that she is being unburdened of, essentially, a role that she is not particularly capable of playing.
The actors find they are still processing the physically and emotionally grueling second season. “It’s been very overwhelming,” says Sophie Nélisse, who plays young Shauna.
The body count is getting up there. How do you thread that needle? When does it become too much?
Lyle: It really is where the story wants to take us, where we always thought it would go, and where it feels like it wants to go. We’ve always known that there would be consequences and that was part of the design of the show. We open the series with a character dying. We wanted to announce very quickly that this was a show in which death would be a specter that is hanging over all of them.
I hope this doesn’t sound ridiculous, but I think we approach it — or at least I approach it — less as though we’re building something and more as though we’re excavating something. You want it to feel as though this story has happened and we’ve just uncovered it as opposed to we’re slowly building it piece by piece. Because then you run the risk of doing things to create a twist, to create a reaction, as opposed to finding a story in its totality and telling it.
Bart, you directed the finale. You also directed the premiere. What feeling did you want to evoke with this finale and what scene stressed you out the most?
Nickerson: I wanted a chaotic resolution. Something that creates the tension of discordance, but that feels like there is a sense of some kind of completion, even if it is like a bit of a sub-chapter. In terms of what stressed me out the most, the amount of actual snowy real estate we had for the rolling chases was very small, so figuring out how to make it look and feel expansive but connected and to give that all a sense of geographic movement and different flavors, it took a lot of work. But it’s also the fun part. Getting to direct was such an incredible experience that I’m so grateful for.
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