Yellowjackets’s Big Bad Was Hiding in Plain Sight

Spoilers follow for the third season of Yellowjackets through the April 11 finale, “Full Circle.” 

In “A Normal, Boring Life,” ever-confused furniture salesman Jeff asks a question about his wife: “What’s Shauna done now?” Two episodes later, Yellowjackets’s third-season finale, “Full Circle,” offers a number of answers that push the show toward a new and needed phase in both timelines. In the past, Shauna was a chaos agent practically salivating at fucking up other people’s plans and ending other people’s lives. In the present, Shauna is a death moth shaking off a cocoon of domesticity and embracing the horror she inspires in others. And in the larger Yellowjackets lore, the series has finally embraced what now seems like an inevitability: That even-keeled Shauna, of the home-cooked dinners and the sweetly delivered “fuck you, nepo babies” speech to a couple of dopey hoteliers, has been our Big Bad all along. More of Melanie Lynskey chomping on people’s flesh in season four, please!

Shauna’s ascendancy was the backbone of Yellowjackets’s third season, giving it structure and consistency amid a series of shocking deaths. In the ’90s, she wrests control of the group from Natalie and keeps the Yellowjackets in the wilderness based on sheer force of will; in the contemporaneous timeline, she slips into increasing paranoia and lies to the other surviving Yellowjackets about what she’s up to. Looking back, Yellowjackets has laid this track for a while, hiding Shauna in plain sight among other Yellowjackets who seemed so much more fucked up from their time in the wilderness. Compared with Misty (abductor and murderer), Tai (animal sacrificer and possessee), Lottie (cult leader and possessed by a different spirit), and Natalie (self-destructive addict), Shauna was pretty much normal. Her obsessive journaling in Canada was a way to work through her trauma; her rocky relationship with Jeff and her affair with Adam were indicative of a typical marriage slump; and her killing of Adam wasn’t that much worse than Misty’s and Tai’s similarly destructive bouts of violence. (Shout-out to Van, whose craziest post-wilderness decision was maintaining a video-rental store in a thoroughly streaming world.)

Yellowjackets has a flair for surrounding characters with forces that build and intensify until they reach a point of no return, and “Full Circle” reveals how much of that approach was focused on Shauna from the beginning. With an ensemble this huge, of course other characters get major climactic moments or emotional arcs to play over the three seasons: Lottie stabs a bear, Natalie nearly relapses while grieving Travis’s death, Tai discovers her shadow self’s deception, Misty learns that sleepovers with your high-school friend’s daughter aren’t really that fun. Chart Shauna’s path, though, and it becomes clear how much her horniness for mayhem was a primary cause for the Yellowjackets’ increasingly Lord of the Flies–like dilemmas. She wasn’t praying to “It” like Lottie or holding reporters captive like Misty, but in the first two seasons, Shauna going along with Lottie and Jackie’s séance and eating Jackie’s ear, killing Adam and getting the other Yellowjackets involved in the cover-up, and admitting that she’d kill anyone else who was blackmailing them formed a pattern of “Yes, and.”

From the mild-mannered way Sophie Nélisse and Lynskey first portrayed the character in her adolescence and adulthood, all huffy rolled eyes and beleaguered sighs, you wouldn’t think Shauna was a secret thrill chaser. But the contrast between Shauna’s initial stick-in-the-mud characterization and her increasingly diabolical choices was the point, so that her bursts of anger felt unusual, even atypical — until the third season, when they occurred with such frequency that they became a revelation. Shauna in season three is a mask-off teen tyrant with better-than-you superiority and spiteful line readings that transform the other girls’ pity toward her for losing her best friend and her baby into legitimate fear. Unlike Lottie, Van, and Tai, Shauna isn’t making decisions out of supernatural belief; unlike Hannah, she’s not operating out of survival mode; unlike Natalie and Misty, she’s not swayed by sentiment. Shauna chooses to be a pariah because that outsider status gives her power, a transformation that Nélisse and Lynskey both play like they’re channeling Tom Cruise chomping on necks in Interview With the Vampire or Ursula mixing potions in her cauldron in The Little Mermaid, all venomous glares and smirking grins. To quote another fantasy property: Chaos is a ladder, etc., and if Shauna gets her way, she’s going to climb it all the way to the lonely top.

Looking back on the season, all the foreshadowing was there, and it pays off in “Full Circle.” In the premiere’s ’90s story line, Shauna goes after Mari during their “capture the bone” game, complains in her journal that the girls “told themselves stupid fairy tales and pretended they were brave and strong,” and sarcastically calls Nat “my queen.” As an adult, she says of herself when writing a faux obituary, “She was the worst wife and mother on the planet.” In the finale’s back-then plot, Shauna presides over the Yellowjackets’ feast on Mari’s flesh (finally, Pit Girl confirmed!) and luxuriates in her status as the new Antler Queen, complete with Mari’s hair decorating her vestments. With Shauna’s authoritarian role in the past unveiled — she’s tossing her dissenters’ teepees like prison cells and handing out cruel and unusual punishment to anyone she doesn’t like — Lynskey can drop the pleading edge she so often gave Shauna and go cold and calculating as she journals and narrates: “The danger. The thrill. The person I was back then. Not a wife or a mother. I was a warrior … I let all of it slip away from me. It’s time to start taking it back.” This is Lynskey in The Last of Us mode, pitiless and unrelenting, and teeing her up against an aligned Misty and Tai is the most exciting development that could have come out of an originally aimless-feeling season.

Yellowjackets co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have long talked about having a five-season plan for the show; it hasn’t yet been renewed. But do we need two more seasons? Shauna’s position of authority feels like the beginning of a natural end for this story, one that could be handled in a fourth and final go-round and would allow Nélisse and Lynskey to send their character off in a bang of glory. In the ’90s, how much more miserable could Shauna make life for Natalie once she learns Natalie successfully radioed for help? Will Natalie’s act of rebellion cause anyone to rise against Shauna, and what would a coup attempt look like? In the present, how explosive could a face-off between Tai, Misty, and Shauna — three murderers! — get, especially if we learn other Yellowjackets outside of Melissa are still alive and could take different sides in this war? If we’re always bound to repeat the past, does Misty and Tai turning against Shauna mimic what happened then? Shauna has been revealed as the Yellowjacket most clearly crystallized by the wilderness into the truest iteration of herself, someone whose transformation isn’t contingent on what the eerie did to her, but what she did for herself. Shauna choosing to be the villain is a horror story of a different kind, and one Yellowjackets could — and should — pull off in a final season about the Yellowjackets’ most aspirational final girl. And please, let our guy Jeff stay strong and stay away from his estranged wife. That’s one death we don’t want on Shauna’s hands.

Related

• Yellowjackets Season-Finale Recap: Livin’ on the Edge
• Yellowjackets’s ‘Pit Girl’ Always Thought It Would Be Her