Why Yellowjackets Is the Show I Needed as a Teenager
Or, an ode to darkness, girl’s sports, and queer love.
I was a pretty morbid kid. Anything unexplained, spooky, or icky was bound to grab my attention (at the expense of my already dubious teenage sleep schedule) and I read article after article about plane crashes, missing persons, and murder. I was also, as anyone who knows me can attest, a huge jock. Captain of the varsity softball team, I played high level club travel ball and eventually earned an NCAA commitment. Sports were, for nearly twenty years, the single most important aspect of my life.
But women’s sports rarely get the same media attention as the men do; sure, A League of Their Own is a great movie, but it’s hardly seat-gripping once you’ve seen it seven or eight times. The amount of movies and shows made about women’s sports are often limited to comedies or teen dramas, and these never appealed to the budding horror aficionado that was teenage me.
So when I sat down to watch the brilliant Yellowjackets premiere, I knew I had finally found the representation I had always wanted as young adult. Here was the cutthroat brutality of competitive girl’s sports, mixed with the grisly horror of a dramatic plane crash. Throw in some queer pining, Juliette Lewis/Christina Ricci comedic chemistry, and juicy marital drama, and I was hooked. But it wasn’t just the premise that had me awaiting each week’s episode with near-agonizing anticipation. No, it was because Yellowjackets — a show which only includes a few brief clips of actual soccer being played — is the most realistic portrayal of a girl’s sports team that I’ve ever seen.
Anyone who played travel softball (or other sports) between ages twelve to eighteen has probably had a conversation with their teammates about cannibalism or wilderness survival. Don’t ask me why, but every team I played on had a strange obsession with ranking its members on a survivability scale. These debates would occur during warmups, between games, in crummy hotels on Saturday nights — no matter the venue, we would always, somehow stray towards discussing who would win a bloody battle royale in the woods.
Yellowjackets is all those hushed conversations in the flesh. In 1996, on their way to nationals, the eponymous soccer team crashes somewhere in the Ontario wilderness, seemingly doomed to succumb to either the elements or each other. We know at least four of them survive and become adults, as half the show’s narrative takes place in 2021, but we don’t know exactly what happened between the fateful crash and the eventual rescue, a staggering nineteen months later.
True to life, the Yellowjackets are not the one-dimensional jocks of typical media. As the perpetual resident “emo kid” of every team, this particularly struck me as important to what makes Yellowjackets so effective. This is a team that has prom queens and valedictorians, but also punks, soft-butch lesbians, Jesus freaks, and clairvoyants. It’s in this diversity (and duplicity) that the realism shines through. Our four “main” characters — those we follow in present day, too — include the driven and intelligent Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown/Tawny Cypress), compassionate but conflicted Shauna (Sophie Nélisse/Melanie Lynskey), bullied yet terrifying Misty (Samantha Hanratty/Christina Ricci), and painfully self-sabotaging Nat (Sophie Thatcher/Juliette Lewis). The dynamics and relationships between these four drive the present day narrative, but it’s their interactions with their other teammates that color the events of 1996, and no sub-pairing of characters illustrates just how emotionally complex Yellowjackets is like Taissa and Van (Liv Hewson) do.
It’s hard for a lot of young athletes to be out to their teammates in 2022, but it was much more of a minefield in 1996. We see the frustrations and joys of a secret relationship between Taissa and Van early on in the show, particularly when a distraught Tai can’t find Van in the wreckage. Later on, we see them sneaking away from their teammates to kiss behind trees and have steamy sojourns to the lake at midnight. Brown and Hewson portray the giddy secrecy of such a romance with a delicate sense of knowing. Taissa, ever intense and enterprising, appears a strange fit for the wise-cracking and kind-hearted Van, but the dichotomy is what makes them so compelling to watch. Brown nurtures a soft edge in Taissa that slowly leaks out over the course of the series, turning her from a seemingly ruthless character, to one with only the safety of those she cares about in mind. Hewson, in turn, flits effortlessly between moments of sheer hilarity — seeing Van excitedly describe the batshit plot of While You Were Sleeping is a scene for the ages — and incredible vulnerability. This speaks to their skill as an actor; their breakout role as Abby Hammond in Santa Clarita Diet set the pace for them in both comedic and dramatic roles.
However, when Taissa finds that an episode of her own sleepwalking has led to Van being viciously mauled by wolves, their secret relationship comes to a screaming crescendo. Van somehow survives both the attack and premature funeral pyre (“Really? Fire?”), but both of them are irretrievably traumatized. What follows is a jarringly stomach-churning scene in which Van’s face (yes, face) is stitched back together while her teammates hold her down. In the following episode, we see that she has recovered enough to walk and talk, but is clearly suffering from severe emotional distress. Self-conscious and depressed, Van is understandably not keen on Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) ill-fated idea of a “Doomcoming” dance.
As heartbreaking as it is to see the jokester in Van seemingly crushed, it also gives Taissa an opportunity to show a side of her that we haven’t seen yet. Brown’s nuance in portraying Taissa comes to a head; where she is usually headstrong and demanding, Taissa becomes gentle and nurturing, showing Van the matching masks that she has crafted for them to wear at the dance. It’s a quiet moment in a string of very tumultuous episodes, but it’s also one of the most important to both characters’ development arcs.
It’s here at the dance where Taissa and Van officially come out to the team, kissing each other to a round of whoops and applause from their friends and (equally gay) coach. The incredible — if diagetically fleeting — joy of seeing a queer couple immediately embraced by their peers is unprecedented. In a show filled with dread, deceit, and gore, to have such a brilliantly happy moment is a much-needed reprieve and a step forward for LGBTQ+ representation in all genres, and its something I desperately needed as a queer teenager. Seeing a lesbian relationship persevere and even flourish in such dire circumstances gives Yellowjackets a hopefulness that it was missing and in doing so, elevates the show beyond the constraints of its genre and narrative timeline.
In short, Yellowjackets is a mess in the best kind of way. Shocking, brutal, and at times almost maddeningly funny, it weaves a narrative that is nuanced but never unwieldy in its execution. This is the story of a girl’s sports team in all its arguably terrifying clarity, punctuated by the strength of queer joy, and it’s exactly what I, and so many others, needed as kids, and still need now.
So, buzz buzz, Yellowjackets. I’ll see you in season 2.
(On a goofier note, below is my curated playlist of songs that gave me Yellowjackets vibes. Enjoy!)
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0P88uczSNMJB8yjJoaz2Ve?si=YxvDoOr5T-m9FoVK5r4_cQ
