Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets is a thriller drama television series that premiered in November 2021. It follows a high school soccer team that is stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 months, and the survivors' lives decades later. The series was written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. It stars Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Ella Purnell, Steven Krueger, Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Kevin Alves as members of the team in 1996. Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Simone Kessell, and Lauren Ambrose play surviving members as adults in 2021.

The second season premiered in March 2023. The third season premiered in February 2025.

Yellowjackets received seven Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award nomination.

Tropes used in Yellowjackets include:
  • Abhorrent Admirer: Misty is obsessed over Coach Ben Scott. Ben is disturbed because she's a psychopath, she's his student, and he's gay.
  • Accidental Murder:
    • Shauna unintentionally kills Adam with a knife after the latter quickly approaches the former while being interrogated.
    • Lottie is unintentionally killed by being pushed down a flight of stairs by Callie after the former upsets the latter.
  • Amateur Sleuth: Misty is part of an online community of people who solve crimes. She uses her skills in order to help Natalie solve the mystery of Travis's death and cover up the other Yellowjackets' crimes. During the second season, she meets and works together with Walter, another amateur detective.
  • Arc Symbol: A symbol of unknown origin consisting of a triangle with some lines, a circle, and a hook attached to it makes several appearances. In 1996, it appears carved on various trees and in the cabin. In 2021, it appears on postcards sent to the surviving Yellowjackets members and in melted candles around the area where Travis died.
  • An Arm and a Leg: Ben's leg is stuck under a piece of the crashed airplane. Misty amputates it to save him.
  • Attack of the Political Ad: Taissa's political opponent runs an attack ad with language like "cannibalizing your tax dollars" and imagery of Taissa eating meat, suggesting to voters that she was a cannibal while living in the forest.
  • Break the Haughty: Jackie was the popular team captain before the crash. In the wilderness, she doesn't contribute much, so she becomes disliked by most of the team, leading to her being kicked out of the cabin and dying of hypothermia.
  • Cannibal Clan: The opening scene of the series shows that the group of crash survivors eventually resorts to tribal cannibalism. They first start after Jackie dies but then add more ritualistic elements in future cannibalistic killings.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Lottie runs out of antipsychotics while living in the wilderness. This eventually leads to her having hallucinations of premonitions. After some of them come true, she is chosen to be the spiritual leader of the crash survivors.
  • Dramatic Irony: Shauna tells Jackie that Jackie's life will have peaked in high school and will become a housewife reminiscing about her teenage years. This is what happens to Shauna after she returns to civilization.
  • Dying Dream: Jackie dreams of warm fires and hot chocolate while dying by freezing to death.
  • Eat Dirt Cheap: Taissa eats dirt while she sleepwalks.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The story jumping between 1990s and the 2020s lets the audience know that characters who appear in 2021 survive being lost in the woods.
  • Interrupted Suicide: As Natalie holds a gun to her head, cultists led by Lottie appear to stop her and capture her.
  • Heal It with Fire: After Misty cuts Coach Scott's leg with an axe, she heats it in a fire and holds it to the wound to cauterize it.
  • Hollywood Healing: Vanessa has relatively minor scarring even though nearly half her face was torn off and she did not have access to modern medicine.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: The crash survivors eventually resort to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter, beginning with Jackie.
  • Just Plane Wrong: Misty secretly destroys the flight recorder in order to prevent rescue teams from finding the crash survivors. The purpose of a flight recorder is to record events that occur on the plane and not to act as an emergency radio transmitter.
  • Lesbian Jock: Taissa and Van are lesbians who start a relationship with each other after their soccer team crashes in the woods.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Lottie believes that the wilderness communicates to her after she runs out of antipsychotics. The strangeness of the events occurring convinces most of the characters that Lottie is a seer, but there are also natural explanations for the phenomena acknowledged.
  • Shame If Something Happened: While keeping Jessica prisoner and demanding information, Misty casually describes to her how she knows where Jessica's grandfather is and how he might die of a fentanyl overdose after receiving chocolates. Misty does this while injecting chocolates with fentanyl.
  • The Friend Nobody Likes: Misty considers Shauna, Natalie, and Taissa to be her close friends in the present day. They often express their annoyance when Misty is around even though she clings to them.
  • Teen Pregnancy: Shauna has sex with Jeff as a high school student in 1996 shortly before the plane crash. She becomes pregnant and tries to keep it secret while isolated in the wilderness.
  • All Just a Dream: After Shauna goes into labor, we see several scenes of her caring for a healthy newborn who the other crash survivors then take and eat, which is all revealed to be a dream.
  • Cult: Lottie is the leader of a cult that lives in an isolated community that provides its members with unconventional therapy in the form of rituals inspired by the crash survivors' spiritual experiences in the wilderness.
  • Lottery of Doom: The crash survivors decide who to kill and eat by drawing from a deck of cards.
  • Mummies At the Dinner Table: Shauna keeps Jackie's corpse in a meat shed for months. She talks to it until the other survivors decide to burn the corpse.
  • Murder by Mistake: Natalie is mistakenly injected with a fatal dose of fentanyl by Misty, who was instead trying to kill Lisa.
  • Only Sane Man: The only person who does not partake in the wilderness rituals or cannibalism after they start is Coach Scott.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After witnessing the other crash survivors eat Jackie and Javi, Coach Scott decides to escape from them by living in a hidden cave.
  • Ascended Extra: Several of the Yellowjackets, including Crystal, Gen, and Melissa, have hardly any presence, memorable lines, or even names in the first season, but become relevant to the plot by the end of the third season.
  • Locked in a Freezer: In the third season, Shauna is briefly locked in a walk-in freezer at the nursing home Misty works at. She thinks it's a murder attempt until Misty lets her know that she locked Shauna in the freezer as punishment.
  • Mercy Kill: Coach Ben is stabbed in the heart by Natalie as a mercy after being mutilated by Melissa and kept as a prisoner for weeks.
  • "Previously On...":
    • Episodes begin with one of the survivors introducing a montage of clips from prior episodes.
    • In the first episode of the third season, Van begins a speech with "Previously, on the Yellowjackets" and gives a recap of the events of the crash to inspire the other survivors. This is juxtaposed with Shauna describing the more disturbing events of the previous seasons in her journal.
  • Survivalist Stash:
    • In the first season, the crash survivors find a cabin in the woods stocked with tools, some food, a rifle, and plenty of ammunition.
    • In the third season, Ben finds a buried cache containing plenty of food.
This article is issued from All The Tropes. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.