[COLUMN] Yellowjackets Tries to Pivot With the Zeitgeist | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the third season of Yellowjackets, which premiered on Showtime and Paramount+ this weekend.

The third season of Yellowjackets arrived on Showtime this weekend. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the two-episode premiere was how decidedly “normal” it felt.

Yellowjackets launched in late 2021, with its first season running into early 2022. The show built quite a following during that first run of episodes, becoming one of the buzziest shows of the season. It was a show that “captured the zeitgeist”, seemingly landing at the perfect moment to tap into the collective psyche. Showtime’s President of Entertainment, Jana Winograde, would describe that first season as “magic in a bottle.” That is not an inaccurate description.

The first season of Yellowjackets hit like a bolt from the blue, packed with uncanny and bizarre imagery. It opened with what seemed to be some sort of monstrous occult ritual, a cannibalistic feast in which the participants were cloaked in strange and monstrous outfits. It was bizarre and haunting. The first season of Yellowjackets was blackly funny, but it was also quite horrific. It was a show about shared hallucinations, about what happens when social order breaks down.

For those who have not watched the show, Yellowjackets is quite similar to Lost in structure. It is essentially split across two different time periods. The first is set in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of a plane crash that strands the eponymous teenage girls’ soccer team in the vast wilderness, leaving them to fend for themselves. The second takes place in the modern day, as the survivors of that horrific trauma try to go about their lives.

Yellowjackets premiered during the first year of the Biden Administration, late in the COVID pandemic. It was an era marked by a desperate appeal for the return of “normalcy”, and rooted in the belief (or the hope) that the Trump Administration represented “an aberrant moment in time.” At its core, that first season of Yellowjackets was a quintessential post-Trump show, a story about how everybody had briefly lost their minds and then found themselves picking up the pieces.

As such, Yellowjackets was a zeitgeisty show for the early Biden era in the same way that The Handmaid’s Tale resonated so strongly against the backdrop of the first Trump era. However, this sort of timeliness can be a double-edged sword. A show that (even accidentally) comes to so perfectly crystalize a given moment in the collective consciousness can quickly find itself outdated as the cultural winds shift. The Handmaid’s Tale went from a show of the moment to “is this still on?”

Watching the third season premiere of Yellowjackets, it feels like the series is undergoing a similar existential challenge. The show’s second season struggled a little bit to satisfyingly build off its breakout success, with critics labeling the sophomoric run “uneven” and “hamstrung.” While the first season grew its audience from 246,000 viewers at the premiere to 333,000 viewers at the finale, the second season audience shrank from 226,000 viewers to 134,000 viewers.

This might explain why the third season feels, from its opening scenes, like something of a reset. In particular, the third season premiere of Yellowjackets feels much more grounded and less sensationalist than the previous two seasons. This is most obvious in the shift in setting of the flashbacks. The girls have survived the harsh and stark winter. The season’s longline promises: “as summer arrives, the Yellowjackets face a fragile victory.” Everything is brighter, well lit, less moody.

Whereas the first season opened with a grim and satanic ritual, the third season opens with something more playful. What initially appears to be some sort of hunt is revealed to be a friendly game among the survivors. The stakes of this are not life and death, but instead a bet between two competing teams about which will have to serve the other for a day. The girls return to a village of huts. They gather berries and they hunt livestock. Director Bart Nickerson shoots it in a very matter-of-fact fashion, avoiding excessive stylistic flourish. This is just girls being girls. It’s not particularly horrific or unsettling. It is almost normal.

After that, Vanessa “Van” Palmer (Liv Hewson) regales the survivors with an account of their against-the-odds survival. “Spring came,” Van orates. “And, with it, a new beginning.” Naturally, Van’s recounting of the previous two seasons downplays the grislier aspects. In the season’s second episode, Mari (Alexa Barajas) assures Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) that the group’s cannibalism is behind them. “We’re not doing that anymore,” she tells him, not specifying what “that” is.

The third season makes repeated efforts to parallel the efforts by the survivors to impose normality upon their wilderness experiences with the more contemporary narrative threads. The revised opening credits sequence even directly juxtaposes the makeshift dwellings constructed by the girls in the forest with the suburban homes owned by their adult selves. There is a strong sense in these two episodes that the wilderness is not radically different from the ostensibly more civilized modern world.

The premiere underscores this point by directly contrasting the “solstice dining pleasure” of the winning team with a fancy restaurant date between the adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) and her partner Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress). This relatively refined wilderness dining experience is a marked departure from the surreal image that opened the show, with the losing team forced to serve as waiting staff in a strange approximation of urban dining.

This is not to imply that things are “normal” in any meaningful sense in either of the show’s two timelines. Survivor Shauna Shipman (Sophie Nélisse) listens to Van’s sanitized account of the girl’s adventures with naked contempt.  “How’s this story for you?” Shauna writes in her diary. “Once upon a time a bunch of teenage girls got stranded in the wilderness and went completely fucking nuts.” It is certainly less of a crowd-pleasing narrative than Van’s tale of triumph against the odds.

“They worshipped evil spirits, and they hunted their friends, and they feasted on their flesh, and they fucking liked it,” Shauna narrates. “So they told themselves stupid fairytales and pretended they were brave and strong.” It is a very blunt assessment of the collective insanity that seized control of the group. “Because the reality was that even if rescue came, they could never go home again,” Shauna ruminates. “Because of what they’d done, because of what they’d become.”

Even the very classy and very sophisticated urban dining experience enjoyed by Van and Taissa has a decidedly savage undertone. The two women skip out on the meal without paying the bill, prompting their server (Nathaniel Shuker) to chase after them. He is almost hit by a bus, and the stress of the experience gives him a heart attack. Taissa and Van are oblivious to this, at least until Taissa returns the following day to settle up on the bill. Terrible things can be ignored or rationalized in the service of individuals’ self-serving narratives.

In some ways, this feels like Yellowjackets trying to pivot slightly, to adjust to the shifting cultural moment around the show. In its first season, Yellowjackets felt like a very Biden era show, a story about what it felt like to emerge from a moment of collective insanity and to try to reckon with the consequences of that. In contrast, the third season of Yellowjackets premieres less than a month into the second Trump Administration.

One of the big cultural anxieties of the present moment is the realization that the Trump era was not some historical aberration. “For the first time, Donald Trump has become normal,” Shadi Hamid wrote of Trump’s second inauguration. “His 2025 inauguration marked not just a political transition but the normalization of the man and his movement — a profound shift from his first presidency when he was treated as an aberration to be resisted at all costs.”

This insanity has become the new normal. What was once shocking and horrific has become banal. This was obvious even during the election cycle, as reporters wrote about “the public growing numb to [Trump’s] alleged misdeeds.” As 26-year-old voter Avery Dalal, who faced three elections with Trump on the ballot, told NBC News, “It’s kind of hard to imagine having a ‘normal election.’ I don’t even know what that means anymore.” What was once unthinkable is now mundane.

The third season of Yellowjackets feels like it is engaged with this shift. Callie (Sarah Desjardins), the daughter of the now-adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), is suspended from school for dumping meat on her classmates. “Why would she do that?” laments Jeff (Warren Kole), Callie’s father and Shauna’s husband. “Why would she do such a thing?” Shauna tries to downplay it, but Jeff ignores any attempt to normalize it. “That’s not typical trauma, that’s not a typical childhood, and I think it’s real possible that our daughter’s not okay.”

However, Jeff seems to be fighting a losing battle in his attempts to argue that this situation is meaningfully abnormal. It is instead just the nature of these characters’ lives. Yellowjackets even acknowledges this shift in the context of broader American political culture. Homeschooling Callie, Shauna discusses the “Teapot Dome Scandal”, the corruption scandal which is the most obvious historical precedent for the Trump Administration. “Which President?” Shauna asks. Callie replies, “I don’t know, Trump?”

It was President Warren G. Harding, who is often compared to Trump in his personal life, his approach to the job and his legacy in the office. Interestingly, to get back to that tension in the first season of Yellowjackets about the challenge in adjusting to life after trauma, it was Harding who famously ran on the promise of “a return to normalcy” after the First World War and the Spanish Flu. This is perhaps the great fear of the current moment: that this insanity is the new normal.

In some ways, this feels like a central theme of this third season premiere of Yellowjackets, and an attempt on the part of the show to pivot slightly away from the zeitgeist of late 2021 into the cultural mood of early 2025. If the first two seasons of Yellowjackets were about trying to find a way back from a horrific moment of shared insanity, the third is instead about the fear that there comes a point where such insanity becomes normalized and palatable.

While it may no longer be the buzziest show on television, Yellowjackets still has a little bit of a sting to it.