With a narration divided between past and present, ‘Yellowjackets’ has caught us once again in its story of stranded young women and their primitive instincts in the depths of the forest. In this season 2, we have seen the young barely survive their first winter while in the present there was a fateful but no less fascinating meeting of the surviving adults.
In this way, a few minutes after learning that although Lottie (Courtney Eaton / Simone Kessell) was the “medium” with the wild, the identity of the horned queen was neither more nor less than Natalie (Sophie Thatcher and Juliette Lewis). A few minutes after seeing her proclamation in the past, in the jump to the future we saw how things got extremely complicated in the forest.
Sucked into the wild inside her, Misty (Christina Ricci) accidentally kills Natalie. A tragedy that destroys the unexpected reunion of the survivors of the flight.
The angel of Death
A turn that, in the words of Karyn Kusama, executive producer of the series and director of this particular episode, was already predicted in a certain way during the pilot of the series, which she also directed. Something that, somehow, its co-creators also confirmed Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson in the “Behind the scenes” of this final episode.
“It was fun replaying that moment from the pilot with Natalie and Misty, completing the whole cycle of their friendship”, acknowledges Ashley Lyle. The co-creator of ‘Yellowjackets’ refers to a very specific scene in which, during a large bottle of Nat consumes LSD at a bonfire, hallucinations soon begin and there she sees Misty. As he reacts (“Misty?”), she has disappeared.
A very brief moment but one that did not go unnoticed by the fans: was it a mere hallucination? Was it really there? and that it has finally been confirmed as a kind of premonition of how the fate of both would be linked. As Kumana explains, that was the vision of the angel of death:
“Something that I know the showrunners are always thinking about and that Ashley and Bart have been thinking about since the pilot, is that kind of mysterious moment where Natalie hallucinates about Misty at the bottle in the woods and how that was always this flash- forward challenging the notion that Misty was always going to be like a grim reaper to Natalie. And so it comes full circle in the season 2 finale, where we go there towards that moment. Their relationship was so troubled and sticky and weird and this is partly why. They are complicated ladies, complicated teenagers!”
The director also explains how this particular death opens the opportunity to explore in still greater depth what happened in the forest.
«Something that I have talked about a lot with Juliette and in fact with the whole cast is that nothing is for sure. One thing that I’ve really experienced, and I know a little too much about myself, is that loss can be this excruciating, transformative experience, and I think we’ve seen that these teenage characters have suffered a lot of loss. As we meet them, we see what they’ve been through and we see them as adults and we wonder how some of them, or at least I wonder, put one foot in front of the other. But I think there’s something about what a loss in the present like this is that creates an opportunity to explore the ways that it can prompt reassessments or revisiting the past and can prompt a lot of change, for better and for worse. And so I think it will be something that the show explores deeply around Nat’s death.”
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