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Yellowjackets saves the juiciest meat for its ’90s story line, leaving characters in the present day starved for attention.
In the past, reigning Antler Queen Natalie’s difficulty in keeping the group’s various factions together is helpful hindsight context for her adult misery but also makes Juliette Lewis’s absence in the modern timeline that much more noticeable — and the disorienting agony she brought to the role that much more missed. In its haste to move on from adult Natalie’s influence on the story, Yellowjackets glosses over the women’s complicated relationship to grief, using her demise as a tool to ratchet up the series’ eerie tone rather than a way to meaningfully explore what happens when this group loses a core member at this stage of life. When co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and the rest of their creative team home in on what makes these girls and women tick, maneuvering the characters to reflect the thin line between civility and the feral, Yellowjackets is luscious, immersive, and barbed.
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