In the latest episode of Showtime’s once-great series, Yellowjackets, we get another big character death. We get two, actually, though the second isn’t quite as calamitous. By my calculations, this brings the death tally of adult characters this season up to five, though one of those is in the Wilderness timeline. Spoilers ahead.
The two characters killed off this episode are Adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) and Kodi (Joel McHale). In both cases, all I can say is . . . what a waste. Ambrose is best known for her role in Six Feet Under, and a lot of people were excited to see her as Liv Hewson’s adult counterpart. Her character had potential. I know many fans thought she would be a key player in figuring out the mysteries surrounding Other Tai (Tawny Cypress) and the Man With No Eyes. Even this season, we had the pretty wild visit to the ice cream parlor, the weird commercial with the Man With No Eyes, the creepy voice message you could listen to if you called the phone number in the commercial. So many clues and breadcrumbs leading . . . nowhere. Nothing has been done with any of this for the rest of the season and now Adult Van is dead.
What a waste.
While less of a big deal to the overall story, bringing in Joel McHale just to have him killed off two episodes later is a deeply perplexing creative decision. Having Hannah (Ashley Sutton) murder Kodi is pretty bizarre also. I guess she’s trying to fit in so she can survive, but going right to cold-blooded murder is extreme, even for someone trying to survive to see their daughter. It took the girls a long time to get to this point, but Hannah gets there in a few days.
These deaths come on the heels of the equally bizarre and jarring death of Adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) which brings us to four adult survivors dead, though Adult Travis died offscreen (sparking a really fascinating mystery that ended in sheer stupidity and disappointment). Adult Nat (Juliette Lewis) died at the end of Season 2.
All of these deaths are ridiculous for different reasons. But the unifying theme is that these girls survived in the Wilderness, overcoming all the odds, facing horrific struggles, only to die in the modern timeline for nothing. Nat is killed by an accidental fentanyl shot. Lottie is (presumably) pushed down the stairs, after literally walking across Travis’s pit without breaking through the branches in the teen timeline. Van survives a wolf attack but gets stabbed by Melissa of all people, apparently to make room for Hilary Swank in the cast. All of these characters deserved better.
More to the point, adding all these characters was a mistake in the first place, since we now know they all survive in the teen timeline only to be totally wasted as characters in the adult timeline.
Even the actors are unhappy with it, and not too shy about expressing their unhappiness. We knew Lewis was unhappy with her role, especially since it involved playing an addict which she wasn’t comfortable with, but it’s illuminating to see the others express such disappointment with their deaths.
In an interview with Variety, Ambrose and Cypress made it clear that they were less than thrilled with Adult Van’s death and the writers’ choices this season:
When Ambrose first learned about the writers’ plans, she had a request: “Please make it earned and worthy of this character that Liv invented.” Cypress chimes in here. “When I read it, it did not feel earned, quite honestly, and I didn’t really understand it. Now I see that we’re saying goodbye to one character but introducing another character. It’s the most gruesome way to start [Melissa’s] story, so I get why they did it. But as a fan, I’d have liked it to have gone differently for sure—and as a fan of Lauren, I would have liked for her to stick around.”
Simone Kessell said in a previous interview on Adult Lottie’s death:
“I don’t know what happened in that writers’ room, or whether they decided that they wanted to bring in a fresh character, or just have the three main girls. As an actor, you always think, ‘Was it something I did? Was it my performance? Could I have done it differently?’ she pondered. “I just felt it was premature because I wanted to see — and I know that the fans and the supporters of the show did too — where Lottie was going. So to have that just cut off didn’t feel good.”
I’ve been beating this drum for awhile now, but the adult timeline is just ridiculous at this point. Adult Tai was such a fascinating character in Season 1, and she’s been totally ruined in the following seasons. It would have been so interesting to see her navigate politics as an elected senator, balancing her wife’s horrific revelations and her duties as a public figure with this re-emerging Other Tai. Instead, she and Van just kind of wandered around aimlessly for two seasons. Both characters suffered enormously.
Lottie was the original cult of the Wilderness leader. She had such potential to be a scary, ominous, mysterious adult character but she was just . . . fine, mostly. Affable. A rich white lady with a wellness retreat. Her death feels both unearned and lame, but her character before that was nothing like we expected, and while I’m all for subverting expectations, this felt less subversive and more like the writers just ran out of ideas. Kessell isn’t the only one that doesn’t know what happened in the writers room. A lot of fans are scratching their heads.
Of course, a lot of fans are also defending every decision this show makes no matter how much it ruins these characters and makes this show a pale shadow of what it once was. I catch plenty of flack from angry fans who think I’m sexist/homophobic/just plain mean for writing these critiques of the show. But I loved Yellowjackets in Season 1. I thought it was brilliant. I thought these characters were deep and complex and compelling. Now, in the adult timeline at least, we’re just watching Scooby-Doo.
There are still some mysteries I know many fans, even jaded fans, are curious about. Who killed Lottie and why? (This seems obvious given the DNA evidence that it was Shauna, but we know it wasn’t Shauna. Only one other character in the show shares her DNA, so all the Walter/Jeff theories seem super boneheaded to me.) Who is the Pit Girl and who is the Antler Queen we saw in the very opening episode of this show? And how are the girls finally rescued?
The problem with these questions is that I care so much less about the answers now than I did at the end of Season 1. So much of the show’s tension is gone.
But I do think they’ve done a couple things well. Slowly making Shauna the villain of the series is actually quite brilliant, and her turn in both the adult and teen timeline toward a genuinely bad person to root against is great. Unfortunately, while we can still root for teen Nat (Juliette Lewis) in the past, we don’t have anyone to root for in the present. Making Adult Misty (Christina Ricci) more of a protagonist feels like a Plan B at best, because unfortunately she’s become so much less frightening than she was in Season 1, when she was all for kidnapping and murder and cutting up bodies to dispose of the evidence.
Actually, it might have been better if they’d made the central conflict of the show Jackie (Ella Purnell) vs Shauna (Melanie Lynskey / Sophie Nelisse). These two characters had such great tension. They were best friends with so much baggage between them, and Jackie would have made a great, surprising hero to go up against the equally surprising villain Shauna has become.
Oh well. Mistakes have been made. Potential has swirled down the drain. We are stuck with the show as it is, not as it could have been. One more episode to go in Season 3 and perhaps the biggest question is whether there will even be a Season 4. I can’t say I care much one way or another.
