<em>Yellowjackets</em> Is So Much More Than a ‘Female <em>Lord of the Flies</em>’
Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets have mostly had to rely on creaky comparisons: a female Lord of the Flies … a ’90s Stranger Things … a teen Lost, but in Canada. The coming-of-age horror story is indeed tough to categorize, but nonetheless thrillingly addictive. The show follows a championship-bound girls’ soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021.
Like Stranger Things, the show uses genre horror as a way to recall what it feels like to be a teenager. After all, with so much in high school seeming life-and-death, a survival narrative is almost too on the nose. But although the anxieties of that age are universal, Yellowjackets also speaks to the very specific trauma of this moment. As they dream about college, crushes, and national championships, the girls have their lives interrupted by an unthinkable disaster. Suddenly grappling with surviving each day, they find themselves in a world without clear rules for how to stay safe and return to normal life.
Yellowjackets isn’t just about the trauma of the team’s 19 months in the wilderness, though. It’s also about how that trauma has stayed with them—how they’ve tried to grow past it and support one another through it.
The comparisons to Lost are mostly quite apt: Yellowjackets’ quasi-supernatural plot has spawned endless online theorizing. (Who are the “pit girl”and the “antler queen”? Who’s blackmailing the adults? What does the cult’s strange symbol mean?) In breaking from Lost’s mold with two timelines, though, the show introduces a fascinating new kind of mystery: How did the teenagers we see in the woods grow into the adults they become back home?
For an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review, Shirley Li, Lenika Cruz, and Megan Garber analyze Season 1 of . Listen to their conversation here:
