Note: This story contains spoilers from “Yellowjackets” Season 3, Episode 1 and 2.
When “Yellowjackets” co-creator Ashley Lyle teased that in Season 3 “the girls are thriving” in the wilderness, audiences probably didn’t expect to see the teenage survivors actually comfortably housed and well fed after the Season 2 finale in which the cabin, their only shelter, burned down.
Season 3 picks up a few moths after the events of Season 2: Now it’s spring and the girls have built cozy little wooden huts for themselves. They’ve also started raising geese and the wild game hunting has been going well, so no one is starving.
The opening scene — in which Teen Mari (Alexa Barajas) appears to be running for her life in a callback to the chilling “Pit Girl” murder sequence in Season 1 — is quickly revealed to be a Capture the Flag-type game with no one’s life in any danger.
The only one who doesn’t seem to be thriving is Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), who’d rather journal alone in her hut than play nice with the others.
Before the Feb. 14 premiere, showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco told TheWrap about how Shauna’s dissatisfaction leads to a “dark version” of the character as she pushes to replace Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) as the group’s leader, and how in both timelines, Shauna is the most feared character.
TheWrap: Shauna is the only one who’s really not buying into this idyllic wilderness existence. And we see her coming into her power more in later episodes. What’s her frame of mind going into Season 3?
Ashley Lyle: Back in the real world, Shauna was about to experience a big shift. She had been by choice in the role of a beta, the moon to Jackie’s sun. Even in the pilot, we could feel her chafing against that. She was lying to Jackie about going to Rutgers and she was preparing for this break. And then, not only did that not happen, but she loses her best friend and she has enormous guilt over that. And the consequences of her affair with Jeff: She gets pregnant, she loses the baby. It’s the dark version of her coming into her own in a way that she might have done more normally, and maybe less angrily, had life continued the way that she thought it was going to.
Jonathan Lisco: We want to play with the audience’s expectations. We set up Shauna to be an underdog in some ways, and you’d like to root for that person, but the rooting interest is going to get very complicated this season. When someone is in the shadow of someone else for so long, and has subjugated all of her feelings for so long, that can have very dark consequences. We’ll see those play out in the course of Season 3.
Bart Nickerson: At the start of this season, she feels like she is not a part of [the group]. There is something inescapable about the idea that if you think you should be in charge, if you think you should be the leader, you are looking down on the group to a certain extent.
It’s interesting that in both timelines, Shauna is the one everybody’s afraid of, although in the contemporary timeline, I feel like she’s been behaving quite well.
AL: We definitely began the season with the idea of some introspection on Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey)’s part. We have the scene at the makeshift post-funeral party for Natalie (Juliette Lewis), where she’s having a bit of a reckoning with herself about what kind of a mother and wife she’s been. She’s trying to course correct and be a good mother and wife. And ultimately, the question is, “Is she really capable of those things, or does that run contrary to her very nature?”
The takeaway from the trailers is that someone is trying to kill all of the adult survivors. Shauna especially thinks someone is after her, which may or may not be true.
AL: People who suffer from PTSD [will] click into survival mode [at a moment’s notice], but Shauna in particular, is primed to click into survival mode. That’s why she is the first to feel the urgency and the paranoia and the panic of putting together these things that are happening to her.
JL: Another aspect of PTSD is often that paranoia leads to, or can lead to, a false pattern recognition. Things are happening in a certain sequence. You put them together as meaningful and causal as opposed to correlative, and that may or may not be happening to Shauna here, but it’s put into stark relief by her trauma in the past. So everything is filtering through that prism and as Ashley says, amping her up almost as if she’s experiencing the trauma from the past again.
The first two episodes of “Yellowjackets” Season 3 are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. New episodes will premiere Fridays through April 11 and air Sundays on Showtime.
