Note: This story contains spoilers from “Yellowjackets” Season 3, Episode 7.
Ever since “Yellowjackets” debuted, fans have been fixated on one particular character — and we don’t even know who she is. But after the show’s latest, game-changing twist, we might have finally met her.
“Pit Girl,” as has become the fandom’s non-canon nomenclature for the mysterious character, was actually the first person we ever saw on the show. Introduced in the opening scene of the series pilot episode, the fair-skinned brunette sprints through a frozen forest, underdressed, wearing just a nightgown (and the gold heart necklace that has become a significant symbol and major mystery of its own in the Yellowjackets mythology). Whoever she is, Pit Girl is clearly running for her life, surrounded by the sound of animalistic shrieks as she tries to make her escape.
But that escape is cut short when she falls into a pit full of spikes and dies, impaled, before becoming a feast for the cannibalistic survivors. With that, we witness what we now know to be one of the Yellowjackets’ hunts, one of their rituals to appease the all-powerful force they call “The Wilderness,” which may or may not be a construct of their collective trauma-induced imagination.
Since that opening scene, Pit Girl has emerged as one of the biggest fascinations for the fandom, a figure of mystery who we always assumed was one of a dwindling amount of possible characters. After all, we know it can’t be any of the women who make it to the adult timeline, it can’t be any of the increasing number of young Yellowjackets who have already died, and we know she has to fit a very specific physical profile — the exact physical profile of the show’s surprise new character, Hannah (Ashley Sutton).
Let’s quickly run down the state of the Pit Girl theories.
It obviously can’t be Shauna or Lottie (nor the increasingly brunette Natalie) because we know they survive the wilderness. That leaves a limited lot, mostly background or supporting characters. There’s the little-known Gen, along with some still-nameless extras, whom we know even less. There’s the ever-sassy Mari, the recent favorite as Season 3 has set up a rivalry between her and Shauna, who is becoming fully unhinged and more empowered as the season wears on. Mari also already fell into a pit earlier this season, in an episode cheekily titled “It Girl,” and a roar of “foreshadowing!” could be heard throughout the realm of “Yellowjackets” theorists.
Another once-popular theory posited it could even be Shauna’s teenage daughter, Callie, by some trick of editing to conceal that Pit Girl’s death takes place during a new hunt, set within the contemporary timeline.
But Season 3, Episode 6, titled “Thanksgiving (Canadian),” might have just changed everything and solved the mystery once and for all, because a new brunette just dropped and she seems a perfect fit for the role.
In fact, at the end of the episode, three new characters entered the fray in the most unexpected of ways: they stumbled upon the Yellowjackets out in the woods – at the most inauspicious moment, no less. As commanded by Shauna and led by Lottie, the girls were deep in a cannibalistic frenzy, ritualistically consuming the corpse of Coach Ben (RIP), even though they were far from the desperate starvation of the winter. And as we learn in Episode 7, “Croak,” it was actually their euphoric, feral cries that lured the new characters to them.
Those new characters are Joel McHale’s rugged outdoorsman, Kodiac, and the two scientists he’s guiding through the wilderness: Nelson Franklin’s Edwin (we barely knew ya) and, most importantly, Ashley Sutton’s Hannah. Unlike Edwin, Hannah is not immediately killed. Moreover, she is notably a slender, fair-skinned brunette who might have come into the wilderness in possession of a nightgown. And she’s an outsider. From Jackie to Javi and Ben, the Yellowjackets have made a pattern of feasting on those they view as “other.”
What’s more, “Croak” reveals that Hannah is now in the Yellowjackets’ custody, having turned herself in as the wild pack tried to chase her down (you could say they hunted her down, another moment that fires off the “foreshadowing” alarms) — and we know she survives for a while. In the adult timeline, we learn that Gen and Melissa grew close to her during their time lost in the woods. Finally, we know that she dies. From the way that the surviving Yellowjackets talk about her to the obituary that Shauna reads, it’s clear that Hannah ain’t making it out of the wilderness.
But does she become a feast for the Wilderness (proper noun)? Only time will tell and with the series hopeful for a five-season arc, it might be some time before we get those answers. But one thing is for sure, Hannah has just moved way up the list of possible Pit Girls and given theorists a whole new candidate to ponder.
“Yellowjackets” debuts new episodes Fridays on Paramount+ with Showtime.
