The Girls Aren’t Alright: On the Second Season of ‘Yellowjackets,’ the US Women’s National Soccer Team, and Raging Against the Constraints of the Patriarchy

Despite their isolation, the Wiskayok Yellowjackets have to navigate a new world under the weight of patriarchal standards.

Showtime

By Robin Jennings

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This is it.

It’s the moment. 

Every Yellowjackets fan has been… waiting for this? Dreading it? I’m still not completely sure.

If you watched the first season of the Emmy-nominated Showtime hit, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The premise was clearly laid out in the 2021 pilot: in 1996, the Wiskayok Yellowjackets — a girls’ high school soccer team from a random suburban town in New Jersey — ventured out to the West Coast for a national championship game. Halfway through their trip, a storm hit and their plane went down somewhere over the Canadian wilderness. We know that the girls who survived the crash will be stranded there for nearly two years and that, eventually, they’ll turn to cannibalism to survive. Some will make it out, but most won’t. The backcountry will get violent and unforgiving. We’ll bounce between this timeline and one set 25 years into the future, following the ladies who managed to get home as they grapple with the decisions they made as kids. But at the end of season one, viewers would figure out that the 1996 timeline was a slow burn at best. It wouldn’t be until 2023 that we’d arrive at the second episode of season two, “Edible Complex,” to get to the moment — the point of no return.

After an extended period in isolation without food, tragedy is ready to pounce. Jackie (Ella Purnell), the team’s captain, succumbs to hypothermia after the rest of the team cast her out following a devastating argument, one born out of hopelessness and a night tainted by an accidental mass overdose (courtesy of wild mushrooms). The rest of the girls fully intend to cremate her remains after finding her body, but Mother Nature has other plans. A sudden wind blows through and a pile of snow lands on her makeshift altar. Instead of turning to ash, Jackie’s body slowly roasts. The smell is enticing — nay, intoxicating. It overwhelms her teammates to the point that it rouses them from their sleep. They gingerly file their way out of the cabin and wade into the snow, no longer able to wish away the animalistic hunger growing inside of them. As Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls'' swells in the background, the team looms over what’s left of Jackie. They wait a beat, hesitant and unsure. As grace would have it, they collectively hallucinate a feast worthy of the Greek gods as Thom Yorke's lyrics spill out of our speakers:

It's always best with the covers up

I am the pick in the ice

Do not cry out or hit the alarm

You know we're friends 'til we die

One by one, they lock eyes. This is okay, they say to each other telepathically. She wouldn’t want her death to be in vain. 

It’s all the permission the team needs. They consume their once-revered leader so voraciously that their shell-shocked coach — the only adult left among them —  retreats to the cabin in abject terror.