'Yellowjackets' Season 3 Finale Recap And Review: The Pit Girl And The Antler Queen

We’ll start with the present timeline before going back in time to the fateful hunt that served as the opening moments for Yellowjackets. In the present we learn a few things:

1. Callie was Lottie’s killer. She did it because Lottie was saying all this crap about her being “the child of that place” and tells her Shauna can’t love her because she’s jealous. “You’re just like her but more,” she says, and Callie gets upset and pushes the older woman down the stairs. Lottie can’t fall through the branches of the pit, survives years out in the Wilderness, sets up her very own cult and then dies when an angry 17-year-old shoves her. Neat! Callie was looking for Melissa’s tape which apparently Lottie stole when she was staying with them, though why Lottie would have any inkling that it was there or that it was important is beyond me.

Misty figures all of this out by way of Walter who mirrored Lottie’s phone. It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention this season. We already knew it was Shauna’s DNA found with Lottie and the only other person on this show who shares her DNA is Callie.

I will say, this version of Adult Lottie, in her last moments, reminded me more of Teen Lottie than she has most of the show. It’s a shame they killed her in such a goofy way. “You mean eating each other,” Callie says at one point. “And hunting each other,” Lottie says. “And all those other thrilling, terrible things.”

Callie tells Jeff, who’s pretty upset. Which leads us to . . .

2. Callie and Jeff leave Shauna. Frankly, good for them. They needed to ditch that crazy woman. She’s dangerous, unhinged, a woman looking to create chaos in her life, who wants violence and who ought to have been killed by her teammates back in the Wilderness when they had a chance.

3. The adults bury Van. I’m not sure what happens back at Melissa’s house. Is she just gone? Does she leave her family and a big old bloodstain? Does she call the cops? We don’t find out. Tai and Shauna go out into the woods and bury Van. I guess this makes more sense than calling the police given the exposure to all of them. Wouldn’t this be more interesting if Tai was an elected senator who has to bury bodies to keep her constituents and press from finding out? Adult Van’s storyline has been completely wasted by this bizarre murder. Now Tai is estranged from her family, isn’t doing senator stuff, and doesn’t have Van. She does take a big old knife and cuts out Van’s heart and eats it, which is pretty gruesome and might have been a pretty wild scene if this show was still on the level it was in Season 1.

4. Shauna finds the note from Melissa. It says exactly what Melissa claimed, which begs the question: Why did Melissa kill Van in cold blood and say she “wanted to be bad”? All of this prompts Shauna into journaling again, where she inexplicably says that she has forgotten so much of what happend out there in the wilderness and now it’s all coming back to her. As you may recall, Shauan already took detailed journals of what happened. When discussing any repressed memories, she claimed she didn’t want to know. Nothing in the show prior to this season has indicated that Shauna repressed her memories of being a total lunatic in the wild, or the Antler Queen, or the instigator of pretty much the worst stuff that happened. It makes sense, but the show hasn’t laid the groundwork for this “twist” at all.

5. Tai and Misty team up to take down Shauna. This, along with Shauna’s journaling, is the biggest indication of where the adult storyline is headed in Season 4. I do think it’s a little goofy for Tai to say she “forgot” that Shauna was the one fueling all the bad stuff in the Wilderness “for the longest time.” I guess she and Shauna both just pushed all those memories down when they returned to the real world, but it’s a bit silly that this wouldn’t come out earlier, like when Shauna killed Adam with a knife. Tai tells Misty that Shauna will be the last one standing, and she doesn’t want that does she? “No,” Misty says. “I definitively do not.” So that’s Season 4’s adult timeline, I guess, unless this show keeps randomly pivoting.

Back in the 90s timeline, two hugely significant things happen, and both rely on Hannah, a character who has been given almost no time to develop into such an important character.

The first, of course, is The Hunt. Akilah, working with the other Bad Teens, comes up with a plan to poison all the animals just in time for winter. Setting aside how stupid this is in terms of basic self-preservation, it’s the excuse Team Shauna uses to instigate another hunt. Given the power of Shauna’s sheer force of will at the trial and when everyone tried to leave (magical, one might say, given she was outnumbered both times and gave no solid reasoning in either instance, but the girls followed along anyways) I don’t understand why she couldn’t just do it again.

In any case, they decide to draw from the deck once again and Tai and Van rig the deck (I guess shuffling before such a deadly game never occurred to anyone). They set up Hannah to take the fall, but Shauna’s instincts tell her something is up, so she changes places in the circle. Again, weird to not have any rules for this game, but okay. This works out well for Shauna because Mari ends up drawing the Queen of Hearts, and we all know that starting in Season 3, Shauna really hates Mari.

And so The Hunt begins. Some of this next bit is really striking, because it’s shot-for-shot taken from the first episode. But in many ways, fleshing out this scene actually diminishes it. We get a lot of girl drama. Melissa attacks Shauna and almost kills her. Akilah confronts Lottie in the cave, telling her she no longer believes in her despite just killing all her animals. Various other little moments take place that break up what was, in the pilot, a terrifying, haunting scene, that it just feels a lot less than it was before.

Learning that Shauna is the Antler Queen is also less shocking after seeing her act the way she has all of Season 3, but it still feels like they’d planned on Lottie being the Antler Queen in Season 1, and then changed everything. All of this would have been a lot better if Jackie had still been around, and all three seasons had been their growing conflict, transforming from best friends into bitter rivals over three seasons, only to have Shauna responsible for her gruesome death. Of course, this was clearly never the plan as they obviously wanted to kill off Jackie in the first season and Pit Girl from the first episode looks just like Mari. There are many instances that feel like the writers changed the story or made it up as they went along in this show, but this is not one of them.

“Bring me her hair,” is quite the hideous moment also, but we learn why the Antler Queen had tufts of hair stuck to her robes in the first episode.

I actually turned on both episodes at the same time and watched the various scenes play out, and even though many moments are the same, it’s striking just how much more intense and ominous and dreadful the original hunt was from this version. There are also weird differences. In the pilot, Misty looks up and smiles as they all stand around eating by the fire. In this episode, it’s the next morning but she does the exact same thing. It’s just a little odd.

The big “twist” in this timeline is that Hannah disguised herself as Nat for the hunt, which Nat does not actually participate in (thank god). Instead, she’s off on her own, climbing a nearby mountaintop in order to radio for help. She gets all the way up there and nobody answers. She seems almost defeated when suddenly a voice crackles on the other end. “I can hear you.”

So we know that Natalie is responsible for their rescue, after all, and it’s a pretty great moment except for the music choice. Aerosmith? Really? “We’re living on the edge” belting out over this moment feels hokey rather than triumphant. If ever there was a time to bring the orchestral score into an episode, it would be while Nat screams into the radio, begging for someone to answer.

I keep imagining how this all could have played out so much better. Killing Nat off at the end of Season 2 was a huge mistake, and it definitely feels like Season 2 was radically changed to accomodate this. As much as I hate recastings, this might have been a time to recast Juliette Lewis instead of changing the entire story to fit her departure. Not having Nat in the adult timeline just ruins the 90s timeline for me. Both Nat and Jackie being dead makes the adult timeline pointless and unsatisfying. And no, I don’t think the final conflict for the adult Yellowjackets ought to be a weird Tai and Misty vs Shauna vs Melissa setup.

There were moments throughout this episode and this season that I genuinely enjoyed, but this should have been such a big, earth-shattering finale and it was ultimately just another letdown. Less stupid than the Season 2 finale, but just mediocre. There’s something tragic about a great show devolving into a mediocre one, but here we are. What did you think?

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