It's Flesh Feast Or Famine As Yellowjackets Season 2 Somehow Gets Even Darker

This post contains spoilers for the available episodes of "Yellowjackets" season 2.

"Yellowjackets" returned for season 2 last week with a vengeance, and episode 2 picks up right where things left off. In case you somehow forgot, Shauna ate Jackie's ear, and now she's dealing with the psychological aftermath. She's still hallucinating visions of Jackie, who tell Shauna that the bear meat is almost gone and the team is going to be in serious trouble if things don't change. Lest we forget, we aren't watching a ghost of Jackie, this is purely a manifestation of Shauna's grief, so everything Jackie says is an extension of how Shauna really feels. The subtext through their entire conversation is Shauna performing mental gymnastics to justify the inevitable — they're going to have to eat Jackie to survive.

Except the devastating delusions don't stop here. Jackie and Shauna are also bonding, with Shauna doing Jackie's hair to cover up her missing ear, and poorly applying makeup so she looks less "necrotic." Shauna is a terrible make-up artist, and Jackie's corpse ends up looking like a toddler after playing in mommy's make-up. Jackie continues to prod Shauna about her incessant lying and starts picking at her deepest insecurities. "You only had sex with him so you could imagine being me," Jackie snaps at her. Remember — THIS IS ALL SHAUNA'S DOING. Suddenly, she visualizes Jackie cutting off her flesh and offering it to Shauna, with Shauna freaking out. "This is sick!" she screams before Jackie corrects her by saying, "You're the one holding the knife." Oh, Shipman. You need help.

The creepy VHS credits roll, and we're off to the races!

In 1996, Van walks up in the middle of the night to find Taissa missing. Their arrangement of being tied together at night has failed because Tai somehow cut through her restraints without Van knowing. She bolts out into the wilderness and finds her shuffling in the snow. Taissa is heading toward the edge of a cliff, following The Man with No Eyes. Remember him? The terrifying vision she had as a child? Yeah, he's back. Van has to full-body tackle her to get her to stop, preventing her from walking straight into her death. If that wasn't weird enough, the mysterious symbol is carved into a tree trunk just at the edge of the cliff. Spoooooky! Let the record state: Van is an incredible, empathetic, and supportive partner, but these two are so young to be dealing with a problem this extreme. My heart hurts for them.

Meanwhile, in the current era, Taissa is practically living off of espresso because she knows what might happen if she falls asleep. It's some real Nancy Thompson in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" behavior. At one point, she sits in front of her vanity looking exhausted, and her reflection moves on its own. I've seen "Mirrors," don't you dare take a bath, Taissa! The next time we see her, Sammy has walked to her place from school to see her and Steve the dog. Simone doesn't know, but given how cheerful Sammy is being ... something weird is going on.

Taissa calls up Simone to tell her Sammy showed up unannounced, and she is pissed. When she finally arrives at the house, the door is chained up and Taissa is passed out on the couch. Simone runs through the house looking for their son and sees that his bedroom window is open. She blames Taissa, as she should, and the two hop in the car to go searching for him. As they're driving around, Simone gets a very frustrated call from Sammy's school. Turns out, Sammy has been waiting there for two hours, he never left school to see Taissa, and she completely hallucinated the whole situation while she was sleeping. "You are very sick, Taissa. You need to stop everything that you're doing and get help," Simone says, declaring the understatement of the century.

While Taissa's condition is still not canonically defined, it appears that her sleepwalking is manifesting as an out-of-body experience. That expression gets used usually to describe something like astral projection, but psychologists in practice use OBE as the inverse of lucid dreaming. When Taissa sleeps, she views the dreams and nightmarish images as reality. Or, you know, this could be something totally supernatural, in which case, Taissa is extremely dangerous.

As Simone yells at Taissa for not getting help, she appears to disassociate, putting on the stern, intimidating face we saw during the season 1 finale as she was elected senator, and the two are hit by a truck as she blows a red light. The press is about to have a field day with you, Madam Senator!

Callie is still in her teenage angst era, but all things being fair, she has plenty of reasons to be annoyed as hell with her parents. Like, they killed a man and are really, really bad at hiding it. Callie ends up dumping her milquetoast boyfriend but doesn't tell her mom about it, which means she now has an excuse to do whatever she wants under the guise of hanging out with her best friend or her boyfriend with Shauna none the wiser.

Nat's former crush and current cop Kevyn Tan shows up at Shauna's house to "give her a head's up as a friend" about Adam's disappearance, and Shauna absolutely whiffs it. Misty was right, she's terrible at talking to the cops. Before she can incriminate herself by lying through her teeth any further, Callie interrupts with a distraction. This is a fascinating color on Callie, who as of the last episode, I would have expected to let her mom get busted.

After the close call, she and her friend go to a bar where she meets a man with a cop mustache. Look, I'm not saying all cops have mustaches, but I am saying that all men with that specific mustache are cops. He also suspiciously has a similar situation as Callie with his parents being a mess. Is it a coincidence ... OR A SETUP?! Good news, a few scenes later we learn he's Kevyn's partner and is unofficially working undercover. Kevyn is less than thrilled about his partner's new plan because this could screw things up for their case. I would laugh for an eternity if Shauna gets away with Adam's murder because a cop was unethical with her daughter.

Speaking of cases, Misty is knee-deep in trying to solve Nat's disappearance. She posts images of the motel's ancient security camera to the Citizen's Detective forum looking for advice and is met with unanimous replies that there's no use trying to hack into it. Unanimous, except for an account named "PuttingTheSickInForensics," who we already know is the handle of Elijah Wood's character, Walter. He tells her that he'll help as long as she stops downvoting his theories on Adam's disappearance. She's not budging, but Walter still helps ... by showing up at her place of work.

Walter shows up at the senior center where Misty can be found denying medication to patients that she doesn't like, seemingly on a tour for his elderly mother. Based on how often he and Misty lock eyes, I think this is all a cover. He needed an excuse to get to Misty, and he found it. Walter is also the kind of guy who wears shorts and calf-high socks with formal shoes, so I'm immediately suspicious of him because that's some serial killer s***. He later leaves Misty a note about investigating someone who stayed at the motel when Nat disappeared, and I am praying to the forest gods that it's Randy. We didn't see anyone in season 1 at that motel other than Randy, and the show's running joke of treating him like a punching bag will never get old to me.

Walter and Misty could be a detective dream team, or it could spell danger for Misty. After all, she's an accomplice to Shauna at this point, not to mention, she killed Jessica Roberts last season. If anyone could figure her out, it would be another Citizen's Detective.

Lottie doesn't take too kindly to Nat's cult, clarifying that "we are an intentional community turning suffering into strengths." Lisa is doing fine after getting stabbed through the hand with a fork by Nat last episode, but exclusively calls Lottie "Charlotte," which will take some getting used to hearing. Lisa brings Lottie a drink, but it isn't exactly what she asked for, and it's a great peek at the woman behind the culty curtain. Despite her welcoming, healing energy, Lottie's truth slips through in her judgment surrounding Lisa's mistake. Lottie also clarifies that all of the outfits of the commune members are heliotrope, not purple, in reference to the flower. Heliotrope means "to move with the sun," and describes the types of flowers that follow the light of the sun throughout the day. Hmm, guess we now know why Lottie wears orange and yellow.

But the big news is that Lottie tells Nat what really happened with Travis the night he died. He was having panic attacks and called Lottie to say the wilderness had "come back" to haunt him. His theory is that the easiest way to confront it is to get as close to death as possible, citing the time "Van almost died" and again when Lottie almost died (FORESHADOWING!!) as proof. Travis planned to hang himself just enough to lose consciousness and confront the darkness, setting the forest symbol in candles beneath him. 

Sadly, he rigged himself up using a button-powered machine, and when Lottie went to bring him down, it failed. Nat thinks Lottie is holding out information and says, "Every time you try to save someone, a lot of bad s*** happens." Lottie has some terrifying flashbacks of Laura Lee and later that night, Nat has some awful visuals of her own. Did Travis' death bring back the darkness?

Back in the past, Taissa goes into the meat shed to find Jackie's corpse wearing clown-ass makeup and calls out Shauna in front of everyone, and chews out Lottie for encouraging her. Coach Ben lets out a "Holy christ," once he hears what's going on, once again, being the voice of reason. Shauna is desperate to keep Jackie around and says they can't bury her because the ground is frozen solid. "We can cremate her," Taissa says. Oh, god. Ohhhh god. It's happening.

As they set up the shockingly well-made funeral pyre, the other girls try to make a claim for Jackie's clothing. Especially Mari, because she's the worst. Shauna refuses to let anyone take her clothing, and Lottie sees the chunk missing from Jackie's arm. She takes off the BFF necklace and gives it to Shauna, who is the one who finally puts the flame under her. She delivers a heartbreaking eulogy, and Travis places Javi's bloody clothing under the pyre to burn with her.

That clothing, by the way, was Nat's doing. Travis is hooked on Lottie's woo-woo nonsense, and practical Nat can't handle it anymore. In an act of desperation, Nat took a piece of Javi's clothing, shredded it, and wiped her own blood on it to "find" as proof to Travis that Javi is gone and he's gotta let him go. This act seems to finally get through to Travis, who breaks down but finally accepts that his little brother is gone. When Lottie sees the bloody clothes, she picks a fight with Nat, because she's sure that Javi is still alive. If Lottie is right about all of this, I don't think they're getting Javi back, at least, not the Javi we last saw. He's gonna be haunted or feral or ... something.

Later that night, Travis and Nat finally get intimate again, but the second she puts her hand on his chest, he starts visualizing Lottie. They finally have sex again, but he keeps seeing Lottie both in place of Nat or watching over them. Even weirder, Lottie is presented like a Mother Mary figure, coddling Travis or serving as a protector. God, these kids are all going to need SO much therapy. During the weirdness, the wind travels through the woods and knocks a ton of snow on Jackie's pyre. Everyone starts waking up because they can smell it ... Jackie is cooking.

Side note, I used to live next to a crematorium and burning people smell a lot like beef or pork depending on the body fat percentage. Do with that information what you will.

When they all wake up smelling Jackie, Shauna declares, "She wants us to." The scene splices into images of the team participating in a Greek feast, in full formal costuming. It's go time. All of the Yellowjackets are officially fine young cannibals. Shauna uses the knife and carves her best friend. It's disgusting, it's poetic, and it's the last moment of civility during the meal. The moments resembling the Greek feast are joyous, but the reality is absolutely ravenous. They rip Jackie to shreds, consuming every last bit of her. Coach Ben is rightfully mortified and he refuses to participate. He says nothing, but his face definitely says "Oh my god, these f***ing kids are gonna eat me." Next week's post-cannibalism clarity is gonna be a doozy!

The name of this week's episode is "Edible Complex," a clear play on the term "Oedipal Complex." Last week's episode was "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," the joke of course being that the next line is, "lend me your ears," and then, ya know, Shauna ate Jackie's ear. The ancient Greek theming was most evident during the cannibalism feast this week, but the episode title sounds like a Freudian interpretation of Shauna's relationship with Jackie. This isn't an instance of loving her best friend and hating anyone who gets in her way, it's loving someone so much you want to consume them ... maybe even to become them. It's sad! It's gross! I love it!

• I think Taissa was the one who took the indoor bucket poop in the cabin. Maybe eating dirt isn't the only thing she does while in a squatting position during her sleepwalking adventures.
• Andrés Soto Valverde, the actor who plays adult Travis in the 2021 timeline sounds so much like Kevin Alves (teen Travis) that for a solid minute, I thought Soto was dubbed with Alves' voice. The "Yellowjackets" casting department once again stays unmatched.
• There's no way Jackie's letterman's jacket tasted good. Those things absorb sweat like a sponge and she practically lived in it for months with no access to laundry detergent. Gross!
• I gotta admit, I missed seeing Jeff and his cornball humor this week. What has this show done to me?

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