Yellowjackets Season 3 Finally Confirms The Identity Of Hilary Swank's Character

This article contains major spoilers for "Yellowjackets."

Well, congrats citizen detectives, you've done it again. "Yellowjackets" season 3 episode 8 "A Normal Boring Life" finally introduces special guest star Hilary Swank. As the fan hive had called, she is playing a grown-up version of plane crash survivor Melissa (Jenna Burgess). 

To make sure the audience recognizes her, Swank's Melissa is introduced wearing a baseball cap, like the one her teenage self has often been seen in. As fans had previously caught from promotional footage, Swank is also wearing blue contact lenses to match Burgess' eye color.

Swank's casting fits a pattern. The past storyline of "Yellowjackets" is set in the 1990s, so for the middle-aged characters, the show has cast '90s starlets Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis. Swank, who broke out thanks to "The Next Karate Kid" and "Beverly Hills 90210," fits that mold. Not for nothing, one of Swank's more recent roles was in 2020's "The Hunt," another story about people hunting people like animals. 

Melissa was a barely-seen background extra in the first season of "Yellowjackets." Then, she got a name, a slightly bigger role, and was recast with Burgess in season 2. Still, she seemed like she was destined to be chow for the Antler Queen — until season 3, when she finally got more spotlight and hooked up with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse). Now we know Melissa will make it out of the Wilderness, but how does the show bring in yet another survivor?

Yes, Melissa is the one who left the DAT tape at Shauna's (Lynskey) house earlier this season. As we learned across episode 6 and 7, the tape has the audio of the Yellowjackets' cannibal feast and Lottie's murder of hapless hiker/researcher Edwin (Nelson Franklin) when he stumbled on their bonfire. How? The DAT belonged to Edwin's partner, Hannah (Ashley Sutton). Apparently the Yellowjackets eventually killed Hannah (new Pit Girl candidate, anyone?), but Melissa brought the tape home, and it came to embody her guilt. This is where the show swerved with the "Shauna's stalker" story and how it won me over.

Ever since the speculation of Swank as Melissa started, I was pretty skeptical. Bringing in yet another survivor seemed soapy and not in a good way. Plus, it would limit even more which characters could die in the past story. But I think the show deftly pulled it off, and in doing so, it convinced me it was a good move. 

Episode 7, "Croak," established that the Yellowjackets thought Melissa was dead. This one reveals she made it back from the Wilderness but seemingly died by suicide later; the other Yellowjackets all went to her funeral. As Melissa reveals to Shauna, she merely faked her death, and the cops didn't press the case because she wrote a note. Melissa is coming out of the woodwork now because Natalie (Lewis) died, and she was worried she might be next.

So, it's clear the writers understood they couldn't just pull the "actually another of the Yellowjackets survived" trick into season 3. They had to provide a reason why we hadn't heard from them yet. Melissa's new life isn't just plot hole cement, either; it resonates with the existing themes and Shauna's arc.

The twist with Melissa's character is that she's not stalking Shauna. She's not a spurned ex-lover, she's quite happy with her new life as "Kelly" and her wife: Hannah's daughter Alex (Jaylee Hamidi), who Melissa wanted to apologize to but instead fell for.

The episode beats you over the head that Shauna is the truly deranged one, not Melissa. As far as Melissa claims, she left the DAT tape (with a note none of the Sadeckis read) because she'd processed her guilt and wanted Shauna to do the same. Shauna becoming convinced someone was out to kill her, the episode attests, was just her reading into a nonexistent conspiracy. Melissa also seems to have been truly surprised by the news of Lottie's (Simon Kessell) death, so if there is a Yellowjacket killer on the loose, it's (probably) not Melissa.

Shauna's paranoia is a symptom of her time away from civilization. Madness and desperation made the survivors think the Wilderness itself had a will demanding the survivors shed blood for it. Any luck, good or bad, that befell the Yellowjackets was the Wilderness rewarding or punishing them. After that, Shauna can't trust coincidence and is way too comfortable with thoughts of violence. Shauna may have claimed back in season 2 finale "Storytelling" that, "You know there's no 'It,' right? It was just us!" but she's not as readjusted as she protests.

That's why Melissa faking her death and going into hiding makes her into Shauna's foil. The Yellowjackets were so affected by their time in the Wilderness that none of them can ever truly be the person they were before the crash. Shauna desperately tried to be, marrying Jeff and never leaving her hometown, but it didn't work. The only way that Melissa could find peace was by "ending her life," casting off her identity and starting over as a different person.

"Yellowjackets" has sometimes struggled to effectively parallel the past and present timelines, but "A Normal Boring Life" does it exquisitely. In the past, the Yellowjackets have a chance to escape their Hell thanks to Hannah and her guide Kodiak (Joel McHale). But with rescue in sight, not all the Yellowjackets want to go home. Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) warns that "this place will follow us for the rest of our lives." The present-day scenes are all about showing that Tai was totally right.

In the final scene, as Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) prepares to lead the team to rescue, Shauna, Lottie, and Tai all refuse to leave. Worse, Shauna says none of the survivors will be leaving. On some level, they all like who they can be in the Wilderness; Lottie is connected to "It," Tai can be with her girlfriend Van (Liv Hewson), and Shauna has just become the leader she wanted to be. As much as Shauna was broken by Jackie's (Ella Purnell) death, the loss of her best friend also allowed her to become a whole person, not an appendage to someone else. "A Normal Boring Life" underscores that by opening with Shauna's dream of herself working in a supermarket, confronted by a ghostly Jackie who tells her she never amounted to anything.

Natalie has been changed too, but by the guilt of what she's done or let happen to survive. Note how she senses "It" when the wind blows, and speaks out in defiance: "We're going home, got it! We are leaving whatever you are behind." Natalie is by herself when she says this. Part of her believes the Wilderness has a will, but she doesn't want to submit to it; she wants to escape its grasp. If they can get home, Natalie thinks, at least things can't get worse for them. But all evidence in the show up to this point suggests she was wrong. 

Back in the season 3 premiere "It Girl," Shauna journaled her cynicism about their continued survival: 

"Once upon a time, a bunch of teenage girls got stranded in the wilderness and they went completely f**king nuts. They worshipped evil spirits and they hunted their friends and they feasted on their flesh and they f**king liked it. So they told themselves stupid fairy tales and pretended they were brave and strong. Because the reality was that even if rescue came, they could never go home again. Because of what they'd done. Because of what they'd become. That's the truth."

Even during Natalie's death back in season 2, she imagined herself sitting on a plane. On some level, she believed herself to have died in the moment of the crash.

The questions that "Yellowjackets" is asking its character are ones that the series' original pitch document outlined as the story's driving themes: 

"What are we capable of when our darkest urges are given not only a voice, but also a stage on which to use it? WHO, exactly, are we once the mask is removed? And can you ever really go back once you've seen what's underneath?"

The refrain of the series' opening theme is "No Return, No Reason." Remember, too, in the pilot, when the Yellowjackets were literally wearing animal masks during their Pit Girl hunt and feast because they'd gone feral? In the Wilderness, those masks became their true faces, and the human faces they wear in the present are just another layer of masks.

The past and present tie together even better this episode because Melissa is starting to become more than Shauna's arm candy. Melissa wants to go home; Kodiak did shoot her through the shoulder with a crossbow bolt back in "Croak," which must have reminded her how painful and dangerous the Wilderness can be.

The episode's title rings harder because "A Normal Boring Life" is what Shauna winds up living, or at least a facsimile of it. She was miserable at the start of season 1. Remember when she killed and cooked a rabbit from her yard, in a sign her butcher self still lived inside her? It took her murdering someone for her and Jeff (Warren Kole) to reignite their marriage. Based on what we've seen, Melissa is the only Yellowjacket who has truly found a normal life, and it's what she's fighting to protect. Her being absent until now doesn't undermine the show's credibility like I feared it would; it shows once more that the Yellowjackets are cursed. 

Shauna, though is determined that Melissa hasn't changed. At the end of the episode, Shauna bites off a chunk of Melissa's own arm and force-feeds it to her. Shauna is still very much the girl who went wild and ate her best friend, and she wants Melissa to know she can never not be a cannibal either.

"Yellowjackets" season 3 had a slow start, but episode 6, "Thanksgiving (Canada)," was one of the show's best episodes and a shot in the arm that "Croak" and "A Normal Boring Life" have followed through on. Hopefully, this season can stick the landing better than the Yellowjackets' flight could!

"Yellowjackets" is streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime, with new episodes premiering on Fridays.