TV & Streaming Flashbacks: Yellowjackets Season 1
review
✦
review ✦
From its first moments, Yellowjackets announces itself as something more than just a wilderness survival story. Yes, it follows a high school girls' soccer team stranded after a plane crash. Yes, it teases cannibalism, violence, and descent into primal chaos. But what elevates Yellowjackets beyond its basic premise is its slow, deliberate unraveling of trauma, identity, and the complicated wreckage of human connection. Season 1 is compelling, unnerving, occasionally messy, and undeniably bold. It asks its audience to sit with discomfort—and rewards those who stay.
Yellowjackets Season 1 | Showtime and Paramount+
A Dual-Timeline Structure That Pays Off
One of the series’ most effective tools is its dual-timeline structure. It jumps between 1996, when the crash occurs and the girls begin their grim journey of survival, and the present day, where the survivors—Shauna, Natalie, Misty, and Taissa—grapple with the ghosts of their past. The toggling between timelines is essentially where the show finds its emotional and thematic core.
The past is brutal, murky, and slowly descending into something feral. But it’s the present-day storyline that becomes the show’s strongest focal point. Watching the adult versions of these women navigate their lives—each scarred in different ways—is often more harrowing than the survival narrative itself. There's a bleakness to how their trauma manifests: in secret affairs, substance abuse, political ambition, and even cheerful sociopathy. And yet, there’s a strange resilience in these characters, a need to reclaim some sense of agency from the past that swallowed them whole.
The show handles the transitions between timelines with precision. Each reveal in one era echoes into the other, giving viewers breadcrumbs of how these women survived, and at what cost. There’s always a sense that we don’t have the full story—and that’s exactly the point.
Jackie: A Standout, Gone Too Soon
Among the ensemble of teen survivors, Jackie stands out as a particularly tragic figure. At first, she comes across as the expected archetype: the popular girl, the team captain, the one who seems to have it all together. But Yellowjackets isn’t interested in letting her stay one-dimensional. Over the season, Jackie becomes one of the most emotionally grounded and morally complicated characters in the cast.
Her clashes with Shauna, her best friend, create a deeply compelling undercurrent. It’s not just about betrayal or secrets—it’s about identity and shifting power. Jackie doesn’t adapt to wilderness life as quickly as others, and that resistance becomes her undoing. Her unwillingness to conform, her isolation, and her final moments are haunting. Her (frustratingly tragic) death feels like a major turning point, not only because of the shock, but because of how human she was in a story that increasingly deals in extremes. She was a character with weight, and her absence in future seasons is already palpable.
Flawed Characters, Slowly Unpacked
One of the most striking choices Yellowjackets makes is refusing to make its characters instantly likable. In fact, many of them come off as deeply unpleasant in the early episodes. Shauna is guarded and passive-aggressive. Natalie lashes out. Taissa is manipulative and secretive. The teenage versions are just as difficult—competitive, angry, insecure, and selfish.
But this isn’t a flaw. It’s the show’s thesis. These aren’t heroes; they’re survivors, and they’re messy, damaged, and often deeply unreliable. What makes the show work is how it peels back their layers slowly, showing who they were and who they could have been, had the crash not turned their world into a brutal crucible.
By midseason, the character work deepens significantly. Shauna’s internal war, Natalie’s addiction, and Misty’s terrifying devotion to control all gain nuance. The series doesn’t seek redemption arcs so much as it seeks understanding. And by the end, even the most frustrating characters feel achingly human.
Mystery, Horror, and the Supernatural—Sometimes Unevenly Mixed
Yellowjackets walks a genre tightrope. It’s part survival thriller, part psychological drama, and part horror mystery with a supernatural edge. The show plays coy with its darker elements—hinting at ritualism, hallucinations, possession, and perhaps something ancient in the woods. Whether what’s happening is truly supernatural or just the product of trauma-induced madness is part of the intrigue.
At times, the show leans so heavily into ambiguity that it risks frustrating its audience. The tension between giving answers and building mystery can occasionally feel more like a stalling tactic. Some episodes meander, and a few plotlines—particularly in the 1996 timeline—feel undercooked or unresolved by season’s end.
Still, the atmosphere is so rich and the mood so finely tuned that it’s easy to forgive these stumbles. The show’s world is oppressive, strange, and fascinating. Even when it falters, it remains captivating.
Thematic Depth Beneath the Blood
What really cements Yellowjackets as more than just a genre series is how it weaves its themes—grief, guilt, shame, control, and the raw will to survive—into every scene. The series shows depictions of trauma, but it also explores how people mold themselves around it. How guilt festers. How secrets calcify. How some people break and others transform.
And yet, for all its darkness, the show has a wicked sense of humor and moments of levity that keep it from becoming oppressively grim. Misty’s chipper malevolence, for example, is as funny as it is disturbing. These tonal shifts are bold, and more often than not, they work.
A Gripping, Unsettling Start
Yellowjackets Season 1 is a slow-burn psychological horror that rewards patience. Its characters are flawed and sometimes frustrating, its story complex and fragmented, and its mysteries occasionally overwhelming. But it’s also gripping, unique, and filled with standout performances. It’s a series that lingers after each episode—unsettling, poignant, and crawling under your skin in the best way.
Season 1 may not be perfect, but it knows exactly what it wants to be. And that’s more than most shows can say.
Score: 7.5/10
Season 1 of Yellowjackets offers strong performances, clever writing, and promising pacing by the time it comes to its gruesome end.
