The following story contains spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 4, Episode 9, “Storytelling.”
WE’VE MADE it. That’s right—we’ve made it through another season of covered up murders, upstate cults, wilderness survival, ’90s needle drops, and, yeah, cannibalism. A whole bunch of cannibalism. Of course, we’re talking about Season 2 of Showtime’s hit Yellowjackets, and we’ve got lots of ground to cover.
One place we’ll start: the question of whether or not the “it” the Yellowjackets encountered in the wilderness really is anything at all. In the past timeline, we see the girls throughout the season becoming more and more obedient to what Lottie senses and tells them to do; after an early season feast on the accidentally-roasted Jackie, the girls get a taste for blood and eventually realize that eating one of their fellow humans is the only path to survival. They repeat a refrain “it chooses,” and by drawing cards at random, “it” chooses Natalie.
But “it” switched to Javi, so the girls choose to think, when he tried to help her. He slips through a crack in the ice, and drowns/freezes to death. “It” chose, they say. And so they eat him to stay alive—starting with his brother, Travis, taking a big old bite out of his raw heart (after Shauna butchered his body into manageable pieces and removed his bones). Fun!
In the present timeline, Shauna, Misty, Nat, Van, and Tai all convene at Lottie’s wellness center/cult, and Lottie—clearly not doing well, as we know she has had issues with mental illness for her entire life—gets them to embark in the same kind of game/hunt. Shauna is ultimately the one to draw the Queen card, indicating that “it” chose her—and like no time has passed, the now adult Yellowjackets put their masks on and are ready to hunt Shauna for sport.
Shauna, now constantly the tired-of-it cynic, can’t believe they’re believing in this. She says there never was an “it,” and, if we’re being real, she has a point. Lottie is in a mental health crisis and the others are blindly believing her. Granted, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
Eventually, though, when Lisa (the 20-something girl in Lottie’s purple cult) emerges with a shotgun to try to help, Misty tries to subdue her with her signature poison—the same one that killed the snooping Jessica Roberts last season. But Nat—thankful for the empathy that Lisa showed her—pushes her out of the way, taking Misty’s poison to the chest instead.
And that leads us into the final stretch of Season 2 of Yellowjackets.
So, without further ado, let’s talk about the most pressing questions that came out of the Yellowjackets Season 2 finale.
Is Natalie Really Dead?
The Season 2 Yellowjackets finale features a bunch of unknown poisonous concoctions entering people’s systems. But we can be fairly certain that the one that went from Misty’s syringe into Nat’s body was, unfortunately, fatal; Misty says herself that it’s too late and that she “killed her best friend.” When the police arrive to Lottie’s retreat, we hear them discussing a middle-aged woman who died due to an “overdose”—that’s Nat.
Just as interesting as Natalie’s actual death is the way that it was depicted in her own mind—as a passenger on a crashing plane. If you think about the people she saw—her younger self, young Lottie, and Javi—they all have one thing in common: they died in the wilderness. Obviously Javi is the one who actually died in the wilderness, and Nat probably still to this day feels guilty about not saving him from that icy water. But young Nat and young Lottie get a little more metaphorical.
Throughout Season 2, we see Lottie and Nat become immensely different people in the wilderness than they were as high schoolers. Lottie throughout the season represented the belief in something supernatural, some stronger force at hand in the wild, while Natalie throughout was her more practical foil. But at the end of the season, those walls come down, as Lottie, fresh off taking a beating from Shauna to keep the group sane and together, relinquishes her spot as de facto leader to Nat. And we have no idea what Nat does after that, but we can assume that it was something she wasn’t proud of.
In her dying moments, Nat was joined by the most important figures in her life who stopped being who they were while in the wilderness.
Who else dies in the Yellowjackets Season 2 finale?
There’s one other significant death in the Yellowjackets Season 2 finale: Kevyn Tan, the former goth kid-turned-detective who’s been hot on Shauna’s tail all season, suspicious of her involvement in Adam Martin’s murder/dismemberment.
Kevyn and his partner, the asshole Saracusa, follow their way to Lottie’s cult. And when Kevyn goes snooping around, he unfortunately finds Walter cooking up some cocoa—and it’s here that Walter finally proves to be just as insane and dangerous as his new flame, Misty (what a cute couple!). Kevyn passes out cold, just after Jeff gave a false confession to Adam’s murder, after a few sips of Walter’s clearly poisoned hot cocoa.
Jeff and Walter stuff Kevyn in a trunk, along with his phone, hoping to draw Saracusa out as a trap. It works, and Saracusa comes to try to open the trunk… only for Walter to emerge, and we’ll never know for sure if the cocoa was a fatal poisoning or not, because Walter immediately fires the gun several times into the trunk. Kevyn is definitely dead at this point.
And that’s when Walter lays down the deal to Saracusa—Kevyn, they will claim, was responsible for Adam’s murder and cover up, and was trying to pin it on others. And he lets the asshole Saracusa, clearly a bit shaken, take the “credit,” because the other option is being involved himself.
Walter, the useful psychopath, solved the whole thing. We can’t wait to see more of him and Misty wreaking havoc next season.
Why was the cabin burning at the end?
That one is a bit more of a mystery, considering it’s the ice cold winter. But it would seem that Coach Ben, in an effort to stop what he may see as the growing undeniable evil in the girls, tried to get rid of all of them in a moment of mania (or, perhaps, a newfound destructive ideology); he did seem particularly heartbroken when he learned that Nat let Javi die. But if he was so horrified that they would eat their friend, that makes it a bit hard to believe that he would murder them all in a fiery blaze. But then again, who else could it have been? We could be set up for a major storyline of “Coach Ben vs All the Girls,” and that seems a bit unevenly matched. Could be a rough few weeks for a certain assistant coach who’s already down a foot.
We may have to just go with “the wilderness did it” for now. But one thing’s for sure—it’s going to make the coldness of winter a whole lot harder in Season 3. And it’s going to get us a lot closer to that deranged opening of the first ever episode. Will the real Antler Queen please stand up?
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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