‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3 ending defined: We lastly know who Pit Woman is

Yellowjackets followers and citizen detectives, you’ll be able to lastly put your yarn partitions and elaborate theories away. After three seasons and several other fake-outs, we lastly know the id of Pit Woman, the Yellowjacket whose dying by literal pitfall ominously kicks off your entire present.

As revealed within the Season 3 finale, “Full Circle,” our poor, unlucky Pit Woman is none aside from Mari (Alexa Barajas). The reality is not that stunning. The writing’s been on the wall for Mari since Season 1, on condition that her hair and construct match that of Pit Woman. However Yellowjackets took its Mari foreshadowing to new heights in Season 3, which opened with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) looking Mari via the woods in a very intense recreation of Seize the Flag. Later, Mari fell within the pit Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) uncovered — the exact same pit that might in the future result in her doom.

Simply because the finale’s title emphasizes, Mari’s dying brings us full circle, not simply to the start of Season 1 however to all of the breadcrumbs planted firstly of Season 3. Plus, Shauna will get to enact the last word revenge fantasy as retribution for Mari’s teen bitchiness in the direction of her firstly of the season. (I might say consuming your bully continues to be approach harsh.)

However the near-inevitable march to Mari’s dying is not with out its surprises. The identical goes for the remainder of “Full Circle,” which exposes Lottie’s (Simone Kessell) killer and takes a serious leap ahead in the direction of the Yellowjackets’ rescue. Let’s break it down.

Mari is Yellowjackets‘ Pit Woman, however the hunt for her is extra sophisticated than you may suppose.

The Season 1 opening noticed Mari working from the frenzied hoots and howls of her teammates, suggesting an all-encompassing fervor throughout the Yellowjackets. But “Full Circle” reveals that could not be farther from the reality. As an alternative, the crew has splintered into factions. Shauna and Lottie (Courtney Eaton) embrace the hunt and the concept of sacrificing somebody to the wilderness. Van (Liv Hewson) and Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are reluctant but able to take part so long as their heads aren’t on the chopping block.

Tai even convinces Van to rig the sacrificial card draw for researcher and outsider Hannah (Ashley Sutton), however Shauna shuts that down, seeing as Hannah appears to be one in all her strongest allies. At the very least, Yellowjackets tells us she is, however we get so little time with Hannah post-joining the Yellowjackets that she could as properly be a background character within the vein of Gen (Vanessa Prasad). Why introduce a full-grown grownup (who’s additionally a mom) into the combo when you’re not going to discover her dynamic with the youthful, extra feral Yellowjackets? Alternative, squandered.

Elsewhere on the hunt, different splinter factions undertake difficult maneuvers of their very own. Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) takes the chaos of the hunt as a possibility to abscond with the satellite tv for pc telephone, which Van has been working to repair. She switches garments with Hannah (who, once more, is mainly a non-entity) to cover her absence from Shauna. In the meantime, Akilah (Nia Sondaya), Melissa (Jenna Burgess), and Gen try and distract the hunters from going after Mari, even going as far as to assault them. Melissa tries to take down Shauna however would not observe via. (How boring of her!) Akilah follows Lottie to the hallucination cave and appears ready to mind her with a rock. Yellowjackets would not present the result of that exact showdown, however Lottie does pop again up unscathed, whereas Akilah would not seem like current within the later feasting scenes. Did Lottie simply homicide her offscreen, or will we get extra solutions in a later season?

The Akilah and Lottie dialogue does result in a fairly large revelation: Akilah needed a hunt, and so did Gen, Mari, and Melissa. She poisoned their animals to plant the concept in Lottie’s thoughts, however the reasoning is flimsy. They would not have needed a hunt for meat functions, as there was loads of livestock left within the pen. However then why endanger one another’s lives? To create a distraction to take down Shauna? Was she was meant to fall within the pit lure as a substitute of Mari? This will likely simply be one other set of questions the present will deal with farther down the road, however your entire looking sequence feels off — and never in a very attention-grabbing approach.

Yellowjackets reveals that Callie killed Lottie.

“Full Circle” resolves one other massive Yellowjackets thriller. Who killed grownup Lottie?

Initially, Misty (Christina Ricci) thought Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) was accountable because of DNA proof. Nonetheless, it seems that mentioned genetic materials really belonged to Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins), since moms and daughters share mitochondrial DNA.

When Misty confronts Callie, the reality spills out. She’d gone to go to Lottie within the metropolis as a result of Lottie had stolen the tape with Hannah’s recording on it from Callie’s drawer. However as a substitute of giving Callie the tape again, Lottie invitations her to the constructing’s candle-filled basement. (Sidebar: How’d she set that up with out getting caught?) There, she delivers a speech concerning the wilderness and the way she sees it in Callie.

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“You are the child of that place,” Lottie says. “It took our baby and gave us you.”

That wildness actually comes via when Callie straight-up shoves Lottie down the steps to her dying. Whereas she appears remorseful afterwards, there isn’t any denying the darkness in her eyes, identical to the darkness she describes in Shauna’s personal gaze. Possibly she’s much more like her mom than she thought.

(One other sidebar, however why does grownup Lottie’s post-death dialog together with her youthful self happen in a morgue as a substitute of a airplane like Natalie and Van’s? Was the dying airplane overbooked? Is it only for individuals who had been marked for dying within the wilderness?)

So, who was messing with Shauna all season lengthy?

Now we all know who killed Lottie, however one other Season 3 thriller stays standing: Who was screwing with Shauna all season lengthy?

Yellowjackets provides explanations for the brakes incident (they had been simply previous) and the fridge lock-in (that was Misty messing together with her). It even tries to justify the telephone enjoying “Queen of Hearts” within the lavatory by saying folks lose their telephones on a regular basis. This specific telephone simply so occurred to be enjoying a music tied to the Yellowjackets’ trauma.

None of those explanations really feel significantly satisfying — particularly not the telephone one! Sure, they set up Shauna’s paranoia, which we additionally noticed at play in the course of the hunt, however the result’s a letdown. Possibly Shauna and Yellowjackets‘ feverishly theorizing followers are in the identical boat, drawing connections that are not there. I simply want the precise clarification was extra attention-grabbing than “coincidences happen sometimes.”

With this give attention to coincidence, Yellowjackets has moved any suspicion off grownup Melissa (a criminally underused Hilary Swank). Shauna even finds the conciliatory word that Melissa claimed got here with the tape. (She then shoves it down the rubbish disposal, after all.) That is all properly and good, aside from one massive factor: Melissa murdered Van, so there’s far more happening together with her. Too unhealthy Yellowjackets is not involved in exhibiting it. Grownup Melissa ends the season the way in which she began: a non-entity whose backward baseball cap is her sole character trait.

Yellowjackets performs with reminiscence in its Season 3 finale.

Yellowjackets Season 3 closes out with some massive developments. Natalie makes use of the satellite tv for pc telephone to make contact with the surface world, which means rescue is on its approach. Within the current, it is everybody in opposition to Shauna. Jeff (Warren Kole) and Callie depart her, and Misty and Tai ally themselves so she will not be the final Yellowjacket standing. As Tai factors out, and as we have seen this whole season, Shauna totally gave into the wilderness and thrived on it throughout a number of the Yellowjackets’ darkest instances. She additionally led the ridiculous effort not to flee the woods (though Tai wasn’t innocent there both).

Shauna, although, has a unique view of what occurred within the woods. Within the season’s ultimate scene, she re-enters journal mode and muses on whether or not she and the opposite survivors repressed recollections of the wilderness as a result of they had been traumatizing, or as a result of they hid a darker secret about who the Yellowjackets actually had been.

“I think we can’t, or won’t, remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun. That’s the terrible truth we left out there buried, along with the people we called our friends,” Shauna writes. “Except it’s all coming back to me now. The danger. The thrill. The person I was back then. Not a wife, or a mother. I was a warrior. I was a fucking queen. I let all of it slip away from me. It’s time to start taking it back.”

Seems to be like grownup Shauna shall be embracing the Antler Queen standing she loved a lot in the course of the feast of Mari. However not everybody previously appears to be having as a lot enjoyable as Shauna says. The feast sequence brings again the pictures of livid chomping from Yellowjackets‘ very first episode, however mixes it in with extra sophisticated photos, like a tearful Gen tucking into her good buddy. Within the mild of the following day, some Yellowjackets look sad and resigned beneath their do-it-yourself masks. What’s the “true” reminiscence of the wilderness, then? The rose-colored concept that they had been all having enjoyable, or the brutal battle for survival? Or is it some warped mixture of each?

Yellowjackets Season 3 leaves us with one final callback to the Pit Woman sequence from Season 1, episode 1. That sequence of foreboding flashbacks ended with Misty eradicating her furry masks, placing her glasses on, and smiling straight into digicam, an indication that she’d given herself completely over to the joys of the feast. However Season 3 places that second in a unique context. After Shauna discovers Natalie is lacking, Misty pulls off her masks, places her glasses on, and smiles that very same smile into digicam. This time, it is a signal that her satellite tv for pc telephone plot with Van and Natalie has labored.

Which of those smiles is the “true” smile, then? Or did Misty simply pull the identical enigmatic smile transfer twice in in the future? (Along with her aptitude for the dramatic, I would not put it previous her.) Nonetheless, the re-use of the identical smile (in opposition to completely different backdrops) represents the 2 completely different objectives for the remaining Yellowjackets. Misty’s Season 1 smile indicators a love of the wilderness and the hunt. Her Season 3 smile gestures to hope for escape, in addition to the joys of one-upping Shauna. These polar reverse concepts signify the 2 Yellowjackets factions remaining on the finish of Season 3. And whereas we all know rescue is coming, how will Natalie’s transfer shake issues up with Shauna in Season 4?

Yellowjackets Season 3 is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

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