In an ecosystem in which there are dozens of channels and streaming platforms competing with content that seems infinite, the biggest challenge of a new series is to survive. Yellowjackets has not only managed to premiere a second season after becoming the surprise revelation of the year 2021, but it was gaining legions of fans with each new weekly episode to become a small pop culture phenomenon, with the added difficulty of not coming from a large platform like Netflix, HBO Max, Apple Tv or Disney +, but of a cable channel like Showtime, which does not have the same ability to "viralize" its product.

Despite this, its first season became the second most watched in the history of the channel, going from being a small gem of a discreet cult to reaching more than five million weekly viewers, doubling its audience from its premiere to the final episode, reaching important nominations in the awards season, including from the Writer's Guild of America. Created by the marriage formed by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Yellowjackets is an epic story of survival, psychological terror and initiatory drama that offers a vision of adolescence far removed from the color of pink and the petardeo of high school movies starring girls.

The series tells us the misadventures of a team of high school soccer players who survive a plane crash in an impregnable area of Canada, going through all kinds of hardships, while, as in Lost, we jump in time and also follow their lives almost 25 years later, when the past they want to forget returns to them relentlessly. A fresh recipe, but that alone does not explain the popularity that the series has reached, which should be attributed to a lot of factors. On the one hand it has collected both critical praise and an excellent word-of-mouth process, which has resulted in an unbridled passion for the characters, endless theories about their many mysteries and even an abundant fan art or tests to know "What Yellowjacket you are".

In the second season the scheme is repeated and we return to the team's shelter but in the middle of winter, with more cold and snow around the cabin, alternating between 1996 and the present, where the terrible things that the protagonists did to survive in nature continue to haunt them as adults. It is in this narrative plane where the clues, symbolism and the most ephemeral flashbacks are concentrated, where brushstrokes of the most murky elements of their past are shown: ritual elements, visions, prophecies, fleeting memories, symbolism, clues and easter eggs for the internet to devour and regurgitate them in the form of hypotheses, Reddit threads and Twitter chats.

Cannibalism is just the tip of the iceberg in this second season

Jonathan Lisco, showrruner

From the first moment it seems that the new installment is already aware of the reaction that got its careful casting and now play with its popularity by focusing on its heroines with another conscious perspective. Now it is more evident that Juliette Lewis growling swear words or Christina Ricci adjusting her glasses are character tics that we all want to see again. The season is looked at differently when the cast has seen a rise that feeds back with the success of the series, such as the recovery of Melanie Lynskey, who left her mark with her few minutes of The Last of Us and shone in Candy, or Jasmin Savoy Brown, who continues to stand as a queer youth icon after certifying her success in Scream VI.

The cast also has new additions such as Elijah Wood and Lauren Ambrose, who plays Vanessa in her adulthood, two faces that remind us of another of the keys to the success of the series: the nostalgia of the 90s. Yellowjackets meets the rule that pop culture tends to recover the past in waves and if in 2010 it was flooded by a longing for the 80s, with a final crescendo represented by Stranger Things in 2016, now it is certified that there is a generation that longs for the 90s and fulfills a cultural cycle of remembrance and celebration of the era they lived as children. There is also a certain element of discourse in the idea of showing an era that seems close – his musical idols still have continuity – but in which there were no social networks, smartphones or everyone had internet.

There is a certain irony in equating the plot of the past, a hostile exercise in survival and return to the wild, with the idea of a time when teenagers listened only to what was on the radio and watched things on VHS because there were no platforms, neither spotify nor whatsapp. If the Yellowjackets were a great women's high school soccer team in 2023 now, many would probably be TikTokers or microinfluencers, making the barbarism even more shocking. Because at the core of the series is the return to the animal state of the human being and, to some extent, we are facing a female version of Lord of the Flies, which deals with the same fading of the structures that build the idea of society.

Yes, girls also become unhinged and become cannibals in the woods

Ashley Lyle, creator of the series

The change of genre with respect to William Golding's novel is no coincidence. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ashley Lyle explained her choice: "We thought, who is more civilized than women? As children, they have learned very early on how to please people and what social hierarchies are. It's a more interesting way to make things fall apart and yes, the girls also get crazy and become cannibals in the woods." Yellowjackets dares to suggest that the brutality of femininity can coexist alongside softness or beauty. In fact, it goes further by establishing that not only does it coexist but that everything is part of the same, which connects with the work of the director who launched her fantastic formal section, Karyn Kusama, who had already played similar themes in Jennifer's Body or in The Invitation.

A point of view that surprises at a time when we tend to see the fiction created by women as a constant denunciation of patriarchy, when in reality there are explorations that treat their own universes from their point of view, such as their vision of a feminine violence that is not always linear. In parallel to the ideas of the work of the writer of Open Wounds, Gillian Flynn or the screenwriter of Last Night in Soho, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Yellowjackets offers a step further in the idea of cruel friendships in high school that explored School of Young Murderers or Little Liars, with the attitude and esoteric immersion of Young Men and Witches or the adult psychosis of Killing Eve.

A series where there is room for female alliances, pseudo-religious rituals, biting cruelty and adolescent hormones. A multifaceted, contradictory and convincing version of femininity that leaves room for the capacity for kindness, loyalty and love in the face of the potential of relentless violence while playing with the idea of an ethereal evil that is transmitted, a darkness that they take back from the past but that we do not know if it is supernatural or in the heads of the girls. Showrunner Jonathan Lisco has warned Entertainment Weekly that cannibalism is just the "tip of the iceberg" in this second season, so thenew visit to the wild still has a lot to explain about what really happened in the forest.

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