Yellowjackets season 1 recap: where we left the characters and questions to answer for season 2

It’s been a little over a year since Yellowjackets was last on our screens – but the series is finally making its return this March. That’s more than enough time to forget some of the details of any show, but that’s especially true of a mystery drama like Yellowjackets.

With that in mind, then, here’s everything you need to know about the first series of Yellowjackets before watching the second, as well as a reminder of some of the biggest questions the new series still has to answer. 

There are, obviously, full and detailed spoilers for the show so far from here on out. 

In 1996…

In 1996, the Yellowjackets football team are getting ready for a national tournament. En route to Seattle, their plane falls out of the sky, crashing somewhere in the Canadian Rockies and leaving the girls stranded in the wilderness. The crash kills some of the team – including head coach Bill Martinez, who had brought his sons Travis and Javi on the trip – and leaves the survivors dazed and wounded.

After the crash, it takes the Yellowjackets a while to acclimatise to the wilderness. Misty (Sammy Hanratty) is the first to really take to their new environment, using her first aid skills to save the life of assistant coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) – having long been something of an outcast on the team, Misty starts to like how dependent on her everyone has become, and secretly destroys the plane’s black box locator to try and prolong their stay. 

It's not long before they start to run out of the food they had on the plane, and have little success foraging near the crash site. The team start to explore the island, soon finding an abandoned plane and a disused cabin – and the dead body of its former occupant. He had some supplies of his own, though, and a gun that Travis and Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) start to use to hunt, and for a moment it looks like they can start to build a survival routine.

The danger doesn’t stop, though, as Van (Lauren Ambrose) is severely injured after being attacked by wolves, and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) realises she was pregnant when they boarded their flight. Reasoning that they need to find help sooner rather than later, Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) tries to fly the abandoned plane – which explodes shortly after she takes off.

Life in the wilderness continues to take its toll. Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Lottie (Courtney Eaton) had been taking medication to treat schizophrenia – medication she ran out of shortly after the crash. She starts having visions, which some of the girls begin to take seriously out of desperation. Tensions develop. Some of them get closer – Van starts a relationship with Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown), as do Travis and Natalie – while others begin to resent each other. Jackie (Ella Purnell), once their team captain, proposes a ‘doomcoming’ celebration. It quickly takes a turn, though, after most of the team eat some hallucinogenic mushrooms found by Misty, and in their drugged state try and sacrifice Travis and Jackie to the spirits that Lottie hears. They’re stopped at the last moment by Natalie.

The next morning, Jackie gets into a huge fight with the rest of the largely unrepentant team. It comes out that the father of Shauna’s baby was in fact Jackie’s boyfriend Jeff – they’d been having an affair before the crash. Jackie and Shauna explode at each other, fighting the way only best friends do, and Jackie leaves the cabin to sleep outside.

That night, the first snow falls, and Jackie freezes to death. 

In the present day…

Twenty-five years later, an adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is approached by journalist Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma). She wants to know what really happened to the Yellowjackets in the wilderness – and if they did, as was rumoured in the press when they were eventually found, turn to cannibalism. Shauna gets in touch with fellow survivors Tai (Tawny Cypress), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), and Misty (Christina Ricci), soon realising they’ve all been sent a postcard with an ominous reference to a symbol they saw in the wilderness.

Natalie and Misty start trying to track down Travis, wondering if he received a similar postcard – but when they arrive at his home they find him dead, an apparent suicide they’re convinced must have been murder. Tai, meanwhile, is campaigning for state senator (her opponent runs ads insinuating she was a cannibal), and a disaffected Shauna strikes up an affair with local artist Adam (Peter Gadiot).

Not long after, Misty is approached by Jessica – in reality not a journalist but a political fixer hired by Tai, in an attempt to find out if her former teammates were a liability to her senate campaign. Rather than simply dismissing her as Shauna did, Misty knocks her out and ties her up in her basement.

The group receive a blackmail threat, seemingly connected to the mysterious postcards. Believing Adam to be the blackmailer, Shauna kills him – only to realise it was actually her now-husband Jeff (Warren Kole), trying to raise money for his struggling furniture store. Shauna tells Natalie, Misty, and Tai that Adam was the blackmailer, getting their help to dispose of the body.

Tai is elected as Senator, but realises that she’s started sleepwalking again for the first time since the wilderness. Her wife finds a grisly basement shrine that Tai made while asleep – complete with the head of their thought-missing family dog – and flees with their son. Meanwhile, Misty poisons Jessica.

The series ends with Natalie preparing to kill herself. Her investigation into Travis’ death went nowhere, and it seems like he wasn’t murdered at all. Before Natalie can do anything, though, a mysterious group bursts into the room, kidnapping her and driving away in an unmarked van. Her phone falls to floor, and a message comes through with an update on her investigation into Travis. Before he died, his bank accounts had been completely drained – by someone called Lottie.  

What are the biggest questions left for Series 2 to answer?

Going into Series 2, there’s more than a few lingering questions left for the series to answer:

• Was there really a supernatural presence in the wilderness, or was Lottie simply imagining it?

• Did the girls really turn to cannibalism?

• What happened to Travis in the present day – and what happened to his brother Javi in 1996, after he seemed to disappear during the doomcoming celebration?

• Is Lottie running a cult in the present day – and did she kidnap Natalie?

• What happened to Shauna’s baby?

And, again: did they really turn to cannibalism? 

Yellowjackets begins on Paramount+ on Friday 24 March. You can read more of our Yellowjackets coverage right here.

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