TV Review: YELLOWJACKETS: Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot [Showtime]

Yellowjackets Pilot Review

Showtime‘s Yellowjackets: Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot TV Show Review. Yellowjackets is one of the most exciting new TV shows of the Fall 2021 TV season. La Brea has one highly interesting character, a persevering amputee and Foundation has a gaggle of engaging characters. Almost all of Yellowjackets‘ lead characters are attention-black-holes, dragging the viewer’s attention to them whether they like it or not, because of what eventually happens to those characters and what they endure. It is that mystery that drives the viewer’s thirst for more and the narrative divvies out those delectable tidbits in drips and drabs.

Pilot establishes who the main characters are and who the survivors become after their ordeal. Though only four of the adult survivors are shown in Pilot, two of the four display an under-layer of toughness and potential violence. One can surmise that these same hidden depths exist in all of the survivors, instilled by the harsh environment they were thrown into after the crash and the evolution (or de-evolution) necessary to survive.

The most thrilling part of Pilot is only teased (the transformative event i.e. the plane crash and the subsequent 18 months in the wild) but that doesn’t hamper the narrative one iota because of the strong characterization of the adult characters and the growing characterization of the younger characters.

The viewer is shown what some of these younger characters could have become (their trajectory e.g. attending Brown University for one of them) and what they become because of (or in-spite of) the plane crash, a cataclysmic, intervening event in their lives.

Unlike the pilot episode for Stargirl, the viewer sees who the characters were before the catastrophic event in their lives takes place thus the viewer sees what the characters had and what they lost. Because of this, empathy is established toward most, if not all, of the characters.

Pilot, and it seems the entire Yellowjackets TV series, is presented in a present day / past framework. The past, because of what happens there, is more interesting than the present, at least in Pilot. It is the nightmare glimpses of fur-clad individuals that not only makes Yellowjackets seem like a nightmare version of William Golding‘s book The Lord of the Flies but the story of what would have happened if that island didn’t have food to feed the stranded.

The Ruthless One

Teen Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is driven, a pragmatist, and is ruthless (if the practice field accident wasn’t an accident). Even at a young age, she knows what she wants. From her secret team plot against a fellow player to the “accidental” brutal take down of a potential team weak link, Taissa gets what she wants during her first few moments of screen time. It is not hard to imagine that someone with her personality traits survives the wilderness ordeal, doing whatever it takes, cutting down (into bite-size pieces) anyone or anything that gets in the way of that goal. It is of little surprise that adult Taissa (Tawny Cypress) becomes an elected official. Ruthlessness of her nature (if I am right about the practice field take-down) is easily transferable to almost any occupation, especially high office in the United States.

The Lucky One

Because of her broken leg, Allie (Pearl Amanda Dickson) isn’t on the plane when it crashes into the forest. She doesn’t endure what her teammates endure to survive, and has a relatively normal life (supposition at this point). Between 1997-1998, Allie is still in the Yellowjackets’ high-school (the girls on the plane were varsity players, juniors and seniors) when her former teammates are eventually found and rescued. What is it like for Allie in that high-school when the plane disappears, when no one can find the plane, and when the survivors are found 18 months later? I hope writers / creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson include that narrative in Yellowjackets along with the grown-up version of Allie.

Team Ambivalence

The “fish rots from the head” is the old adage and that is exemplified in Pilot. After ingénue team member Allie is grievously (and potentially purposefully) injured on the practice field and sent to the hospital, the most illuminating personality event happens in the entire episode – none of the injured girl’s teammates go to the hospital to visit her and be with her in her time of need. The Yellowjackets that stuck up for her on the team don’t go. Even the Yellowjackets team captain, Jackie (Ella Purnell), is ambivalent toward the plight of her freshly-injured comrade.

They all go out partying instead, with Jackie quipping about how it’s a tradition for the champions to celebrate before their big game. One of their own gets horribly injured, they abandon her in the hospital, and then go out drinking and partying the very same night?

On the television series Friday Night Lights, when a teammate got sent to the hospital with a grievous injury in the first season, the entire football team and its coaches were there in the hospital for him, including the cheerleaders. With the Yellowjackets, their partying tradition and fun-night-out are more important. It is this public, self-centered action that speaks to all of the Yellowjackets’ core-selves, even the most virtuous among them. This also speaks to how they are eventually able to do what they do to each other in the forest after the plane crash.

When you start out with low or impaired empathy, and you are surrounded by a team of such individuals, you are able to commit unthinkable acts quicker than if you were in a group of individuals with fully-functioning consciences à la the survivors of the plane crash in Frank Marshall‘s film Alive.

The Beginning of the End

Jackie thinks she is going to college with her best friend Shauna. She also thinks that she and her boyfriend are virgins when they first have sex. What Jackie doesn’t know is that a.) Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is not going to be her college roommate, having gotten into an Ivy League school that Jackie most-likely never even applied to and b.) Shauna had sex with her boyfriend during one of their breakups, taking his virginity, and is still have sex with him behind her back.

Shauna already betrayed Jackie once and is harboring her college acceptance letter secret, another betrayal (both of which will definitely come out after the plane crash, adding to the emotional drama in the forest). Shauna has been thinking of herself and own needs for sometime, unbeknownst to very few. In a do-or-die situation (like after their plane crashes in the forest), I see her doing the same again. Pilot laid out that ground work in a very believable way.

The Yellowjackets’ True Training and Questions

When the viewer learns how long the Yellowjackets soccer team is in the wilderness alone, it’s shocking. It is almost the same length of time for Navy SEAL training. Their lengthy, harsh training forges Navy SEALS into harder, tougher soldiers, the elite. The Yellowjackets, with no instructors, training regime, doctors, food, or a safety net, are thrust into an equally harsh environment except there is no off-switch like there is for a person in SEAL training – ring the bell and go home. There is no bell for the Yellowjackets’ new reality. Their frozen forest hell becomes their reality and their world. They become creatures of that world, survivors of it, inhabitants of it. Those beings are the ones glimpsed in the future scenes in Pilot. They are the ones howling, chasing a person through the forest, possibly Captain Jackie. They are the ones that slit the dead girl’s throat and eat chummed chucks of her.

These images provoke tantalizing questions: 1.) Who is the shrouded figure whom everyone gives deference to in the forest? (I think I already know the answer to this question), 2.) How did they dig out and spike that giant pit trap? Isn’t the ground nearly frozen solid?, 3.) Why didn’t Shauna go to Brown University after she was rescued? Was her acceptance letter pulled because of the rumors surrounding how they survived in the wild?, 4.) after the survivors are rescued, do they go back to high-school so they can graduate and get their diplomas? If so, what is it like for them to walk those halls, college-age now but still in high-school, with the mystique of what happened to them and the rumors of what they did to survive?, and 5.) when rescued, will Allie be in that high-school to welcome them back?

These and other questions I look forward to getting the answers to in the future episodes of Yellowjackets.

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