‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Song and Dance

New theme song! Gutting secret confessions! Intense grief! Thwarted suicide attempt! Hallucinatory parrot-based musical theater interlude! Multiple total breaks with reality! Savage Fight Club–style beatdown! Gahhh, there’s so much to talk about in Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 7…and it’s thanks to the work of writers Rich Monahan and Liz Phang that we get to watch and talk about any of it at all. The union writers of the WGA deserve to be paid and treated fairly by the major studios — surely not even the Antler Queen herself would be evil enough to disagree with that!

At any rate, last week I speculated that in simultaneously reuniting all the known survivors in the past and killing Shauna’s baby in the present, Yellowjackets may have reached a major inflection point, moving from being one kind of show into being something else. I think the new version of the theme song — quieter, more somber, and performed by Alanis Morrisette — may be an indication that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and showrunner Jonathan Lisco agree. You can’t do either those things and then go on as if two major, major milestones haven’t been reached, and now passed.

A second, less favorable indicator that the filmmakers understand the gravity of the situations they’ve created — and here comes the complaint portion of the review — is that the episode opens with one of the show’s most ham-fisted needledrops yet (and on this show, that’s really saying something). Over some legitimately haunting shots of the snow-covered trees and cabin, the show plays “Something in the Way,” the almost comatosely morose acoustic closing number (not counting the hidden track here, music nerds) from Nirvana’s epochal album Nevermind. I know we’re dealing with serious business, but can’t we be trusted to get that message without picking just the right song to hold our hand?

It continues from there. Later in the episode, the reunion of the six survivors is soundtracked by, sigh, “6 Underground” by Sneaker Pimps, and Shauna’s postpartum rage gets Live’s maternally fixated “Lightning Crashes,” with its infamous lyric “Her placenta falls to the floor.” And don’t forget “I can feel it coming back again” while the Antler Queen rears her ugly head in the here-and-now, in the form of Lottie’s illusory therapist. Subtle! I’m so over these first-draft found-music selections, man. The show would so improved without them. That beating Shauna doles out to Lottie in the cabin at the end of the episode? Tell me that wouldn’t have been better if all you could hear were the sounds of fists on flesh and the gasps of the onlookers. And I like “Lightning Crashes”!

But enough griping, for real. I’m hesitant to be unequivocal about it, but it sure does seem like this show has gotten good. I mean, never in a million years would I have thought it had the vision and the stones to do a whole salute to, like, old-school Golden Age Hollywood musical visual techniques, the opening sequence of Mulholland Drive, the visual overload of Speed Racer, and the Ken Russell-y vibes of Altered States. But that’s what director Anya Adams gives us, when Misty steps into a sensory deprivation tank as part of her Lottie-dictated therapy and envisions an entire song-and-dance number, starring Elijah Wood’s Walter in top hat and tails, John Cameron Mitchell of all people in a large bird costume, the word “motherfuckers,” and Christina Ricci’s face against red curtains right out of the Black Lodge beaming over it all. This was straight-up fantastic shit, and the last thing I expected. 

(By the way, regarding Ricci, in this whole sensory deprivation tank sequence: As respectfully as possible, hello.)

Equally impressive, but from a whole different direction, is how deep the show is digging into everyone’s dysfunction, in both the past and present. I’m not thinking of Lottie and her realization that her therapist doesn’t exist and she’s been communing with the evil spirt of the wilderness the whole time, either. I mean Shauna admitting that she’s kept her daughter at arm’s length her whole life because she was too afraid to become attached to someone who might die, like her first baby did. 

Or Van and Tai kissing in the midst of all their major, major issues (Van has cancer in addition to being broke, by the way), with the kind of chemistry between actors Tawny Cypress and Lauren Ambrose that really calls to mind what it might be like to make out with your high school sweetheart after decades apart. 

Or Misty calling up Walter and leaving a shrilly upbeat message attempting to walk back her earlier rejection of him; her closing one-woman exchange of “I’m gonna hang up now, no you hang up first, no you hang up first, no you hang up, hahahahahahahahahaha!” was one of the most uncomfortable-to-watch things Misty has ever done. (Again, this is really saying something.)

Or Coach Ben, beset with hallucinations of his own, nearly killing himself as despair overwhelms him, only to be talked off the ledge by Misty of all people; her threats to slander him and expose his homosexuality don’t work, but breaking down and crying over not being able to save Shauna’s baby and not wanting another death on her hands does. Her involvement in the “disappearance” of Crystal, for whom the survivors spend much of the episode searching, goes unspoken. 

Or a pair of the extraneous survivors kind of casually, oh-so-hesitantly approaching the idea of eating Crystal if they find her dead. (“It would be disrespectful to the wilderness to waste it” got a good laugh out of me.) Or Shauna being so overwhelmed by grief over her baby’s death that she once again convinces herself that the baby was somehow eaten by the other survivors, then, at Lottie’s urging, beats her nearly to death in order to vent. 

Maybe here, at the rock bottom of everyone’s emotions, is the place to put the Antler Queen’s credo. “Tell me,” she asks Lottie in the form of the therapist, “is there anything of value in this life that doesn’t come with risk, or cost, or consequence? Does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?” That’s fine phrasing, buzzing with a poetry that would serve the show well to maintain where and when it can.

The only non-musical sour note I can think of comes at the very end. Although it’s handled well, with Jeff attempting to relay the news that her slain lover Adam’s body has been discovered without doing so in an incriminating fashion, the final scene does bring us back to the realm of Grownup Murder Hijinks, my least favorite aspect of the show. I get why they closed on this “oh no!” moment, but it just doesn’t feel commensurate with the power and tone of the rest of the episode.

But that’s a minor point. I came away from this episode of Yellowjackets feeling excited about the future of the show, which we’re already guaranteed to see thanks to its critical and ratings success. Well, I’m excited about the show’s future yet pessimistic about its characters’ futures — with a horror show, that’s exactly the place you want to be.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.