The premiere of Euphoria may have featured a) a baby eating a cigarette and b) someone getting fatally shot mid-fellatio, but the residents of East Highland are about as wholesome as The Baby-Sitters Club compared to the teens in this month’s real hit series: Yellowjackets. For those yet to tune into the buzz (sorry), the Showtime drama, airing weekly in the US, takes its cues from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, with one key twist: it follows teenage girls rather than boys, and, as the drama’s title suggests, these girls are less harmless flies, more venomous wasps.
Take the opening of the “Pilot” episode, directed by Jennifer’s Body’s Karyn Kusama, which will have you searching for adult nightlights on Amazon Prime. Deep in a snowy forest, a masked girl is tearing through the evergreens barefoot, wearing only a pale nightgown in spite of the icy cold. The scene feels horribly reminiscent of Wind River, except all around her there are peculiar, eerie calls that sound both human and animalistic at once, adding an element of Lynchian surreality to it all. Then, because there’s no way this could end happily, the girl falls into a snow-covered trap, leaving behind nothing but her bloody footprints. Enter the survivors, all of their faces hidden, but clearly pleased to see their one-time friend impaled. Lording over them: another masked figure who’s wearing deer antlers in a way that calls to mind the victims in season one of True Detective.
Thus begins the story of the eponymous Yellowjackets, a high-school football team from New Jersey who make it to the 1996 national finals (good), only for their plane to go down in the middle of the Canadian wilderness on the way there (bad). Some die in the crash, but most survive, only to spend the next 18 months alone, having to fend for themselves, with zero resources. This is on top of the normal Heathers-style drama that plagued the girls before. And—no spoilers here—the situation gets very Alive, very quickly. (If nothing else, the many butchery scenes will reaffirm your commitment to Veganuary).
The central mystery, of course, is who ends up the equivalent of Lord of the Flies’s Piggy, but Yellowjackets is much more than gore and suspense (although there is plenty of both). Over the course of 10 hour-long episodes, the plot alternates between the ’90s and 2021, when those who survived both the crash and the ensuing madness are still trying to reckon with what happened 25 years earlier, and the collapse of their feminism-fuelled teenage dreams. (Mercifully, there’s no mention of the pandemic; these riot grrrls have been through enough already.) Further complicating matters in the present day: after maintaining for decades that their time in the wilderness consisted of “scavenging and praying” rather than midnight seances, hunting each other and partying under a full moon, an investigative journalist is now questioning their story.
Really, though, there’s no simple way to describe Yellowjackets. There are moments of pure ridiculousness, but it’s somehow in on its own joke. It’s a little bit Lost, a little bit Twin Peaks, and a little bit Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are eerie wooden carvings whose precise meaning has yet to be revealed (but, let’s face it, are hardly peace signs), a ’90s-heavy soundtrack that includes Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, and possibly some ghosts. And there is a genuinely excellent cast. Ella Purnell is a stand-out among the teen versions of the Yellowjackets, playing manipulative captain Jackie, as is Courtney Eaton as anxious teammate Lottie, who begins to suffer from hallucinations in the woods when she runs out of her schizophrenia medication.
It’s the middle-aged Yellowjackets who really shine, though. Christina Ricci is deliciously, creepily perky while starring as Misty, the Yellowjackets’s slightly desperate former equipment manager, who will do whatever it takes to feel like one of the gang; Tawny Cypress brings to life Taissa, a “queer Kamala” who’s now running for a place in the New Jersey Senate; and Melanie Lynskey is Shauna, a former straight-A student meant to attend Brown who nows resents her status as a housewife. Even if the rest of Yellowjackets were terrible, though, it would be worth watching for Juliette Lewis as Natalie, a former punk who’s just out of rehab and carries a shotgun around like it’s a Telfar bag instead of a deadly weapon. Our sage advice? Make yourself a leaf crown; it’s time to join the Yellowjackets cult.
This article originally appeared on Vogue.co.uk
Also read:
The clothes on Euphoria show just how much the characters have changed
How modern teen dramas are going beyond high-school crushes and prom nights