WE’VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS: POST-SUICIDAL NAVEL-GAZING WITH YELLOWJACKETS
[SPOILERS] WE’VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS: POST-SUICIDAL NAVEL-GAZING WITH YELLOWJACKETS
“The wilderness chose.”
The season two finale of Yellowjackets pushed to streaming Friday, May 26, and with it a surreal gut-punch.
Having let the wilderness choose Javi as the Yellowjackets’ sacrifice, Natalie lives to die another day. Today, actually.
The adult teammates have decided once again to let it choose its sacrifice, using the same playing-card methodology, and the same masks. Shauna draws the queen card, and it’s game on. Misty, Van, Taissa, Lottie, and Natalie chase her through the woods surrounding Lottie’s compound, until Callie shoots Lottie in the arm, bringing the hunt to a halt.
“She’s so powerful,” Lottie says of Callie. Shauna urges Callie to put the gun away. Natalie closes in on Lottie, but Lisa – one of Lottie’s charges – emerges and holds her at gunpoint.
We see Misty’s prepared a syringe with assumed fentanyl, and she’s moving toward Lisa with the intent to inject the lethal dose. But Natalie catches this, and is still protective of Lisa, as she has been all season. Natalie moves in front of Lisa and takes the syringe to her heart.
Natalie’s back in the plane in 1995, she’s her adult self. Javi appears and tells her not to be afraid. She says she’s not supposed to be here.
Teen Natalie appears next to her adult counterpart and assures her this plane is exactly where she belongs. A montage of Natalie’s escape from her own death in the wilderness – to her suicide attempt as an adult flashes across the screen.
Teen Natalie says, “We’ve been here for years.”
Teen Lottie appears beside adult Natalie and guides her breath as she accepts her fate.
We cut back to the woods in present day. Misty confirms it’s too late to save Natalie.
The authorities load up her body and chatter over the radio about a middle-aged woman overdosing, and it stings. This is a brutal way to die, especially for someone who battled drug addiction their entire adult life. But no one questioned it because of that fact. Misty got away with murder. Again.
When I was 25, I tried to die. I did the best I could.
I took all the pills in my possession and some alcohol. Life was too much. I had so much shame and pressure and trauma and self-hatred pent up after so many years. Luckily, like the purple people in Yellowjackets, my partner intervened and got me the care I needed. In the mental health facility following, I was told the odds were that I’d be back if I didn’t kill myself first.
I’m healthy now. Just like Natalie was(ish) when she died.
There’s a brutality in this episode of television that isn’t far off from what we’re seeing in broad daylight on subway car floors, in hospitals, in police dealings, and in the world at large. There’s an idea that the mentally ill are reaping what they sow when they die.
Natalie dodged death in the wilderness. She took it for granted when she tried to die by suicide, and the wilderness punished her for it in the end.
The wilderness is my mother, shouting at me when I was 13, “You have no reason to kill yourself. You’re ungrateful.”
A mother grants life, doesn’t she? She doesn’t just give it. But the wilderness is far from a mother, just as mine always was. We see that in juxtaposition to Callie and Shauna’s relationship, which is one of unconditional love and sacrifice. But Natalie never had that. She never knew unconditional love, and she put her trust in the wilderness, expecting that in return for her dedication. The trade was simply Javi’s life for hers, nothing more.
The second season of Yellowjackets was one full of tough love, unlikability, and paranoia. At the crux of it, however, seems to be this quiet, needle-like question, pulsing as it waits for you to acknowledge it.
How badly do you want to survive in this world?