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We see a lot of what 2021 is like for a post-crash Yellowjacket through the eyes of Shauna, portrayed as an adult by Melanie Lynskey and in flashbacks by Sophie Nélisse. The costumes are likely also a way for them to keep a distance from their true selves, as they were post-crash and the savages they’ve become. This serves to keep us from knowing who’s doing what, aside from glimpses of telltale pink Converse, specific T-shirts, and huge glasses.
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As they chomp on human flesh, they shield their identities with animal skins and horned crowns. The first scene of the episode goes back to those wilderness months, when a girl with long dark hair is running barefoot through the snow, pursued by unseen others making wolf and bird noises as they hunt her straight into a wooden-stake-filled trap and then string her up in a tree, slit her neck, and prepare to dress her meat for consumption.
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And beyond that, which is a lot in and of itself, we get snippets showing us that whatever happened to those girls during those 19 months was bad enough to bleed into their new reality post-rescue, leaving them upright but not altogether right. And we see them board a private plane paid for by the father of one of the girls, Lottie (Courtney Eaton), which promptly plummets from the sky into the thick woods beneath them, leaving them to fend for themselves for what we come to learn was 19 months. We see them gathering at a party in the woods to blow off steam and exchange emotional anxieties over flying to nationals the next day. We see them interacting as a team and as a group of friends within that team. Something terrible happened to the Yellowjackets, and we spend the bulk of the episode being expertly handed glimpses of what that something could be. Actually, to say that this is merely the best new show of 2021 may be an understatement, but before I launch into a poem about it, let’s go further into the pilot. So yeah, with all that in mind, she is the perfect person to introduce us to what I, and many others, passionately claim to be the best new show of 2021. This next bit will quite possibly only be exciting to me, but she directed one solitary episode of The L Word during the original series’ fourth season. Kusama is a notable win for the showrunners as the director of the pilot, having previously directed several other female-driven projects of a physical nature, many of which tip toward dark subject matter, such as Jennifer’s Body, XX, Destroyer, and her directorial debut, Girlfight, which landed her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. The pilot runs viewers through a gamut of emotions at an athletic pace, using dual timelines to introduce the young women of the Yellowjackets, an undefeated high-school soccer team on its way to nationals in 1996, and also show how their lives look 25 years after surviving a plane crash en route to that very game. Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, along with director Karyn Kusama, do that in the very first episode of Yellowjackets better than we’ve seen in a long, long time. There’s an art to building a pilot that sets the premise of the show, introduces the main characters, and lays out an element of mystery to entice viewers to return again the following episode for more, all in under an hour.