#yellowjackets s1 e3

[docholligay]

Misty

Hello! This is about up to Episode 3 of Yellowjackets, and ONLY episode 3 of Yellowjackets. I have not seen beyond the third episode, at all, and know NOTHING about this show. Please do not spoil it for me.  Things that are spoilery in nature, for me, include: saying things like  “Just wait!!” confirming or denying anything I put forward, outside information about the cast interviews or creator statements, leading questions like “Do you think “blank moment” means anything?” etc. Remember  that Y’ALL HAVE SEEN THE SHOW AND I HAVE NOT. This informs the way you  talk about things relating to the show. Just be really careful is all  I’m asking. Also: If there is LITERALLY any stance I  could take on this show or character that would make you upset, please  just fucking block the tag

If you WOULD like to discuss the show and my takes on it, the Discord is right here! I don’t go there, so it’s a great place to get every emotion out.

Please thank @sailorsunspot and @moonlight-frittata for backing this odd way of doing a liveblog, and remember my tip jar is always open

Before I move on to episode 4, I absolutely want to talk about Misty goddamn motherfucking Quigley. She is the greatest character of all time, I fucking loathe her, I ADORE what the writers have done with her and how they twist and pull with her like fucking taffy. She’s a genius stroke of writing AND the actress does an amazing job with her.

Anyway, Misty.

At one point in this episode, Nat asks if Misty has any idea how fucking weird she is and: No! Absolutely not!

Misty completely lacks appropriate social boundaries and seems to be lacking in genuine empathy. She’s never learned how to be likeable, so she settles for being useful. Just like, sitting in her really very lovely bedroom taking a prank phone call, she thought that being smart could save her from social nightmares. Surprise! It can’t!

Misty is a really interesting character for me, because I, too, was a young kid who was very much to the edge of the social circle. I was awkward and overeager and very much into my hobbies (I wore a full ass embroidered blouse and prairie skirt for picture day) and actually pretty “smart”. I went to state for the Nat Geo History and Geography Bee in 6th grade and got to the finals with a bunch of homeschooled 14 year olds*.

You may have imagined this did not make me very likeable, and like Misty, I didn’t really understand what I was doing wrong. I was kind, I noticed when people were upset and tried to do nice things like make a flower bookmark or whatever. I was helpful with homework because it all came very easily to me. I was enthusiastic. 

But I didn’t get the rules. And neither does Misty.

Now, I got smart a lot sooner than Misty, who I would argue never has. She has never figured people out, to this day. A key difference between Misty and I is I think, that empathy thing. At the very least adult Misty, if young Misty did have it, has excised it fairly well from herself.

I gave Misty some credit in episode 2, I think it was, about maybe honestly thinking that she wasn’t pretty enough and just not getting what makes her unlikeable, but I’m rescinding that. I DO think she has no idea how offputting she is or why, but I also think she’s openly manipulative.

She lies to Kevin as Nat, and it never occurs to her that this might be bad or wrong, because to her it’s all about the means to the end, and about using Nat as a way to access this sort of flirtation that Misty herself has never been able to get. Misty, when Kevin first walks up to them, is immediately attracted. And reacts in the most Misty way: Desiring to be noticed, to be remembered, to be thought of.

I genuinely adore how this show takes Misty’s desire for friendship and love and instead of making her the sad nerd everyone is supposed to feel bad for, she, like all the other girls, is a secret monster. She’s like a succubus, or that Japanese monster that eats handsome men. She is happy to do anything, appear as anything, to form these relationships, no matter if they are hollow at core. Misty may be pathetic, but she is not innocent, the show tells us.

It’s ironic that Misty is literally pretending to be Nat, when I argued in an earlier post, and will continue to argue here, that Misty is the one of out them that is really NOT pretending to be something else, simply because she doesn’t know how. She literally admitted to Nat upfront that she pretended to be her to seduce Kevin. She didn’t play dumb for a minute about fucking up Nat’s car. She doesn’t know enough about the way fucking human beings work in order to feel even a moment of shame.

All the other women know that there is something wrong with them at core. But not Misty. Misty has no idea that something in her is fundamentally broken.

I joked that I would not be surprised if Misty killed Travis and did 9/11, and that WAS a joke, but also, i would not be surprised if Misty was somehow involved in his death. I’m not feeling confident enough to say, yes she absolutely is, but in the real world Travis would have killed himself, and this show is in many ways very clearly not in the real world. I don’t think he did because that doesn’t make sense to the kind of narrative we’re working with, though privately I would love if the answer was “Sometimes the poison just takes time to kill you” 

Anyway, MISTY QUIGLEY EVERYONE

*Not to be bitter about an absolutely meaningless contest of nerdery, uh, more than 20 years later, but I lost out on a question about DEW POINT. Which I argue to this fucking DAY is a meterology question, and NOT a fucking history or geography question. I also lost a point for answering Russia as the largest Asian country and not Kazakhstan, which, I know the entire fucking globe is political, but so far as I’m concerned Russia can go fuck itself with its preciousness, the majority of its land holdings are in Asia. Defending my tiny 12 year old self ahaha.

[cinderfeather]

Yellowjackets Season 1 Episode 3 LiveReact

Okay, so @pebblish encouraged me to try livereacting to a Yellowjackets episode, so I thought I'd give it a try (hopefully I'm doing it right):

I don’t know you either Rachel, if we saw you before I don’t remember you

Is that grown up Taiessa’s actor playing her granny?

Why doesn’t misty even want to let Nat out of here site even to grab food at the gas station? Ohhh because Natalie can search her car… but I thought that was obvious even to Nat from the last episode that misty sabotaged her car anyway? Okay I supposed she wouldn’t have tried to search the car if she didn’t suspect.

Three days? What have they been eating? Surely they would have used up all their snacks by then?

Oh they have a food stash?

Oh no last pill

Betrayal!! Shauna voted against her friend!

Is that message on the plane gonna wash off?

Hmm, so if Taiessa is a politician (a leader) in the future, is she gonna come to heads with Jackie really strong?

I don’t understand why Shauna is stalking her husband

Oh a pack of wolves might show up?

Ah clever, Taiessa paid the reporter to just check to see if anyone was talking?

Eeee scary whispers heard from the woods!

Okay cool at least they have water now. But isn’t it freezing? Yes, exactly Jackie.

Oooh Shauna is jealous of that random girl talking to Jackie

Oh hahahahaha the other dude who she’s been tempted to cheat on shows up and plays along to help her OTT lie she was trying to pull to see if her husband was cheating

So does car mechanic guy know she’s married? It’s very confusing.

For a moment I was worried Misty was about to kill the coach

Oooh ‘the man with no eyes’, I’ll need to check screenshots more closely once I’m finished to get another look. We also had Travis appearing for a second in the mirror when Nat was snooping, and she was clean too.

Ooh ‘a bad feeling’ what’s gunna happen?

How did Shauna get the hotel room key?

Okay! Why did her nanas eyes go like that when she died? I can’t think of a illness that would cause that to happen on death so quickly? And why the juxtaposition of the broken doll on the ground with the dead cabin owner?

What did the message Nat have say?

So did Taiessa get Travis killed because Nat mentioned she was trying to contact him?

After the show:

Ahh, Shauna and Matt were getting their own hotel room to have their own affair

Okay, the message Nat found in Travis' place was 'Tell Nat she was Right'. So his killer was probably planning to kill him for longer than the time between Nat's phone call to Taiessa and finding him dead?

Hmm, so someone on Reddit pointed out that the empty forest that Taiessa looked out into actually had the man with no eyes standing there in the same shot in the intro. Interesting.

[knowlesian]

rewatching yellowjackets s1 and realizing tai said “after that bear we saw today? i’m not gonna let you sleep out here” to lottie in e3 given what happens the next time they see a bear and who they let sleep outside is one of those little details that makes me want to affectionately/admiringly punch the writers in the neck

[yellowjacketslesbian]

I did some research on the past credits of Yellowjackets S2 writers to try to figure out which episodes might have taivan plot lines:

(reposted from my twitter - credit for finding the writer’s list and episode titles goes to @sappy-sappho)

S2E3: Digestif is likely to heavily feature taivan because Ameni Rozsa also wrote S1E5 & S1E9 which introduced taivan as a couple & featured their coming out scene

S2E4: Old Wounds was already likely to be taivan's reunion based on the title but the writers' on the episode further confirm it. Julia Bicknell wrote E9 of Bly Manor (aka damie's episode) & Liz Phang wrote E3 of Hill House (Theo's episode)

S2E5: Two Truths & a Lie could feature Van heavily since Katherine Kearns wrote on S1 Hacks (the intersection of gay and comedy is basically Van) - I know this one is a bit of a stretch

S2E6 has Ameni Rozsa as a main writer leading me to believe this will be a pivotal episode for taivan since she wrote a lot of taivan's relationship in S1 and also talked about writing their relationship in The OutFronts panel

S2E7 may also feature a taivan storyline since Julia Bicknell is also a writer on this episode and again wrote THE damie episode of Bly Manor

[seattlesellie]

Oh my god. I watched yellowjackets today up to S1 E3 and Jesus ?? (No spoilers) BUT LIKE? people on TikTok made it seem like a cute little silly gay show and the way I got JUMP SCARED. I hate blood n shit like that and people on TikTok made it seem way different than what it is 🙁💔

ohhhh nooo :(( yeah it’s definitely not a “cute” show n not for the weak !! it gets even more insane on s2 😭

[docholligay]

“We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful what we pretend to be”

Hello! This is about up to Episode 3 of Yellowjackets, and ONLY episode 3 of Yellowjackets. I have not seen beyond the third episode, at all, and know NOTHING about this show. Please do not spoil it for me.  Things that are spoilery in nature, for me, include: saying things like  “Just wait!!” confirming or denying anything I put forward, outside information about the cast interviews or creator statements, leading questions like “Do you think “blank moment” means anything?” etc. Remember  that Y’ALL HAVE SEEN THE SHOW AND I HAVE NOT. This informs the way you  talk about things relating to the show. Just be really careful is all  I’m asking. Also: If there is LITERALLY any stance I  could take on this show or character that would make you upset, please  just fucking block the tag

If you WOULD like to discuss the show and my takes on it, the Discord is right here! I don’t go there, so it’s a great place to get every emotion out.

Please thank @sailorsunspot and @moonlight-frittata for backing this odd way of doing a liveblog, and remember my tip jar is always open

I have never read the Vonnegut novel that quote above is from. I confess to keeping a bit of distance from Vonnegut through absolutely no fault of his own, but because his fans tend to be incredibly insufferable and some of his lines make great tattoos and insta posts for people who read one book a year. If that sounds judgmental, congratulations, you’ve passed the tone portion of the reading comprehension test.

Anyway, I don’t think you need to know the context for the first quote, because on the one hand, it’s what we would call in the literary world: foreshadowing. My immediate reaction was “Oh, he’s the sort of dude who wants you to know he reads Vonnegut” although in full fairness most of those dudes immediately after say, ‘that’s Kurt Vonnegut” so I might be unfair there. But he fits a lot of the profile: he’s young, he considers himself charming, he’s outre and considers himself an individual, all that. And that’s not wrong, maybe. This scene is doing a lot of things at once, it can definitely juggle that.

BUT.

What this is, is the show:

A) Putting a red flag in front of Adam. I have thought Adam was a liar and maybe doing the same shit as the reporter for awhile now, but this confirms it. he’s pretending. This whole thing with Shauna is manufactured and is abotu something that has nothing to do with Shauna, and how the fuck is Shauna going to react when she realizes that this person she’s throwing herself at to make herself feel alive again, this person she’s throwing herself at because she’s tired of fucking the corpse of her love and hatred for her best friend through her husband, who, if he isn’t Jeff the old boyfriend I will eat my fucking hat, this person she feels SOME KINSHIP with, is playing her.

This whole episode is about playing, I think that’s why it’s called The Dollhouse. Playing at adulthood, playing at love, playing at marriage, and also, Adam is playing at seduction.

B) Offering up a thesis statement for the show. All of these girls are actively hiding and pretending to be the thing they are (except, actually, Misty, who has no gift for such things. More on her in her own post, the little scamp. I hate her so much and she’s the greatest character of all time).

Shauna is playacting at being a stay at home mom because she thinks that’s safe, but she’s someone who fucking ate a girl and also participated in the murder of at least one. She is, to go back to an earlier post, a wolf full on masquerading as a RABBIT, because she’s living jackie’s life as a source of atonement.

Taissa is a good upright clean liberal with a nice family, on paper. She’s pretending to be that, and not the cunning and dangerous wolf she is with a child who is either literally or figuratively haunted by the specter of Tai’s grandmother, which I think might be some kind of statement about tai’s interaction with mortality and knowing, but I want to see more show before I come down anywhere on that. Anyhow.

Nat is pretending to be clean when even at her fucking best she was just a dry drunk. “I’m not high, if it matters.” But you’re still arrested. She’s pretending to be a tough girl, when she’s the girl to whom I would most easily affix “pathetic and wet” She’s a fucking sandcastle of a human being, and I actually do not think adult Nat will survive the show though i don’t know the means by which i think that’ll happen the call could easily come from inside the house but I don’t know the narrative place being set well enough to know if that’ll serve it.

ANYHOW. In pretending to be these things, do they risk becoming them? Or is the risk in that, at a very formative time in their lives, they pretended to be a pack of wolves? And so they became it. It seems as if it cannot be unmade.

And Shauna replies with another Vonnegut quote, from a novel i HAVE read: “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

So Slaughterhouse-Five is about war, and trauma, and particularly the effects of war and trauma on children. I’m really really collapsing the book in on itself, which is a good book, a great book, even if it is one of those books someone reads when they’re fucking seventeen and thinks that’s pretty much it--HOLD ON YES THAT IS THE POINT TOO.

Shauna is smart, but is she just, seventeen smart? Is this response just another of the ways in which Shauna is trapped in the moment of the crash? In the aftermath? Amazing.

Anyway, that quote is early on in the book and for me, though, I last read it probably a decade ago, comes to tie together the notion of time, and how time is like standing in a field of wildflowers, and you could never gather them all, and if you did, it would never be like seeing that field, and that is part of the beauty of human existence, is we can only keep so much of each moment. The present is all around us, and beyond us, and so little of it can stay.

Now, I don’t know if the writers/shauna are seeing it the same way, but her response is doing two things: On a chracter level it’s establishing relationship between her and Adam. She feels CLOSENESS with him, being so equally affected by the same author to offer up a quote in reply. Two, it does, in some way, reply to his quote. If I were going to smack at that pitch, I would say it’s saying, “Don’t pretend to be fine with things, or you’ll become fine with them.” “My present is a fucking marianas trench of complication and even I am not sure what is me anymore.”

And then Adam asks a question I fucking LOVE about confirming a suspicion: “And once you do, will it make you happier?” I think about this a lot. DO people want the truth? I don’t think they do this has not been my observation of human nature. That’s not even a criticism, I don’t even always want the truth, sometimes I would prefer a half-truth or concealment or even a full on lie. I am a very big fan of being honest with ourselves, of being candid. Don’t seek answers you don’t want.

And she says no. And he says ‘You’re beautiful when you’re honest”

And I’m trapped between thinking that Shauna is never honest, not even now, and thinking that Shauna doesn’t even know what it means to be honest, because she is still emotionally processing something that happened to her so long ago that it’s a memory suitable for commemorative coins. Both come to the same end, but they FEEL different to me.

[docholligay]

The Opening

Hello! This is about up to Episode 3 of Yellowjackets, and ONLY episode 3 of Yellowjackets. I have not seen beyond the third episode, at all, and know NOTHING about this show. Please do not spoil it for me.  Things that are spoilery in nature, for me, include: saying things like  “Just wait!!” confirming or denying anything I put forward, outside information about the cast interviews or creator statements, leading questions like “Do you think “blank moment” means anything?” etc. Remember  that Y’ALL HAVE SEEN THE SHOW AND I HAVE NOT. This informs the way you  talk about things relating to the show. Just be really careful is all  I’m asking. Also: If there is LITERALLY any stance I  could take on this show or character that would make you upset, please  just fucking block the tag

If you WOULD like to discuss the show and my takes on it, the Discord is right here! I don’t go there, so it’s a great place to get every emotion out.

Please thank @sailorsunspot and @moonlight-frittata for backing this odd way of doing a liveblog, and remember my tip jar is always open

MAN, do I hate the opening credits. This is not to say I am by and large an opening credit hater, and i DO wish good credits would come back, but this is not what I want to justify wasting the time on. It’s about a minute and a half long. That is a LOT in a show like this.

And I get what it’s showing, it’s showing the distortion of the past, the failure to even, probably, remember it the way it really happened, and how it distorts their present. Memory is, I think, going to be a thing in this series, at least I hope so. There’s no way these girls can’t each have a different memory of “what happened” and unless I’ve missed my guess, what we’re being shown in the show of the past is meant to be an objective as possible look at it, not what each of the girls THOUGHT happened. I am hoping they’ll delve into that more seriously, and the whole thing with the burial of Rachel Goldman and the way they create meaning for her out of small, scattered, frankly arbitrary bits gives me hope that they will work on memory and meaning ANYWAY I’M WRITING A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT POST NOW.

But, not to be all “yeah yeah the time knife we’ve all seen it” but I did not need this opening to hint to me that this was a direction we were going. I think that was pretty clear from the outset, the way Shauna has kept her journals because she wants to hang on to the SPECIFIC memory of Jackie specifically (who is definitely dead) and the whole ordeal, Nat who tries to blitz away the memory of what happened in drugs and alcohol, Misty who holds to this memory of usefulness and continues to manipulate situations to catch that high again, Taissa who can only understand the world through her desire to control or to lead because in her mind, no one else will EVER do it correctly.

All that is there in ep 1 and 2, and also this one. I don’t need a minute and half of hazy video glitching out while a very subtle track says “NO RETURN!! NO RETURN!!” to let me know what’s going on emotionally within the show.

POSSIBLY UNPOPULAR OPINION.

[docholligay]

Dog and Wolf

Hello! This is about up to Episode 3 of Yellowjackets, and ONLY episode 3 of Yellowjackets. I have not seen beyond the third episode, at all, and know NOTHING about this show. Please do not spoil it for me.  Things that are spoilery in nature, for me, include: saying things like  “Just wait!!” confirming or denying anything I put forward, outside information about the cast interviews or creator statements, leading questions like “Do you think “blank moment” means anything?” etc. Remember  that Y’ALL HAVE SEEN THE SHOW AND I HAVE NOT. This informs the way you  talk about things relating to the show. Just be really careful is all  I’m asking. Also: If there is LITERALLY any stance I  could take on this show or character that would make you upset, please  just fucking block the tag

If you WOULD like to discuss the show and my takes on it, the Discord is right here! I don’t go there, so it’s a great place to get every emotion out.

Please thank @sailorsunspot and @moonlight-frittata for backing this odd way of doing a liveblog, and remember my tip jar is always open

I love Taissa because I feel like she’s horrible in a way that is so relatable for me personally. Perhaps that’s the gift of this show--it’s like a fucked up Sailor Moon where no matter what your ‘deal’ is you can find someone who makes you feel represented, only instead of you being a princess of the galaxy you’re a gelatinous blob of bad impulses and coping mechanisms. Anyway.

There’s a one man show I really love, and no one ever watches it, but I am borderline obsessed with the way it tells stories, called “In and of Itself” and one the of the things it talks about in that show is the time between wolf and dog. That’s the time of day when the sun is so low, that you can’t tell the difference between a wolf and a dog.

Doc, what the fuck does this have to do with anything? Taissa is a wolf. This isn’t just me saying this, this has already been shown a few times within the show, there’s a lot of wolf references and imagery generally, sure, but SPECIFICALLY in reference to Taissa*. But she’s living in a world that is domesticated, now. Her wife is a dog. Her wife is upright, and kind, and thoughtful. Her wife believes good things of her, and is, you know what? Actually naive. When she says Tai promised that this campaign would be about the issues, she shows a stunning lack of knowledge not only about how politics is done but about who her wife IS.

Tell you what, if I ran for anything, my wife would just assume I was going to start committing overt social violence immediately, which is part of the reason I DON’T run for shit, is I would be hedged into a situation where I KNOW I would compromise my values and become a person I can’t be proud of.

And Tai too! her first impulse is to weaponize something Bathurst didn’t do and couldn’t have prevented--his family potentially owning enslaved people. But she knows it’s an effective weapon, the same way she sets herself against Allie, the same way she doesn’t attempt to convince fucking jackie of anything but shows her that she’s no longer leader, the same way she is going to use Bathurst’s daughter’s addiction to bolster her own campaign. THE SAME WAY SHE HIRED A WOMAN TO TRY AND GET THE OTHER GIRLS TO CRACK. Taissa believes that the best defense is a good offense and that was never ever just on the field.

Taissa is a predator. 

And this is part of the problem with Sammy, too, isn’t it? Sammy is displaying wolvish tendencies, aggression and strong pack behavior with his family. IN many ways, he is a Taissa who has not learned to appear a dog in the dim light.

I’m not unconvinced that part of this show is about generational trauma but we haven’t gotten far enough for me to make more than a throwaway comment about that, so.

Maybe the woods let Taissa be the wolf she always was. Maybe everything happening with the postcard is going to release that ugliness, that strength, that power and that darkness.

*I think this is too on the nose, but I’m not leaving out the possibility that Taissa killed Jackie. I’ve talked before about rabbits and wolves in this show, and Jackie is Doomed, and Shauna’s fucking weird rabbit thing I think has to do with still hating yet memorializing Jackie, jackrabbit, etc etc etc. I am gonna laugh so hard if Jackie is alive ahaha.

[docholligay]

SO THAT’S MY POSTS ON EPISODE 3

let me know if there’s anything in particular about episode 3 you wanted me to say something about!

Please thank @moonlight-frittata and @sailorsunspot for this!

Assuming everything stays as is, essays for ep 4 are on the 28th, stream is the 30th

[docholligay]

Is Shauna aware that she hates Jackie?

On mobile so this may not be incredibly in depth. I HAVE NOT SEEN PAST EPISODE 3 PLEASE DON'T SPOIL ME

I'm not sure she's that self aware, no. It's early days in the show and I may be mistaken, but I think she's so bound up in love and guilt and duty to honor her memory that any negative feeling she might have shed either chalk up to that or feel so EVIL for having that she would shut it away.

I don't think she realizes she's living Jackie's life as atonement

I don't think she realizes every rabbit she kills for eating the beautiful things she might plant now, is Jackie.