[This story contains spoilers through season three, episode four of Yellowjackets.]
Yellowjackets has planted several mysteries to be unraveled in its third season.
Most recently, the Showtime series delivered another major cast death with Adult Lottie Matthews in episode four, setting up a whodunnit that will be revealed in the finale. Simone Kessell, who plays Lottie in the show’s adult timeline, told The Hollywood Reporter that Misty [Christina Ricci] will play detective and try to figure out how Lottie died, with the answer eventually coming in the season finale.
The series from co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco set up several other plots to theorize about, including lingering mysteries of the wilderness and the fate of Coach Ben (Steven Krueger). There’s also someone haunting Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and a cassette tape that her daughter, Callie, played by Sarah Desjardins, intercepted in the season premiere.
Lyle revealed to THR that the mystery tape will play a big part in the season, and that the plot around it was actually among her and Nickerson’s early pitches for the show to Showtime.
Desjardins says she’s pretty excited for viewers to see how it plays out, especially since she went along for the ride as they filmed.
“At the beginning of the season when we had our pre-season start chat, [the showrunners] talked broadly about that storyline and how I was involved, but really didn’t give me any idea of what direction it was going to go in,” Desjardins tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So as we shot the season and as I’m getting the scripts, I was right there with everyone else going, ‘What am I gonna do with it! This sounds like we’re deep into the fabric of whatever’s going on here,’ but it was a mystery for me, too. As we played it out throughout the season, it was really satisfying and suspiring.”
There’s a lot of intrigue as well as opinions around Callie, the only daughter to Shauna, who lost her baby boy in the wilderness and who, as viewers are coming to see more of in season three’s 1996-set timeline, was a force to be reckoned with when the teenaged Yellowjackets soccer players did whatever they did out there in order to survive in the wilderness for 18 months after their plane crashed.
In the third episode, the mystification around Callie attracted Lottie when she sought out Shauna’s family after being released from a psychiatric ward. Now seeing that Lottie actually had a home in New York City, it’s clear that her intentions for knocking on Shauna’s door were not just for shelter. Perhaps it was to spend time with Callie, who is ever-curious about her mother’s time in the wilderness.
But when Lottie gave Callie the recognizable heart necklace — telling Shauna, “It never meant what you thought it meant” — Shauna blew up into a fit of rage and promptly kicked Lottie out, seeing that Lottie branded her daughter with their symbol that marks someone as a sacrifice to the wilderness.
When speaking to THR after Lottie’s abrupt death, Kessell explained Lottie’s fascination with Shauna’s daughter. “She was intrigued that perhaps she’s the chosen one from the wilderness,” she said. “I think it’s more for Shauna’s perspective, for Shauna to be like, “What? What does my daughter know?”
Simone Kessell as Lottie, Sarah Desjardins as Callie and Melanie Lynskey as Shauna in the present-day timeline of episode three.
Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.
Reddit threads from the rabid fanbase of the coming-of-age horror series have long theorized about Callie playing an important role in the creators’ longterm vision of the series. Some have even predicted that Callie could be the ever-elusive “Pit Girl” — who was seen being chased and killed in the wilderness to open the series — which if true, would blow many other theories out of the water.
“It’s been so satisfying as the seasons have gone on to delve into Callie’s complexities more and more, and we do that in season three more than any other season,” says Desjardins.
Does that mean viewers will get some of these questions answered about Callie in season three?
“The fans will definitely get some answers, but there will be more questions. It’s a whole deep introspective journey,” she says. “I definitely understood more about her by the end of the season.”
What she can say about Callie’s intentions, as was evidence by the gory school prank she pulled in the season premiere, is that she has her mother’s back, and perhaps is more like Shauna than anyone realized. Shauna memorably opened the show by killing a rabbit in her garden, and now Callie has spilled animal guts on mean girls at school, who were gossiping about her mom.
“She really does deeply love her mom and want to protect her,” says Desjardins of Callie acting out following the season two finale and death of Adult Nat (played by former star Juliette Lewis). “She’s connecting more to this energy that’s going on inside her. She has no idea what’s going on but she’s like, ‘This also feels good, what does that mean?’ Part of her was acting out, but one side of her was like, ‘Will this help connect me to my mom’? So when Shauna responds [by laughing and watching the video], I think Callie is surprised but also taking in that moment as, ‘Do I actually get to connect with my mom?’”
It remains unclear what exactly Callie knows about what her mother did in the wilderness, especially after that Lottie sleepover and her access to this mystery tape. Desjardins says Callie is on a journey this season to get more answers.
“Season two for Callie was trying to understand her mom more and get to the truth, which we got a little bit of. That’s carried through into season three, but it’s coming from a place of her looking more inward and really trying to understand herself,” she says. “That’s the driving force that’s pushing her to the places she’s going this season, and it’s really interesting to see how things develop with Shauna and Callie’s relationship, as well as her relationship to her dad Jeff [Warren Kole] in a very different way.”
She sums up, “It’s madness. It’s confronting. It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. It’s dark. It’s a bit of everything.”
Yellowjackets streams new episodes of season three Fridays on Paramount+, with a linear premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. on Showtime. Follow along with THR‘s season coverage and interviews.
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