[‘Yellowjackets’ Hallucination Dream Sequence Explained by Writer

[This story contains spoilers from the third episode of Yellowjackets, “Them’s the Brakes.”]

Yellowjackets just took us on a ride. But what does it mean for the journey?

The third episode in season three, “Them’s the Brakes,” ended with a hallucination sequence that merged the nightmarish dreams of three characters in its 1996-set wilderness timeline: Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Van (Liv Hewson) and Akilah (Keeya King). These visions included Shauna endlessly swimming to the child she lost, Van nearly burning down with the cabin, Akilah tripping out with an all-knowing alpaca and all of them seeing the ghost of Jackie (played by returning star Ella Purnell), their dead teammate who they feasted on in order to survive.

Co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco, who directed and co-wrote “Them’s the Brakes” with creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, has a lot to say about the episode as he digs into the details of each nightmare, the cultural significance of collective dreaming and the neuroscience behind how a moment like this might be remembered by the adult cast in the present-day timeline.

“It’s not just sensationalism. It’s not just horror. That’s not what we do,” Lisco tells The Hollywood Reporter about their overall Yellowjackets approach. “If it doesn’t feel embedded and coming out of character, then we’re not doing it. We have to have those double and triple strands helixing around one another to create something that really lives inside of you.”

As the latest episode of the Showtime sensation helixes around your brain, read on below as Lisco unpacks what you think you just saw and how it speaks to the show’s most central questions. “The space between objective and subjective experience is starting to blur,” he warns of what’s ahead.

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Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson told me this season isn’t lighter — it actually gets very dark — but that you all had more fun in the writers room. With the freedom of this being season three, the pressure of season one’s massive success was behind you. How did that open up your approach to storytelling?

That’s a really great question. There’s always this feedback loop when you make a show. You’re getting audience reactions really quickly and, I have to be honest, that can really mess you up. While we love our audience and respect their opinion so much, the show inevitably can’t be everything to every person. We have to make strong decisions.

In season two, there was a lot of overhang from the success of season one. We were trying to thread that needle about pleasing all of our audience while staying true to our vision, and that was a very complicated road to travel. In season three we said to ourselves — and we’ve always said this but we said it even more poignantly: We’re a group of people who have to trust our instincts. This is what we do as writers and producers. We have to osmotically absorb all the information we get from the audience because we respect them and we love them, but we cannot make a show for everyone. We have to make a show for ourselves and trust our instincts. Otherwise It will end up being a patchwork quilt of nothing.

So, Ash is completely right. We opened up the floodgates and we said: Let’s let our imaginations run free. Let’s never censor ourselves. Let’s always make sure that we kick the tires on every idea and make sure that it’s operating not only on a plot level, but on an emotional and psychological level, and if our group feels that it is, let’s do it.

You and your co-showrunners have a lot of the overall Yellowjackets story plotted out. When you went into the season three writers room, how much did you already know you were working towards?

You would be so surprised. While we do have what we consider to be architectural tentpoles for the seasons to come, once you get in there and start looking at implementing them, a lot falls away and there’s a lot of deconstruction that occurs before you build it back up again. Sometimes you can have a great idea and throw it on the board, and it winds up staying on the board in this miscellaneous area because you can’t quite make it fit with all the other stuff you love. We don’t go just for shock value or one moment. We want it all to be integrated and feel like it mushrooms in your consciousness after you turn off the show, and the only way to do that is to make sure the entire story is working.

Gertrude Stein in the ‘20s said, “A sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is,” and we extrapolate out from that and say an entire season is emotional. So each episode, we want to hit you in the jugular. But at the same time, we want all of those episodes to hang together in a way where you say, “Wow, that was a ride. That was a journey.”

You have said that if you do things right, cannibalism won’t be the most transgressive thing about this show. Cannibalism was out of the bag in season two. How do you treat cannibalism now for season three?

I wrote the episode in season two where they eat young Jackie, and we waited to do that until it could become a character-driven story. I only wanted to do that episode once I realized it could be a Shauna story. It was about Shauna finding a way to dominate, consume and honor her best friend all simultaneously. Once we linked into that as the main thrust of the story, I’m like, “Ok, we can do cannibalism.”

I appreciate you quoting me. That’s kind of an assumptive nature of the show. People were waiting for it to happen. If that was the key reveal and we had nothing left in the tank, everything would fizzle after that. Now the question is, since they had to do that to survive, will they do that again in a ritualistic way? When all the conventions of civilization that they’re used to are falling apart, will they build up new rituals and new ideas for what protects them in the wilderness, and will cannibalism be a part of that?

Bart Nickerson was squeamish about giving away any spoilers, but Ashley Lyle did tell me that you answer at least two big questions this season. In this episode, we see where Tai’s “no-eyed man” comes from, and Adult Tai and Van (Tawny Cypress and Lauren Ambrose) lean into the spirituality of the wilderness. What is your intent about what questions you’ll let linger and what you will answer about the mystery element of the show?

You’re asking a really good question. Just to take the present-day storyline for a second, a lot of neuroscientists say that when you remember something, you actually don’t remember it; you only remember the last time you remembered it. If that’s the case, then there’s an iterative attrition in your memory. So you can see that the present-day adult characters are looking back but, do they actually remember exactly what happened? Or, through the process of repression and possibly suppression, psychologically speaking, perhaps it’s all become kind of a hazy goulash?

Taissa sees something from her childhood that she forgot, and now she has a motivation and justification for always fearing the no-eyed man. But now she is thrown into deeper confusion about what it all means. All of those dominoes of memory may start falling into place, and they may actually have this wave of memory that starts sweeping them toward what I call a false pattern recognition in their modern lives. They’re like, “Oh my god, it’s happening again.” … “Oh my god, if this is happening, it must link to the wilderness.” When in fact, it could just be a coincidence or a serendipitous intersection of circumstances. We’re going to play with the wet clay of that, and not just play with it. Ash and Bart are right, we are going to try to answer a couple of questions to the audience’s satisfaction.

This is why I like speaking with you — you get into the neuroscience behind Yellowjackets.

Part of the engine of the show is to play with the idea of objective experience and subjective experience, and the space between them. What I see in an objective frame is very different than what you are seeing through your eyes when you’re experiencing what we’re seeing objectively. We’re constantly playing with, what’s truth? When I say we’re answering questions, we are. If people want to know, “Is it a supernatural thing? Is it a psychological thing?” I think it would be really bankrupt to give them an absolute clear-cut answer at this juncture.

This episode ends with a 10-minute hallucination sequence. My first question is, how did you pick these three characters for this vision: Shauna, Van and Akilah?

You have all the characters on the board and frankly, I think we could have taken any of them through that hallucinatory sequence and mined it for a lot of great story. But after kicking the tires on it, we really felt like Akilah, who is a child of nature who loves the plants and animals, was ripe for a subversion of her preconceptions about what is good about the wilderness.

Similarly, Van almost expired, if you recall, in the second episode of the entire series when they were left for dead after the plane crashed. Van has this way of being sarcastic and irreverent and acting like that didn’t really affect them at all and they’ve moved on. But, have they moved on? So their “dream” was to be strapped into that chair, unable to get out while the cabin is on fire. They’re about to expire. And then, if you look closely, it’s the hand of the cabin guy, the hand of Javi [Luciano Leroux, who they let die and ate in season two], the hand of Laura Lee [Jane Widdop, who died in season one] coming in, and it all comes rushing back.

Then with Shauna, that one felt the most tragic and poignant, because here’s Shauna having lost her baby and needing to move on as a 17-year-old in the woods, and now she has this moment where she sees the boy on the banks of the lake, swims toward him but is only getting further away. We felt that was incredibly sad and tragic, but equally might stir up some ideas of her own complicity in not being able to save the baby. And that’s subjective; I’m not saying she’s responsible. She lives with this guilt in terms of her own body and her own ability to deliver that baby. Plus, the doubt over if what was explained to her by the others actually happened. She still harbors this suspicion of the other young women about whether or not they’re telling her the truth. And then of course, just the raw pain of having not been able to meet her child. That was beautiful in our minds and also really harrowing.

In this episode, we see Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) in present day snapping over her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) wearing Jackie’s heart necklace, which was given to her by Lottie (Simone Kessell). Teen Shauna is fiery, but we don’t often see such raw emotion from Adult Shauna. Is this her trauma all bubbling up?

Don’t forget, the necklace was used as a sort of talismanic marking of a person back in the wilderness — and not in a good way. So when she sees the necklace on Callie’s neck, she just sort of snaps. It’s so funny that some of the audience feels like the distance between how we originally met Shauna and where she is now is so great. I would argue that the seeds of current Shauna were always in us meeting Shauna. Themes of the season are: Who is the villain and what does it mean to be a villain? And, who is the underdog and who actually never was to begin with? The audience will hopefully have an unusual and satisfying ride as we unpack that this season.

Back to the hallucination, their dreams end up in the same dream and we’re told their dreams are one. What did you want us to take away from these visions merging with one another and this not being a siloed experience for any of them?

I have a lot to say about this. Many cultures, the Mayans and other Indigenous cultures, felt that collective dreaming was part of the Shamanistic culture. That it was a way for societies to determine what their conventions would be moving forward and often give them really important information about society. There are a couple things here that are really interesting to me as the co-writer and director of the episode. One is that when women live together or are together, they can have a menstrual syncing. This is very well known. In these Indigenous cultures, there’s a dream syncing. So I think it’s really interesting to understand that when their conventions of how they’ve lived are starting to deconstruct and break down and they’re starting to build up new ones, this idea that their dreams would sync up so that together as a group, they can start reconstructing society in a way that we may not think is healthy but that they may need to survive.

This syncing up of their dreams is based in those cultures, but also something they can either totally lean into as a way to move them forward, or see as something toxic and corrosive that they then have to untangle from. There’s a sort of pheromonal effect, a cortisol effect. And then some of them don’t sync up. So there is a level of psychological induction going on of people being convinced that they need to be part of the dream to survive. We also put the “no-eyed man” in the dream, which was part of Tai’s (Jasmin Savoy Brown) vision, as if to say that their subjective experience is starting to blur and the space between objective and subjective experience is also starting to blur.

Lottie (Courtney Eaton) is in the group vision. Does she wake up and remember the dream?

She does not. One of the storylines with Lottie is that she’s lost her ability to be tuned into the wilderness, which is why she’s trying to use other agents to tune in for her like Travis [Kevin Alves] and Akilah.

How do you explain all of them hearing this screeching sound in the cave?

It’s the same deal. Playing with the objective and subjective reality of it all. That sound while it’s being experienced could be extremely vivid. But when heard in a different set of circumstances or viewed through a different lens, it might have a different impact on you. It’s the same way you in your memory remember certain stark, vivid things that were so meaningful to you when you look back. But if you turn to your best friend or someone in your family they’re like, “That wasn’t such a big deal.”

I’m not saying this isn’t a big deal. But the collective alchemy of these women experiencing something so intense is like raising to 11 almost everything they’re going through. This is an important part of the show, and we’re not going to hide the ball from the audience. We’re going to make it really satisfying, but it is sort of plastic in the way it’s functioning in each of their different stories.

You and your showrunners have all talked about how this season will bridge the gap between the teen and adult versions of the characters to better understand how they became the adults we meet. How did you go about that?

After they see this season, the audience will know a lot more about some of the trauma and some of the harrowing experiences that our adult characters faced in the wilderness. That is definitely a yes. They will have more answers about why there are certain alliances and what actually transpired in the wilderness.

Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) is reunited with the team this episode — with a shotgun in his face. Coach confronts everything they don’t want to confront; he holds a mirror up to what they’ve done so far. What does Coach represent this season?

Steven Krueger is just knocking it out of the park. He’s doing such a great job giving Coach an edge but also a deep well of humanity. He has functioned in a number of ways so far. He has functioned as their superego, the person who is still tethered to right and wrong. He’s also functioned as someone who judged them, from their point of view. The fact that he didn’t participate in the cannibalism is really a thorn in their side because, for whatever reason, they believe that means he thinks he’s superior to them. So now he’s an antagonist. But really, all the guy is trying to do is survive! He’s tried to extricate himself from whatever is going on in that mini civilization to try to self-preserve. As we move through the story, you’ll see how that goes for him.

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Yellowjackets streams new episodes Fridays on Paramount+, followed by episodes airing Sundays at 9 p.m. on Showtime. Follow along with THR‘s season coverage and interviews.