Yellowjackets Seasons 1-2 recap: Citizen detective alert!

We’re back for the cannibalism and the comedy as we head back into the Canadian wilderness for the tale of a teenage girls’ soccer team going feral in the 19 months following a plane crash – and the impact on the survivors back home 25 years later. 

While stranded, the survivors form a nature cult, driven by starvation, PTSD, madness, and a desperate desire to appease any force in the wilderness that could stand between them and a death.

Come for the drama, stay for the hilarious background details, like Misty’s (Christina Ricci) citizen detective boyfriend Walter (Elijah Wood) listening to Not While I’m Around from the musical Sweeney Todd – a stage play about cannibalism, obsession and true love – before deciding to divert attention from Misty’s role in dismembering and hiding a body.

And now, to give new citizen detectives a hand, we’ve collected the show’s biggest outstanding mysteries, along with a list of who’s died, who’s still alive, and what we now know.

Read more about Yellowjackets’ biggest shockers here. Binge Yellowjackets Season 1-2 now. And stream Yellowjackets Season 3 from 15 February. New episodes Saturdays.

The Yellowjackets death count

According to the newspaper article we see in Yellowjackets, there were 19 soccer players aboard Flight 2525. Add Coach Ben and Coach Martinez, with his sons Travis and Javi, two pilots named Robert and Fred, and a flight attendant named Janet, and we have 26 in total.

Rounding everything up, by the end of Season 2 we have:

• Five plane crash deaths: Robert, Fred, Janet, Coach Martinez, and Yellowjacket Rachel. 
• Six confirmed wilderness deaths: Javi and the Yellowjackets Jackie, Laura-Lee, Crystal/Kristen, “pit girl”, along with Shauna’s baby (she was pregnant at the time of the crash and gave birth in the cabin).
• Two modern-day crash survivor deaths: Travis and Natalie.
• Nine crash survivors we haven’t seen in the modern timeline: Coach Ben, Akilah (aka JV), Mari, Melissa, Gen, and four as-yet unnamed Yellowjackets.
• Five crash survivors alive in the modern day timeline: Shauna, Misty, Tai, Van, and Lottie. 
• And three people killed in Yellowjackets cover-ups: Jessica, Adam, and Kevyn.

Yellowjackets wilderness timeline

29 May 1996, at the end of spring in Canada: Flight 2525 crashes in the wilderness after flying off course.

August 1996: Laura-Lee dies while piloting a small plane she found in the woods.

September 1996: Javi flees after seeing the girls run wild in a bacchanal thanks to Misty drugging their stew with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and Jackie dies during the first snowfall.

November 1996: The survivors eat Jackie’s corpse, and Taissa leads Van to the symbols carved on the trees in the woods while “sleepwalking” as the feral version of herself. 

December 1996: The survivors find a (now mute) Javi again when they locate the final tree with the symbol. 

January 1997: Crystal/Kristen falls off the cliff, and Shauna beats Lottie to a pulp after her baby is stillborn. 

February 1997, now late winter: The girls hold their first wild hunt with Natalie as their prey. But when Javi falls through the ice, they accept his death instead and eat him. Lottie convinces the other girls that the wilderness has chosen Natalie to lead them, and the cabin burns down while they’re sleeping.

The Yellowjackets were only rescued in December 1997, so there are nine months to go as Season 3 begins.

Mysteries solved!

Who was sending blackmail postcards to the Yellowjackets? Would you believe it was Shauna’s himbo husband Jeff? He ran into financial trouble and used secrets he read from Shauna’s private journals to put the squeeze on the surviving Yellowjackets. Shauna was the only one who didn’t get a postcard. Those same postcards prompted Taissa to hire Jessica Roberts to investigate. But when she poked her nose into Misty’s business, Misty murdered Jessica to keep all their secrets.

Who’s the Antler Queen? At the start of the series we see a figure with a net headdress and mask, with two crowning antlers, seated at the centre of the girls’ cannibal circle. She also wears a white cloak with locks of girls’ hair sewn onto it (like a royal cloak with ermine tails). Nicknamed The Antler Queen by fans, she is the girls’ chosen leader in the wilderness. It’s likely that Natalie is the first Antler Queen, and that the position might still change in the coming months. In Season 2, episode 7, when the grown up Lottie hallucinates the Antler Queen in place of her usual imaginary therapist, the Antler Queen asks her, “Does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?”

Still looking for answers

• Who came back alive and who got eaten? At this point, there are nine people still potentially on the menu: Coach Ben, Akilah (aka JV), Mari, Melissa, Gen, and four as-yet unnamed Yellowjackets.
• What does The Symbol mean? This stick figure resembling a woman impaled on a hook is first seen carved on a tree in the woods the day of the plane crash. It’s also found carved in the floor of the cabin the survivors take shelter in, where it seems to have been used in a ritual. While she’s sleepwalking or dissociating, Taissa follows the same “man with no eyes” that her grandmother saw as she was dying into the woods and finds more trees with the symbol carved on it. Van later maps the trees and finds they form the same symbol on a much larger scale, with the final tree just a stump, which hides the entrance to the underground cave or mining tunnel system where Javi is hiding, which also has the symbol mapped out. So the symbol might, in fact, be a map of the mining tunnels around the cabin. Lottie believes that the symbol is meant for protection, and in the present day timeline, she uses it as the key symbol for her cult.
• Who took care of Javi for two months? After he runs away from the girls, Javi survives in an underground cave system or mining tunnels for two months. While he refuses to speak to the girls when they find him and bring him back, he confides in Coach Ben, “She told me not to come back”. He claims that “she” was his friend. Considering the struggle the others have had to stay alive, could Javi’s friend be a live person?
• Who is Pit Girl? This is the fan nickname for the girl we see being chased through the woods into a pit filled with sharpened sticks, then presumably cannibalised by the surviving Yellowjackets in Season 1. The running girl has long, dark straight hair and was wearing Jackie’s necklace, which, we find out in Season 2, episode 8, is given to the chosen victim who draws the Queen of Hearts card when there’s no more food, not even soup made from boiling Jackie’s leather belt. At the moment several clues point to this being Mari, but we still have some unseen Yellowjackets. Unless the snow continues into March, Pit Girl will probably be hunted down in the coming winter, shortly before the girls are rescued.
• Who or what possessed Lottie during the seance? In Season 1, the survivors hold a seance in the cabin during which Lottie seems to be possessed and speaks in French (while she studied French at school, she was bad at it, according to Jackie), saying, “It always wants blood. It still wants blood! It wanted more blood. Blood flows here. Here. Here. It must.” She also speaks French at the end of Season 1 when she places the bear heart on their altar, saying, “Versez le sang, mes beaux amis.”, meaning, “Spill the blood, my beautiful friends.”
• Is Lottie crazy, or connected to another plane, or both? A question for the ages! Lottie ran out of her medication for schizophrenia in the wilderness. A lot of weird things happen out there … but they could also be explained by the effects of starvation, groupthink, and heavy metals in the water.
• Who burned down the cabin? All fingers will be pointing to Coach Ben, who’s been appalled by the girls’ descent into cannibalism, cults and madness. 
• Why don’t they just eat Travis? We’re sick of the attitude.
• And how were they found? 

Yellowjackets deaths in rhyme

Rachel got stabbed through the throat on the plane

Robert and Fred died by impact or flame

Janet died screaming and writhing on fire

And Coach Bill was impaled by trees and expired

Creepy corpse man was shrivelled up in his chair

Laura-Lee’s aeroplane went bang with her bear

Crystal fell down a cliff while trying to dodge Misty

And poor, frozen Jackie got served extra crispy

Shauna’s stillbirth was buried, not stewed

Javi fell through ice in a wild chase for food

Biscuit was sliced up by the other Tai

And Travis was hanged, but did not want to die

Adam got Shauna’s knife right through his gut

And Walter poisoned Kevyn to save Misty’s butt

Jessica sucked toxic ciggies from Misty

And Nat died by the needle thanks to – oh, come on, now, Misty!

Read more about Yellowjackets’ biggest shockers here. Binge Yellowjackets Season 1-2 now. And stream Yellowjackets Season 3 from 15 February. New episodes Saturdays.