What the <em>Yellowjackets</em> Season 1 Finale Reveals About the Show?s Wild Teen Matriarchy

And yet, I came out of Sunday’s finale—which confirmed that the victim was neither Jackie, who froze to death, nor Lottie, who is apparently still alive—far more eager to talk through the season’s sneakily subversive themes.Because adolescence is a gauntlet, and because women are still the second sex, almost every story pop culture tells about teenage girls is also in some way a story about the horrors, physical and emotional, society inflicts on them. Sure, Jeff and Shauna are hooking up behind her back, but Jackie only learns about that after she’s lost everything else in the crash. Even the MOR hits that show up in Yellowjackets, like Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose,” drip with morbid romance.) Whatever this violent new pagan cosmology turns out to be, that emerges during the psilocybin frenzy of Doomcoming and develops into a faith after Lottie predicts an end to their hunger and then kills an eerily submissive bear, the spiritual appetites it satisfies probably predate the crash.And this is where Yellowjackets becomes more than just a smartly written, well-cast survival thriller.