It’s clear from the first scene of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s genre-bending survivalist series with a host of second-act 90s stars, that the girls of Wiskayok high school, fierce soccer stars on the field and headstrong teens off it, will go feral.
The 10-part series, created by the Narcos alums Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle, toggles between the present and the girls’ traumatic upheaval 25 years before, when the private plane to nationals crashes somewhere in the Canadian wilderness.
One timeline would already provide plenty of fodder for a 10-hour series, but Yellowjackets attempts to do three – a chronological telling of the team’s endurance for months in the woods, a modern mystery of who and what is haunting the middle-aged women, and occasional flashbacks which suggest the Yellowjackets’ survival was a much gnarlier ordeal than their generic line, to inquiring reporters and family members, of “starved and scavenged and prayed” until rescue.
The dual timeline is particularly frustrating in that it halves the time provided to the show’s greatest strength, by far: its roster of veteran 90s stars of canonically dark teen roles as fortysomethings grappling with a metastatic, horrific past.
A mysterious reporter serves to bring the women back in contact , along with a gleefully deranged nurse named Misty Quigley, played with cheery spikiness by Christina Ricci.
As for that crash wilderness: Yellowjackets is significantly better when it strays away from a survival plot that barely tiptoes toward the occult and devastation; halfway through, and the savagery of the opening scene remains barely a speck in the distance.
Lynskey does by far the most emotional heavy lifting of the series, straining for intimacy with her husband and bratty teenage daughter, masking enough rage to massacre a rabbit in her garden with placid smiles.
Any momentum, however, gets dissipated by persistent diversions – shaky close-up shots to ominous music that reveal nothing, memory ghosts warning of danger only for that danger to fade into 90s pop music, another plot escape hatch.