The Girls Aren’t Alright: On the Second Season of ‘Yellowjackets,’ the US Women’s National Soccer Team, and Raging Against the Constraints of the Patriarchy.

On the second season of “Yellowjackets,” the girls aren’t okay: the US women’s national soccer team and raging against the limits of patriarchy. This is it.

Now is the time.

This is what all Yellowjackets fans have been waiting for, right? Fearful of it? I’m still not sure for sure.

If you saw the first season of the Showtime hit that was nominated for an Emmy, you know exactly what I mean. In the 2021 pilot, the premise was made very clear: the Wiskayok Yellowjackets, a girls’ high school soccer team from an unknown suburb in New Jersey, went to the West Coast for a national title game in 1996. A storm came up in the middle of their trip, and their plane went down over the Canadian country. We know that the girls who made it through the crash will be stuck there for almost two years and will have to resort to eating each other to stay alive. A few will get out, but most won’t. It will get dangerous and unforgiving in the woods. We’ll go back and forth between this time period and one set 25 years from now, following the women who made the movies when they were kids. But by the end of season one, fans would know that the events of 1996 were at best slow. The second episode of season two, “Edible Complex,” wouldn’t come out until 2023. That’s when things reached a “point of no return.”

After being alone for a long time without food, tragedy is ready to strike. Jackie (Ella Purnell), the team’s captain, dies of cold after being thrown off by the other members of the team after a terrible fight that started because of hopelessness and a night that was ruined by a mass overdose caused by wild mushrooms. When the other girls find her body, they fully mean to cremate her, but Mother Nature has other ideas. A gust of wind comes through out of nowhere and lands a pile of snow on her homemade altar. Jackie’s body doesn’t turn to ash; it slowly cooks. That smell is so good that it makes you feel drunk. Her friends are so shocked by it that it wakes them up from their sleep. As they slowly make their way out of the cabin and into the snow, they can’t fight the rising animalistic hunger inside them any longer. “Climbing Up the Walls” by Radiohead plays in the background as the team stands over what’s left of Jackie. They hesitate and aren’t sure for a beat. They all have hallucinations of a feast fit for the Greek gods as Thom Yorke’s words play over the speakers:

Underwear should always be worn.

I’m the hole in the ice.

Do not scream or sound the alarm.

We’ll always be friends.

They look at each other one by one. They tell each other, “It’s okay,” through telepathy. She didn’t want to die for nothing.

This is all the team needs to be able to do. The group eats up their once-respected leader so quickly that their coach, who is the only adult left, runs to the cabin in complete fear.