The final trailer for Season 3 of the survival thriller Yellowjackets dropped yesterday and fans rejoice in anticipation of seeing the return of their favorite high school soccer team following a long wait from production being halted due to the last year’s Writers Guild of America strike.
The show will premiere on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME starting February 14th.
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Yellowjackets follows a high school girls’ soccer team during the mid-90s who survive a plane crash that leaves them stranded in the deep wilderness of Canada. The show’s creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, cite the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies and the events of Flight 571 as their biggest inspirations for the series, as the show chronicles the teens’ descent into violent savagery. Audiences also get to follow the survivors in 25 years later in their present lives, having long returned to civilization but still haunted but what they’ve done along with the fear and paranoia of having those secrets revealed.
Spoilers ahead…
In the previous season, we saw the Yellowjackets struggle through the winter as vegetation and animal life became scarce, leaving them to resort to cannibalizing two of their own. The season ultimately ends with Natalie (Sophie Thatcher/Juliette Lewis) being assigned the leader of the group. The cabin they’ve taken sanctuary in being is burned to the ground, presumably by Coach Scott. In the trailer for the new season, we see the group has survived the winter months, but the preceding events have left them splintered and residing in straw huts. Some members are starting to question Natalie’s leadership, with a big reason being a supposed alliance between her and Coach Scott, who is in hiding.
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In the present day, we left Shauna being investigated for a murder she committed and saw the other surviving Yellowjackets members finding out that Lottie now runs a cult. This leads to a confrontation that causes Natalie’s death and Lottie’s institutionalization. The present-day plot point in Season 3 seems to revolve around someone learning about what went down in the wilderness and targeting the survivors.
Noteworthy scenes
The Season 3 trailer has no shortage of things to get fans excited for the show’s return. At the start of the trailer, we see Misty going through Natalie’s storage locker after Natalie’s death. In later scenes, we see Misty wearing a leather jacket and darker clothes suggesting that she went into the locker to steal some of Natalie’s clothes for herself, which is the most in-character thing Misty could do.
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In the trailer, we see Shauna touching a rock while looking menacingly into the camera. For those unfamiliar with the show, Shauna’s backstory adds depth to this moment. After the crash, Shauna discovers she’s pregnant with her best friend’s boyfriend’s child, which Jackie confronts her about before her death. In Season 2, Shauna went into labor, but the child was stillborn. She placed a rock over the baby as a grave marker. The trailer snippet suggests Shauna’s trauma may finally cause her to snap this season.
As for the current-day plotline, we see Taissa pick up a Queen of Hearts while playing cards. In Season 2, we learned that the survivors figured out who they would kill and cannibalize by drawing cards from a deck with one queen, and whoever gets the queen is the one they’ll kill. We then get a cut of Shauna saying “Someone wants us dead”. From this we know that the person who’s targeting them is somehow familiar with the group’s rituals, leading to some fan speculation that we may be getting another survivor reveal.
Finally, we get a brief snippet of Jackie Taylor, giving us further confirmation that Ella Purnell will be revisiting her role this season, if briefly. We see what looks to be a tiled background similar to a locker room, and her hair seems to be covered in bits of snow, so one could speculate that Jackie is showing up here as part of Shauna’s subconscious, similar to the plot device used in the first season where Shauna would “talk” to Jackie’s ghost.
There’s plenty of excitement (and queerness) in store for this season, and we’re ready for all of it.
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