What Happened to Jackie on Yellowjackets?
The queen bee faces the wilderness in the season finale of Showtime's new series.
***SPOILER ALERT- This article discusses major plot points from the season one finale of Yellowjackets.***
We’re still reeling from the Yellowjackets season one finale, but at least we’re not alone. Episode 10, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” answered many questions while setting up new mysteries to unpack in future seasons. And while there is so much to pore over (RIP Biscuit), Yellowjackets answered one of its biggest questions: what happened to Jackie?
In the aftermath of the mushroom-induced bacchanal in episode 9, Jackie (Ella Purnell) is horrified by her teammates’ attempts to sexually assault and nearly kill Travis. But the girls have little interest in what Jackie feels or says. Part of the beauty of Yellowjackets is how it upends the high school hierarchy. In New Jersey, Jackie was the queen bee, popular and well-liked. She’s even made captain of the soccer team, not for her athletic skills but for her influence where her teammates are concerned.
But while influence and popularity are key survival skills for high school, they are useless in the harsh Canadian wilderness. As the girls all shift into survivalist mode and pitch in to help the team, Jackie is utterly useless. She can’t hunt like Nat, she can’t kill and butcher like Shauna, and she lacks the first aid knowledge that helped elevate Misty’s standing in the group. Shauna warns her in an earlier episode that she needs to start pulling her weight, but all Jackie is able to do is host a séance (that goes badly) and suggest the doomcoming party (which turns out even worse).
By the season finale, Jackie has stopped eating, which spares her being drugged by the mushroom stew. She turns nihilistic, realizing that she has nothing to offer the group. It’s a sentiment shared by the team, who are still mad at her for sleeping with Travis despite him being broken up with Nat. And while the high school hierarchy falls away in the woods, the dynamics remain the same.
Yellowjackets never lets us forget that being a teenager is an emotional minefield where hyperbole reigns. Break-ups are uniquely devastating, fights with friends feel operatic in their drama. Every emotion is amplified and easily weaponized. So when Jackie and Shauna finally have it out, the fallout is explosive. Jackie reveals that Shauna was sleeping with Jeff, and he’s the father of her baby. She expects the Yellowjackets to have her back, and she’s not wrong to do so. She was betrayed by her childhood best friend, naturally she is heartbroken.
But Jackie’s plea for sympathy is ridiculed and ignored. Shauna unloads on her best friend, sick of standing in her shadow and following her commands. She doesn’t even like soccer, you guys. As Shauna calls out their toxic friendship, the Yellowjackets rally around her. They too are sick of Jackie’s entitlement and how little she contributes. These feelings have been long-simmering, and here is where they explode.
In a normal world, a massive blowout fight with your best friend would be devastating. But it wouldn’t be deadly. Jackie storms out into the cold night and tries to light a fire as the team goes to sleep in the cabin. She is too proud to go back inside, and Shauna is too stubborn to make her. And as Jackie drifts off to sleep, she dreams that she’s invited back in the cabin, given hot chocolate, and told by the entire team that she is loved. She’s joined by the dearly departed Laura Lee, and a mysterious grown man who we presume is the owner of the cabin.
Shauna wakes with a start (did she have the same dream?) and looks out the window to see it has snowed. And buried in the snow is Jackie, frozen to death. It’s a uniquely devastating moment for the show, in a series filled with them. Jackie’s death was foreshadowed, but it still comes as a shock. And while many viewers expected her to be murdered and eaten, her death was heartbreakingly banal and so avoidable. In a forest filled with wolves, bears, and malevolent spirits, Jackie is done in by bullshit high school drama and the weather. And 25 years later, Shauna is still carrying the guilt and trauma of their fight, searching for closure that will never come.
Jackie’s death creates a massive shift within the group, as Lottie seemingly steps forward to become the new leader. It also marks one of the last vestiges of humanity falling away. Jackie was a key link to their former lives, to civilization and soccer practice and algebra class. She represents their old lives and their old world. But it’s a new world order in the wilderness, one marked with blood, sacrifice, and mysterious unexplainable things in the woods.
While Jackie’s death has been telegraphed throughout the season, fans were hopeful she’d turn up in the present day timeline. A screenshot of a journal in Jackie’s room seemed to reveal as much. As Shauna pages through Jackie’s journal, she sees a list of movies that came out post-plane crash, where Jackie identifies each character she resembles in each film. If Jackie died, then how could she have seen all these movies?
Showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson explain the journal entries with Nickerson saying “It’s not a mistake. We will find out. And I think that will have a lot to do with what I’m talking about here in terms of her seeking some kind of reconciliation with the past.” Lyle added, “I will say, we did not necessarily anticipate people screen-shotting that the way they did. So to our minds, it was a character Easter egg, and not a plot Easter egg.”
Presumably, Shauna filled in Jackie’s journal as a way to cope with her grief. And while Jackie is dead, she will likely return as a ghost to haunt the Yellowjackets past and present. Just one more ghost in a wilderness filled with them.
(image: Showtime)
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