Yellowjackets

The whole cast are excellent, but this is Lynskey’s show. ... The first season of Yellowjackets was great. Season two is spookier, bloodier and just as funny. Strap yourself in for another wild ride.

Yellowjackets Season 2 is darker, more disturbing, and more confident than ever—utterly fearless in its storytelling and unflinching in its vision.

Although the present has yet to fully measure up to the stomach-churning storytelling of the past, Season 2 is still packed to the brim with what made the series such a buzzworthy hit in the beginning: dark comedy blended with harrowing drama, and more than enough wild reasons to keep watching.

A best drama nomination for “Yellowjackets,” which was nominated for its first season in last year’s Emmy race, seems pretty likely if the first six episodes made available for review are indicative of the season as a whole.

The second season reaches the heights of the first, with a negligible bump here or there. The new episodes are packed with more of what fans want: Maybe-mystical mysteries, big Melanie Lynskey monologues, and, of course, cannibalism.

It’s blazing good television, with each episode leaving us wanting more of the madness.

In season two, the deliciously twisty thriller continues to draw much of its strength from its confident ambiguity and delayed revelations, leading us not to Big Answers, but further into the thicket of story and symbolism.

This group of actors are on top of their game, but part of the magic last season came from all four women interacting with one another. In Season 2, each is off on her own adventure for the bulk of the first six episodes. ... Only time will tell if some of these detours will pay off, but I'm eager to find out. It's pretty telling that even when Yellowjackets begs you to cover your eyes, it remains almost impossible to look away.

Yellowjackets still hasn't shed any light on what it means, though the new episodes nudge the explanation ever so slightly toward the "supernatural" end of the spectrum.

Like the best mystery boxes, each new answer raises more intriguing questions, which is enticing enough. But throw in buckets of blood and more Tori Amos needle drops than you know what to do with, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.

While it may not reach the artistic heights of Lynch’s sublime summit (and really, what can?), “Yellowjackets” dances in the same surreal realm. And that should give the series enough cultural bandwidth to last its intended five seasons.

If all parts aren't equally compelling, it's still a must-see for adventurous souls. [10 - 23 Apr 2023, p.6]

Yellowjackets continues to be as uniquely gnarly and peculiar as its title sequence with this madly inventive second season, full of thrillingly disturbing developments.

While the plotting may be initially concerning, the scene-to-scene writing is still spectacular, buoyed by one of the best ensembles on TV.

Yellowjackets sometimes attempts so much that it trips over itself, like a fumbled fast-break play on the soccer field. But between its confident willingness to get weird — sinister trees, bloody bees, pernicious facsimiles! — and its relatively sure grip on its world-building, Yellowjackets is making a compelling case for its own longevity.

If the show explores the paranormal as thoughtfully and confidently as it does teen cannibalism and sticks the landing again in the season finale, “Yellowjackets” will vault to the top of the puzzle-box ranks. But with a show this daring, a fiery wreck always feels moments away.

It just lacks the assuredness of its predecessor season, trying to keep audiences on the hook with more of the same for a bit longer while it toils over what’s next. ... If it wasn’t for that wildly gripping premise and incredible cast, this might be a much more bleak winter to contend with.

Yellowjackets understands the potential toxicity of teenage intimacy, and how best-friendship can sometimes activate awful impulses.

In the first six episodes of its second season, Yellowjackets makes missteps with its present-day storytelling that dilutes the potency of its adult ensemble. Now the past storyline laps it by a lot.

“Yellowjackets” has plenty of flaws, but I’m stunned, six episodes into the nine-episode second season, at the skill with which, without sacrificing the thrill of a good plot, it manages to bend genres, juggle wildly different tones and invert familiar tropes. Whether it will succeed at fully melding this wide range of registers into a coherent story remains to be seen.

While Yellowjackets has its storytelling issues, it does seem that, with everyone settled into the story, that the stakes will be ramped up in Season 2. That should help keep our minds off the show’s glaring flaws.

The performances remain sharp and just the right amount of peculiar (Lewis is the particular highlight), but even the best of actors can’t make wheel spinning terribly interesting after a certain point. ... When Yellowjackets leans into that mysticism—evoking some kind of forest god or malevolent spirit—the show shifts into its eeriest, most alluring form. ... The ending of episode six gives me hope that the back half of the season will collect itself and drive the story forward in a confident direction.

On the whole, far more of it continues to work than doesn’t.

Season 2 keeps moving forward… but the giddy buzz once driving “Yellowjackets” has been replaced by a snail’s pace. Through six episodes, Season 2 appears to be approaching aptly complex quandaries for its core cast members, but the path to their confrontation is padded in too much snow.

Yellowjackets doesn’t always hit form but, when it does, dread is served threefold: what’s happening, what already happened and what might happen next.

Fine work by Lysnkey and Lewis, particularly, will always elevate Yellowjackets from much of the televisual pack, but there’s no doubting that this return to its dog-eat-dog world represents a loss of momentum.

The show can be very dark – figuratively and literally – but it’s lightened by performances from Nineties screen queens Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis.

If you are among those passengers who boarded Showtime’s mystery “Yellowjackets” and couldn’t get enough of it, fasten your seat belts for more turbulence in Season 2. As for others unmoved by the slow pace of revelations in the twin-track drama, the first four episodes offer little hope of reaching a clear destination anytime soon.