The exact appeal of Showtime’s Yellowjackets is tricky to pin down. What kept five million viewers coming back to the decade-spanning psychodrama week after week? Was it the canny treatment of our current cannibalistic zeitgeist? The chaotic evil of Misty Quigley? That impeccable time-jump casting? Between the 90s high school drama, creepy supernatural happenings and that killer soundtrack, season one of Yellowjackets had us tight in its blue-and-gold grip.
Well, if there was going to be a modern day human sacrifice cult, it was always going to be based in New Jersey. What a season finale to the first season of Yellowjackets! Is Antler Queen Lottie alive and well, still sacrificing hearts along with her gray sweatsuit mafia? Does Misty have Munchausen syndrome by proxy, or is she just the most fiercely loyal friend in the world? Is Taissa still in the organization? (She did, uh, have her dog’s heart on an altar in a secret room in her house. But as we know, she very well may have done all that in her sleep.)
The finale, which aired almost four months ago, left us with a major character death (be warned, spoilers ahead!) and gave us several new opened cans of worms as opposed to answers about the mysterious cult that seems to be following our plane crash survivor protagonists. Fortunately, according to a conversation between Variety and showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, more YJ is on its way. Here’s everything we know about season two of Yellowjackets.
“Showtime does like their gore. But luckily, this is just a natural agreement on all of our parts,” showrunner Ashley Lyle told Slate in January 2022 of the show’s dramatic visuals and dark story lines. “We knew going in that we wanted to have a visceral quality to the show. Our intention is never to be shocking or provocative for the sake of it, but to pick our moments where the frailty of the human body is on full display, and we’re not turning away from it.”
What can we expect to see from season two’s plot?
A number of our stranded soccer players were last seen in the middle of a bloody ritual involving a bear’s heart, but Sophie Nélisse’s Shauna is still reeling from her best friend’s tragic death: Jackie (Ella Purnell) met her untimely demise as she fell asleep in the cold outside, a choice she essentially made because of a fight with Shauna.
“We are definitely re-visiting the winter storyline,” Ashley says. “We’ve been calling Season 2, ‘The Winter of Their Discontent,’” a nod to John Steinbeck’s book of the same name, as well as a line from William Shakespeare’s Richard III. It sounds dark and cold and grim and we’re so very here for it.
Kailey Schwerman
In a Deadline interview Levine gave in mid-December, he stated that the writers room had planned to convene in January to get started on Season Two. “I do know that there will be some surprises in terms of the characters,” he said. “There are still lots of questions about who survived, what happened out there. There will be some real surprises in terms of that and I think some characters you may not even have met yet.” In a new June 22 Variety interview, the creators (and married couple) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson revealed that Season Two is now complete, and will begin filming in late August. There is still no firm date for its premiere.
When will production start?
At the moment, the showrunning team is “in the writing process” with their staff and are “just getting started on the actual scripts,” though they have all been brainstorming “for several months now,” and production is slated for late summer. But the requirements (and costs) of filming dreary winter scenes in sunny British Columbia can stack up quickly.
“We’re starting those production conversations and we have some really amazing and creative people on our team,” Ashley says, adding that everyone “will have to get very creative on the production front,” and for viewers to expect some “movie magic at play.”
The series was officially picked up for a second season before the January 2023 finale aired, leaving fans wondering what’s in store for the survivors in the next chapter — and whether they’ll be seeing more from characters who seemingly didn’t make it out of the woods alive. Though Jackie (Ella Purnell) froze to death at the end of season 1, some viewers aren’t ruling out a potential return.
Who will return from the original cast?
Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress, and Melanie Lynskey are all set to reprise their roles in the second season. Their teen counterparts, played by Sammi Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Sophie Nélisse are also slated to return.
We’re likely to see more Courtney Eaton, who plays Lottie, after the finale’s reveal of her potential involvement in Travis’ murder, and maybe even some Ella Purnell – yes, Jackie is dead, but there’s always flashbacks.
Is there a trailer for season 2 of Yellowjackets yet?
Not yet. But watch this space!
The Antler Queen still reigns? Kailey Schwerman
Does that mean that Adult Lottie, still wearing her antlers, will be awaiting the delivery of kidnapped Nat at the start of the new season? We’re betting so—though, as of a mid-January Vulture interview, Courtney Eaton, who plays Lottie, had not heard of her adult counterpart being cast, and was all ears for fan suggestions. As far as Adult Jackie goes, we can officially put that theory to rest, though the diary Shauna flipped through in her childhood bedroom with several references to post-1996 movies listed still poses questions. (The creators also revealed that we’ll learn why those entries exist.)
When is the release date?
Previously, Showtime’s Gary Levine told Vulture that they were looking to premiere Yellowjackets’ second season “at the end of 2022.” While that might still be possible under the show’s current production schedule, it’s one hell of a tight timeline, so we’ll have to wait and see. You simply can’t rush genius.
“You have to understand, we had very little information in the beginning; people played it all very close to the chest, what was going on for the rest of the season. … We still don’t know exactly what it is,” the actress told GQ in January 2022 of Misty’s possible involvement in the cult. “We still have not been told. … I don’t get the feeling that she is in the cult. But I’m not sure.”
