Yellowjackets Season 2, Episode 1, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” is a tornado that sucks the audience in and turns their brains in every direction. The episode starts with the girls coming off the plane after being rescued. We see the blank faces of girls that have been through something incredibly terrifying. We notice the innocence that this nightmare has taken away from them. It flashes to Lottie in a psych ward. The audience is left questioning every belief they had about Lottie. Were her visions just her being crazy? Or did they have merit to them, and everyone around her thought they were crazy? We flash to her in the present day. She owns a place in the middle of nowhere where she runs a cult. People there are working on themselves; they come there to connect with the spirits.
We then see Shauna being questioned by the police about Adam’s death, believing that she murdered him. We, as an audience, know that she and her husband are the murderers of Adam. Callie, Shauna’s daughter, finds out about Adam and immediately assumes Shauna killed him and starts acting out. Callie has reasonable cause for this as she knows her mother was having an affair with Adam. Shauna and her husband keep covering up their tracks as they return to Adam’s place to ruin his drawings of Shauna.
Meanwhile, young Shauna denies Jackie’s death and talks to her best friend’s dead body. This is heartbreaking, but some girls in the house believe this is very problematic. Present-day Misty is part of the Citizen Detective Group. She learns on the website that someone is posting about Adam’s death, saying it was probably the mistress. Misty freaks out about this as she is the one that helped Shauna cover up his death. Misty starts looking for her “best friend,” the missing Natalie, who she believes got kidnapped. Being part of the Citizen Detective Group has led her to gain some detective skills that aid her in finding Natalie. The drama continues as we finally see Natalie in a room where she has been taken to.
The show then leads to Tai finally finding the tunnel in the basement that leads to a shrine of her son. The shrine is terrifying, to say the least. There is a dog head, a doll of her son, and an animal heart. Tai is terrified, as one should be. Tai believes she is the one that did this. It wouldn’t be so out of the question to have this thought. We, as an audience, have seen a different personality in her when she is sleepwalking. This side of her is possessed and does gruesome things.
We flip back to the past as we see Travis having a panic attack over his lost brother, who is in the woods. Young Lottie tells Travis that she has a feeling his brother is alive. Natalie doesn’t want to give him false hope and starts yelling at Lottie for this. Do we believe Lottie’s intuition? She does seem confident that Javi is alive. As we have learned before, Lottie has a way of knowing things that even she doesn’t understand.
The episode starts to close as present-day Natalie tries to run away from her kidnapper. We see the fear and determination as she starts running through the wilderness to get away. As she runs for dear life, she stops in her tracks when she sees Lottie doing a ritual with everyone wearing animal masks. They seem to be burying a dead body. Natalie freaks out and starts screaming. The most important part of the episode comes when Lottie sees the screaming Natalie and calms her down by saying, “Travis has a note for you.” We see Natalie’s face fall when she hears her ex-boyfriend’s name. The man she has been mourning over has left a bewildering note to her.
Rating: 9/10