The Yellowjackets are back! It’s been almost two years since we left the girls out in the woods, and the Showtime breakout hit returns tomorrow, on Valentine’s Day—a weirdly canny marketing choice for a show about high school girls who board a plane for Seattle, and instead crash-land somewhere in the heart of human depravity.

Like Lost for goths and bisexuals (to paraphrase a line from season two),Yellowjackets has everything: an absurdly stacked cast of Gen X icons, two linked narratives 25 years apart, and, uh, ritualistic cannibalism.

It’s also my comfort show (hear me out). There’s a deranged coziness to Yellowjackets—like Little Women if the March sisters were murderers with no adult supervision. It’s also some of my favorite queer representation on TV. So ahead of its third season, I did a full refresh of where we left off two years ago, so you don’t have to. Let’s examine this rich and upsetting text! (Also, if you haven’t seen Yellowjackets and want to remain spoiler-free, please stop before it’s too late. We are going deep into the lore!)

Season 1: Worst Girls’ Trip Ever

If you watch Yellowjackets, it’s probably because the first scene hooked you. It opens to a black screen with panting, panicked breath. You can’t tell the difference between the haunting sounds of nature, and the haunting human voices on the wind. In the unidentified wintry woods, a girl is chased into a pit where she’s impaled, retrieved, and bled out into the snow. Her body is consumed by a group of faceless people, one in a veil and an antler crown. Who’s the girl in the pit? Who is the Antler Queen? For the most baroque theories, you can ask this subreddit, where I have unfortunately spent hours of my one wild and precious life.

But we can’t go down that K-hole now, or we’ll never get out. After this horrifying cold open, we flash back to 1996 suburban New Jersey, where a girls’ soccer team is preparing to go to the national championship game in Seattle. They’re really going to be in a plane crash and devolve into the terrifying figures in the show’s opening, though we yet don’t know how or why.

Instead, we see what their lives were like before the crash: Jackie (Ella Purnell) is popular and committed to performing heterosexuality with her boyfriend Jeff (Jack DePew) while obviously pining for Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), her moody best friend who likes journaling and Liz Phair (same) and who is channeling her own obsession with Jackie into secretly sleeping with Jeff.

Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) has an adorable shag haircut and loves to do drugs, in part because her homelife is awful. Same goes for Van (Liv Hewson), the team’s goalie, who’s in (requited) love with Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown). Lottie (Courtney Eaton) has a history of psychosis, but no one knows. Her father pays for the girls to fly private to nationals. Misty (Samantha Hanratty) is the team’s equipment manager and a social outcast. And Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) is a very 1990s evangelical Christian, and also the only truly nice person on the team. If you’re a millennial who played high school sports, you probably knew a Laura Lee.

In a storyline set in 2021, we see where these girls ended up 25 years later. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is a disaffected housewife who butchers rabbits out of boredom and is married to Jeff (Warren Kole), who has sweet himbo energy but can’t connect with her.

Taissa (Tawny Cypress) has compartmentalized her trauma and become obsessed with achievement: She’s running for public office, and hires an opposition researcher (Rekha Sharma) to look into the surviving Yellowjackets to make sure they won’t squeal if pressed about what they got up to in the wilderness.

Nat (Juliette Lewis) is fresh out of rehab—not for the first time.

And Misty (Christina Ricci), now a nurse, is a cheerful sociopath who wears scrubs printed with whimsical animals as she tortures elderly geriatric patients. The remaining Yellowjackets come together because someone is sending them menacing postcards and threatening to go public with their secrets.

The blackmailer turns out to be Himbo Jeff, who just needs money because his furniture business is failing and he’s in debt to loan sharks (very normal, very relatable), but in the meantime, the adult Yellowjackets get into some truly terrible situations: Shauna initiates an affair with a younger man who she thinks is behind the blackmail and ends up murdering him before she finds out she was wrong; Taissa’s son tells her about a “lady in the tree” outside his bedroom window; this turns out to be Taissa herself, who has violent sleepwalking episodes she doesn’t remember, and which are linked with the ghostly appearance of a Man Without Eyes (Warning: Yes, the dog does die). Nat investigates the mysterious death of their coach’s son and her ex-boyfriend, Travis, and relapses, despite Misty’s valiant efforts to intervene by doing Nat’s cocaine herself (“I will Venmo you!” screams Christina Ricci). Nat ends up suicidal, about to shoot herself when someone breaks in and kidnaps her; we hear a voicemail from Nat’s sponsor, who’s done some digging on Travis’ connections, and oops, sounds like Lottie is still alive and up to hijinks!

While almost every episode focuses on a different character’s perspective in a way that recalls early Lost, the 1996 timeline is heavily focused on the dynamic between teenage Shauna and Jackie, whose mutual animosity would probably be resolved if they would just kiss. But they don’t—and not because of any compulsory heterosexuality (thank god). Yellowjackets has some of the best queer representation I’ve seen on TV in years in the relationship between Tai and Van (and I don’t mean good representation in the sanitized sense: No one on this show is a good person, and that’s what’s so compelling about it).

In the wilderness, the high school social order is upended immediately. Because she has wilderness skills from taking the Red Cross’ babysitting class (twice!), Misty is newly popular. She’s so happy about this that she destroys the plane’s emergency transmitter. Shauna becomes a competent butcher, responsible for skinning and cleaning dead animals. And Nat hunts them, because she’s the only Yellowjacket who knows how to use a gun. Jackie doesn’t have a role. She’s bad at wilderness stuff, and the social power she had before the crash is slowly leeching away.

At first, the girls are organized and resourceful, and their temporary society hums along with surprising order. Accompanied by a few other surviving teammates, including Travis, his brother Javi, and their assistant coach Ben, the girls shelter in an abandoned cabin in the forest once owned by a hunter who also left behind a small, moss-covered airplane.

But things quickly devolve: Shauna finds out she’s pregnant with Jeff’s baby (a DIY abortion does not take), Van is attacked by wolves (!!!), Taissa starts wandering around eating dirt in her sleep, and Lottie runs out of her meds and starts having visions she thinks are signs from the wilderness (and they might be; the show leaves it ambiguous). Laura Lee tries to save everyone by flying the plane to get help, but after takeoff, the plane bursts into flame, and she dies beside her teddy bear.

With Laura Lee gone, there’s no moderating force among the Yellowjackets, and they embrace Lottie’s mythology, culminating in a psychedelic-fueled bacchanalia in the woods that leads them to attack Travis; Javi runs away in fear. This entire sequence is basically an adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, about women devotees of party god Bacchus who tear a man apart in a drunken frenzy. (There’s an entire JStor article about this if you actually care.)

In the midst of this chaos, Jackie, who’s discovered the truth about the source of Shauna’s pregnancy, embraces nihilism and seduces Travis so she won’t be a virgin when she dies, and the Yellowjackets all turn on her, because Travis is in love with Nat. (Did I not mention this? As a whole extra subplot, the two of them were given a firearm to go out and hunt game. Romance blooms, naturally). After a brutal argument with Shauna, Jackie leaves the cabin in a rage, rejected by everyone who matters to her, none of whom bother to check on her.

Jackie manages to build a fire, but it doesn’t matter: Overnight, the first snow of winter falls, and by morning, she’s frozen to death. Shauna starts grieving Jackie and never stops, and Lottie’s mystery cult finds its first followers in Misty and Van.

Much of the intrigue of Yellowjackets’ first season lies in not knowing if anyone but Shauna, Misty, Nat, and Taissa made it out of the wilderness alive. When it’s finally revealed that Jackie died by accident, it subverts the expectation that Adult Jackie might be out there somewhere, seeking revenge. The first time I watched the series, I wanted that to be how season one ended, and I had already dreamcast Sarah Michelle Gellar, which may be a Megan Problem, because they don’t really look alike, and also, on my recent rewatch, I found Jackie’s death a much sadder and more effective narrative choice as written. When you’re in high school, you might think you want the popular girl to die, but you don’t actually: She’s just a kid.

Season 2: Body Horror Intensifies

In season two, the girls are starving, delusional, traumatized, and just straight up not having a good time. Resident adult Ben is in a dissociative state, Javi is still missing, Taissa is still seeing the Man Without Eyes, Lottie continues to be off her meds and is confusing her own psychosis with messages from the Wilderness, JV team member Akilah (Nia Sondaya) starts talking to a dead mouse she keeps as a pet, Shauna is being haunted by Ghost Jackie, and when the frozen corpse of Real Jackie loses an ear, Shauna eats it, because, oh yeah, Yellowjackets is a David Lynch tribute show now.

I’m serious! Misty also has a vision of her bird, Caligula (John Cameron Mitchell), serenading her against the backdrop of a red curtain in a void, an obvious Black Lodge reference. And there’s even a heart-shaped necklace that, like Laura Palmer’s broken-heart pendant, becomes a major plot point.

It comes out first when the girls decide it’s time to cremate Jackie’s body, but a quirk of the weather means that instead of being burned into ash, Jackie is barbecued. The girls eat her body in a frenzied state of shared delusion. Coach Ben abstains. Poor Coach Ben. Can you imagine being the only adult in this scenario? The caffeine withdrawal alone would be brutal.

The only 1996 Yellowjacket having an okay time is Misty, because she has a friend: Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman), a character whose late-breaking introduction did not upset me because of how well she’s used. In a fit of giddy self-disclosure during the grossest imaginable chore run, Misty confides in Crystal about destroying the plane’s emergency transmitter. Misty threatens to kill Crystal if she tells anyone, and accidentally shoves her off a cliff during this exchange—what follows is one of the rare displays of remorse we see from Misty, who is then tasked with attending to the birth of Shauna’s baby, who dies, but not before Shauna can have an extended, traumatizing dream about the baby being eaten by her teammates.

Shauna wakes up bereft and furious, and beats Lottie to a gory pulp. Convinced that Lottie has taken on too much, the girls decide it’s time to find a way to survive, and they settle on the format for the hunt we see in the beginning of season one.

Nat is the first victim. Javi, who’s back and alive after finding a mysterious shelter, tries to help her to safety, but he falls through the ice on a nearby lake. The girls let him drown so they can eat him. Lottie nominates Nat as the crew’s new queen. Coach Ben relocates to Javi’s secret underground cave. Just when it seems like things are coming to a conclusion, the cabin catches fire while the girls are sleeping, and they barely make it out alive before their only shelter is engulfed in flames to the menacing riffs of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon.”

In the 2021 timeline, Shauna and her family are being investigated for murder (families that cover up crime together stay together), Nat’s being held against her will in a cult run by Lottie (they intentionally interrupted her suicide attempt, which is the good news; the bad news is now she has to live in this weird intentional community where everyone wears purple), and Taissa, losing her mind to sleepwalking episodes, hitchhikes to an adorable video store (While You Were Streaming!) run by Van, who is still alive and played by Lauren Ambrose!

Misty teams up with a new character, Walter (Elijah Wood at his most winning and weird), to find Nat, and the surviving Yellowjackets convene at Lottie’s cult compound for a group therapy session that turns into a reenactment of the hunt from the wilderness. Walter successfully sabotages the police investigation into Shauna and Jeff, but when the hunt reenactment is disrupted by one of Lottie’s followers, Misty accidentally kills Nat with a shot of phenobarbital. With Nat dead and Lottie about to be reinstitutionalized, only four Adult Yellowjackets remain, their fate hanging in the balance just as it did when they were teenagers, the consequences of their actions once again violent and profound.

If this all sounds unwieldy, that’s because it is. Yellowjackets’ second season is messy. As mysteries are solved, more are introduced. But it’s also ambitious and formally inventive, with a wobbly VHS effect that sometimes invades the characters’ perspectives. As the season progresses, it’s clear that this is a signal we’re seeing a memory, but like a VHS tape, a memory degrades every time we revisit it. In these moments, we aren’t seeing a crisp, objectively-framed flashback like the ones in season one, but an associative, unreliable moment caught between past and present.

We want answers, and maybe in season three, we’ll get some. But we’ll likely get just as many new questions. Can’t wait.