Where Does Yellowjackets Go Next?

Spoilers follow for the first season of Yellowjackets, including finale episode “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.”

For ten weeks, Yellowjackets has caught us in a snare as tight as the vines that grew around the Hunter’s plane. Between the sustained tension of the 1996 story line and the exacerbating dread of 2021, the series has introduced long-running mysteries, set up character arcs that continue to mutate and transform, and been darkly funny even as these girls potentially hunt down, kill, and eat each other. All the theorizing, all the playlisting — we’ve had fun, haven’t we? And now, we wait for season two.

Before then, finale “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” directed by The Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez and written by show creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, wraps up a number of story lines … sort of. Shauna, Tai, Nat, and Misty seem to get rid of Adam’s body, although he’s quickly reported missing on the news. Tai wins her state senate seat but possibly because she made some kind of occult sacrifice. And Lottie is alive and running a cult whose members seem to dress only in lavender … the same shade that 1996 Lottie wears when offering a bear heart to her altar in the woods.

This wouldn’t be Yellowjackets ending if it didn’t also introduce a new set of questions to explore in the future in addition to the answers we’re still waiting for regarding various events in season one. Until season two arrives, let’s consider what Yellowjackets has left us buzz-buzzing about.

Who else is on Lottie’s side in the wilderness in 1996, and who might be on her side in 2021?

There are eight people at the fire we see in the premiere, and we have three confirmed: Lottie as the Antler Queen, Van as the person standing over the pit, and Misty as the person serving the meat. That leaves five others. Tai’s loyalties seem divided between girlfriend Van and new best friend Shauna, and I’m curious whether that means Tai and Shauna join Lottie because Van does, or if they are on the side of whoever is getting hunted. And remember, in 2021 Jessica said something to Tai about how Yellowjackets survivors are hard to find because some of them live off the grid. Could that be because some of them are in Lottie’s cult? Who else made it back from Canada?

Who is the girl killed in the pilot?

I’ve devoted a whole piece to this, so I won’t belabor it here. But still: We don’t know!

Who killed Travis?

No answers here yet, although Lottie’s cult seems like the main suspect at this point. And now they have Nat, too — did Nat’s sponsor turn on her, or did Misty? I do not think Misty being a double agent is out of the question since we’ve seen her standing alongside Lottie in 1996 twice now: in front of that altar and in the opening scene.

Where is Javi?

Gallery: How The ‘And Just Like That’ Cast Reacted to [Spoiler]’s Shocking Death (US Weekly)

After the events of “Doomcoming” and Shauna’s growled command for Javi to run and hide, he’s done just that, and Travis and Nat can’t find him. Where is he? I know that Adam is dead, but I refuse to believe that the Adam-as-Javi theory is dead, too. I will grind this into the ground! Javi being missing means he could still end up being Adam, dammit!

Oh, about Adam …

Is his back tattoo Lottie’s mark? Notice that the members of her cult who kidnap Nat are wearing pendants with the circle-and-triangle symbol on it. Doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch for me that they might have matching tattoos too!

Who is funding Lottie’s cult?

A detail I had forgotten until rewatching the pilot is that Lottie’s father rents the private plane for the Yellowjackets to fly to nationals. A cult seems like it would take some money to fund, especially a cult that can potentially kill people and drain their bank accounts! What kind of resources are we talking about here? Did Lottie find a way to convert those thousands in T.J. Maxx bucks earned from stolen-and-returned merchandise into hard cash?

Did Shauna and Jackie have some kind of mind-meld?

We see Jackie’s death — brought on by falling asleep in the cold, as Tai had warned against earlier in the season — as a dream in which Jackie is led into the cabin by Shauna, forgiven by her best friend and all her teammates, and then … threatened by spooky Hunter guy, lurking in the background of the cabin. But we see Shauna wake up from this dream, which leads me to wonder: What kind of best friend intuition do we see magnified to its furthest extreme here? Remember when Shauna imagines speaking to Jackie in her bedroom, as she’s flipping through the journal we think is Jackie’s? What if Shauna has had some part of Jackie in her all this time?

About those journals …

Shauna sees her journals as gone from her safe, with the passcode 2525, and that inspires her to distrust and then kill Adam. But then the journals are returned, and the way that Jeff talks about them, he read them years earlier. Were the journals ever actually gone? And if not, what does Shauna hallucinating mean for how much we should trust any scenes from her perspective?

Can we really trust this man?

I know that everyone was back on himbo Jeff’s side after his shock that there was no book club?!, but I worry. He told Randy about the blackmailing scheme. I don’t entirely believe that he knows how to run a business in the digital age. And he knows that Shauna killed Adam and was the one to suggest that she pass off the lie about Adam being the blackmailer to the other Yellowjackets. Is Jeff really steadfast enough to hold all these stories together? If they have money problems again, then what?

What is Simone going to do?

Simone finds what I presume to be Tai’s altar in their home’s basement crawlspace–slash–secret room, and it looks very much like Lottie’s from 1996: the symbol drawn in blood, Biscuit’s head (RIP, Biscuit!), candles, a broken doll (Sammy’s from earlier in the season), and a heart. (A morbid conversation we had in the Vulture Slack: Is that Biscuit’s heart or Adam’s? It looks too big for a dog’s, but how could Tai have walked away with Adam’s? Another question!) Now that Simone has seen this very weird thing, she can’t stay married to Tai, right? Stay at your mother’s house, Simone! Take Sammy and do not come back! And if he starts seeing an eyeless man, well, may I suggest therapy?