Watching Yellowjackets This Weekend? Catch Up Here.

After everything our marooned soccer players endured last season—a wilderness baby’s traumatic birth, eating their teammate and a child, and almost dying in a fire possibly set by a mutinous coach—I expected a grim start to the third season of Yellowjackets, and after making my way through episodes 1-4, CAN CONFIRM!

Things are not looking good for Coach Ben, Adult Van and Tai are caught up in a freaky folie à deux, Adult Shauna and her family are facing the consequences of their actions, someone is stalking the adult Yellowjackets and leaving mysterious tapes on their porches (we’ve made the jump from Twin Peaks references to deep cuts like Lost Highway; Yellowjackets is a David Lynch tribute show!) and as for Lottie, our Goop Sorceress was just killed unceremoniously for unclear reasons, which is how all deaths on this show are treated as the mysteries pile up like bones on a BBQ.

Sorry! That was a very gross simile! But if you’re watching this show, you’re already comfortable with the sublime and disgusting. What I did not expect from this season is an unhinged sense of humor and a constant feeling that everything is not as it seems, a pattern that begins in the season premiere, “It Girl,” which opens with a shot of Mari (Alexa Barajas) running through the forest in terror, seemingly about to be sacrificed by Shauna the Butcher (Sophie Nélisse) as the girls’ next meal. But psych! They’re just playing Capture the Flag!

It’s the team’s second summer in the wilderness, and the girls now live in cute huts with a pen of ducks. They promise they are not doing cannibalism anymore! Nat’s roots are finally growing out, and she’s also the group’s new queen. Misty convenes important meetings by blowing some kind of animal horn, which anyone who has ever been in ninth grade will understand is a Lord of the Flies reference!

And Our Story So Far is extremely Lord of the Flies: In the teen timeline, Coach Ben discovers a pit filled with Dharma Initiative-esque packaged snacks, and Mari, running away in a huff after beefing with Shauna (a behavior that never leads to anything good happening), falls into the pit and dislocates her knee. Ben rescues her, then abducts her because he’s terrified the girls will find him, and truly, what is scarier than a teenage girl out for revenge? I’ve been to high school!

In the cave, Ben and Mari star in the grimiest buddy comedy ever. “I’m too sexy for this cave,” Mari sings to herself. I love Mari! Remember the phantom dripping Mari heard last season? I think it was a premonition of the many cave-drips that invade the show’s soundscape during her kidnapping, which at least includes Dharma Initiative hot chocolate, because as far as captors go, you could do worse than Ben. “How?” she asks, holding out her hand for the mug, which is exactly what Jackie did in her Diane Selwyn-style dying dream in season 1, so I’m not feeling great about Mari’s odds of survival this season.

Bad captor Ben eventually unties her, and she promptly runs back to the girls’ little town on the prairie, where, after being bullied about where she’s been, sells out Ben to the rest of the Yellowjackets, who launch a very “Kill the beast!” search for him that ends in a fume-filled cavern, where Shauna, Akilah, and Van all have terrifying hallucinations involving a fatal slap bracelet (Remember when we played with mild torture devices? The 1990s were a great time to be a kid!) and a talking alpaca, whose hair and overall vibe ALSO remind me of David Lynch. “Everything with teeth will bite,” it says. So true, alpaca! So. True.

So far, the real predators this season are the Yellowjackets themselves. After finding Ben, they put him on “a high school mock trial at the end of the world” for attempted murder, still convinced that he burned down the cabin. (I’m not.) He’s found guilty, despite a valiant defense from Misty, who as a teenager is already a better lawyer than Taissa has ever appeared to be, and some truly funny moments in which we’re reminded that this is a court run by children: “I want a redirect.” “I don’t know what that is!” (Taissa is, of course, the prosecutor.) What might Misty have accomplished if she’d channeled her murderous impulses into defending the accused instead of committing casual elder abuse? Misty is weirdly my favorite character in both timelines this season. It’s possible there is something the matter with me!

Meanwhile, Shauna is making her grief over Jackie and her stillborn baby EVERYONE’S PROBLEM by behaving as monstrously as possible. Listen, I love Shauna—a moody bitch with a journal will always be my kindred spirit—but get a grip, girl! At least we’re also getting a queer storyline for her, because it confirms what we’ve all known in our hearts since season 1: She and Jackie were in love. When Shauna kisses backwards-hat-wearing Melissa, the subtext at last becomes text! Hurrah! (I’m sort of worried for Melissa, though. There is no therapy in the wilderness and Shauna needs help!)

Oh, and Lottie is doing DIY psilocybin treatments on Travis! This means Travis has spent this entire season having a bad trip. He is crying, Lottie! Please let him sober up!

In the present-day timeline, the adult Yellowjackets are reverting back to their teenage selves as they mourn Nat. Shauna is triggered by Lottie’s arrival on her doorstep fresh out of an involuntary psychiatric hold, which has done nothing to disabuse Lottie of last season’s delusions that ended up killing their friend. Lottie, an emotionally immature adult, gloms onto Callie, an actual teenager, with whom she shoplifts (on brand for a character who, as a teenager, stole from TJ Maxx as a hobby) and bullies Misty, who Shauna enlists to protect Callie from Lottie’s influence, which fails miserably when Callie serves Misty an overdose of benadryl in a glass of rum milk punch (I got alcohol poisoning just typing that). Callie, do not do this! Lottie likes to sacrifice people to the wilderness gods! I love Simone Kessell’s quiet gravitas too, but she is not your friend!

As Callie carries on her Lottie girl crush against my advice, Taissa and Van are receding into their own shared delusion that the spirit of the wilderness is encouraging them to kill people so that Van’s cancer will go away. On a trip into Manhattan, they camp out on a busy sidewalk—Van even wears a Joe Goldberg baseball cap!—and decide to “let it choose” a victim to kill, but at the last minute, Van decides she doesn’t want to commit a murder after all, and Tai agrees. “I don’t wanna do it either,” she says, but it kind of seems like she does. They decide to meet up later at Central Park, where they share a pretzel and ride in a horse-drawn carriage, just like Young Van said she wanted to in season 1, and everything seems fine and normal so it’s definitely not.

Back in Jersey, Shauna finds out Lottie has given Jackie’s heart necklace to her daughter, and furiously kicks Lottie out. Later, Misty finds a report that Lottie has been found dead in the city, and I’m guessing Tai killed Lottie in between parting ways with Van and meeting up again for their cute date. Women really can have it all!

Between Lottie’s demise and Jackie’s death in season 1, this is the second time Shauna has kicked someone out only for them to die almost immediately! Also, we can infer from the show’s timeline that Shauna, Van, and Taissa were all in New York when Lottie died. My money’s still on Taissa killing Lottie, but it could’ve been any one of them!

Last season, the adult Yellowjackets discussed the possibility of a supernatural force bringing them together to do bad things, but Shauna refused this mythological spin: “You know there’s no ‘it,’ right? It was just us,” she insists. But there might be an “it” in this season—I’m convinced Bad Tai is still around, but integrated into Regular Tai, and in the wilderness storyline, either everyone is having a shared auditory hallucination, or something really is screaming in the trees.

Speaking of horrors: Remember when I said that Yellowjackets becomes a David Lynch tribute show in season two? In season three, the parallels are intensifying: During a boring business dinner with Himbo Jeff, Shauna escapes into a restaurant bathroom, where she’s followed by someone who leaves behind a phone and calls it, waiting for her to pick up. She doesn’t, but I won’t be surprised if in the next episode, Jeff shows up with a different name and a black wig, because honestly, Shauna has a lot in common with Fred Madison, the Bill Pullman character in Lost Highway who invents an entire storyline in his brain to avoid accepting the reality of his own violent past.

Speaking of this season’s emerging mystery, Hilary Swank will be making her Yellowjackets debut later this season, and so of course I must speculate that she’s the one behind the mysterious tape and phone call. Reddit thinks she’s the adult version of Melissa, and although the eye color is all wrong, I kind of hope Reddit is right, if only for the chaos the arrival of Shauna’s ex-girlfriend could unleash!

It would be a narrative choice aligned with this season so far, as Yellowjackets takes bigger and bigger swings. They may not always land—what’s the deal with all the yellow in the color grading?—but they’re much more fun than the morose, unintentionally funny moments that sometimes accompanied last season’s slog through starvation and snow.

The first season of Yellowjackets focused heavily on Shauna, the second on Nat, and the third season, so far, seems to be spending much more time with Misty’s interiority, and both Christina Ricci and Samantha Hanratty are delivering performances that make Misty as legible and likable as a murderous weirdo can be. In one scene, Misty imagines stabbing Shauna in a fit of pique. The impulse is real, but she doesn’t act on it (though we know she’s done worse). “This is unhealthy,” she tells herself.

This season of Yellowjackets takes a similarly ambiguous approach—Mari is a pit girl, but maybe not the pit girl, and though Nat wears an antler crown, she might not be the Antler Queen. But it won’t last. Alliances are shifting, fall is coming, and things might be sunny now, but we’re getting ever closer to the events of the pilot. And just as the show seems to be answering longstanding questions from viewers, it’s also complicating them even more.