In Yellowjackets Season 3, What’s Eating At You Is Your Anger

For as long as we’ve known them, the women of Yellowjackets have been angry. How could they not be? As teenage soccer players in the ‘90s, their team plane crash-landed in the Canadian wilderness, where they were stranded for nearly two years and turned to cannibalism and cultism to survive, and more than two decades later in the present day, they’re still navigating that trauma while dealing with the mundanities of life. Watching these women channel their anger — an emotion so many of us feel we can’t express without being vilified or dismissed — has been so satisfying, especially last season when the teens used their fury to survive the brutal winter. In Season 3, which begins streaming February 14 on Paramount+, winter is over, but our characters are angrier than ever, and not one of them knows how to deal with the rage bubbling within. 

This is most evident in teen Shauna, who’s played by Sophie Nélisse. Filled with a potent mix of guilt, grief, and rage since the beginning of the series (she’s sleeping with her best friend Jackie’s boyfriend, finds out she’s pregnant after their plane crashes, Jackie dies, the team eats her, and Shauna loses her baby), her anger is now obvious in every glance given and every line of dialogue spoken in Season 3. Shauna has held onto her anger so tightly, it’s made her mean. She yells at friends trying to help her, repeatedly expresses her desire to cruelly punish missing Coach Ben, and bites a teammate’s hand while playing a game. She’s also pissed that Natalie has become the group’s leader, which she frequently — and loudly — lets the others know. 

“She has isolated herself so much and has nothing to lose anymore because she’s undergone so much trauma, and I don’t think anything can shake her anymore. She’s just not scared, and she probably hates herself so much that she doesn’t mind other people hating her,” Nélisse tells Refinery29. “Her point is not to be liked. Her goal is to be feared, so it plays in her favor to be outwardly mean to people.” 

Teen Shauna has no interest in letting go of her anger. Instead, she lets it fester, turning it into a weapon to get what she wants. She’s a young woman scorned, and there’s power in that; Shauna’s wrath has allowed her to move with a purpose and confidence that isn’t common in teen girls — especially not one used to being two steps behind her popular BFF. It’s the kind of energy you want to bring when you’ve, say, finally reached your limit at being spoken over or are ready to prove everyone in the office wrong. But in constantly giving in to her anger, Shauna has also lost any sense of community she ever felt with her teammates. She can’t see the worried looks the others trade every time she escalates a situation, putting more and more distance between herself and the larger group. And that’s a very dangerous place to be: No one can survive alone, in the wilderness or not. 

Flash forward 20-plus years later, and adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is just as angry, but we only see sparks of it since she’s tried to bottle it up more than her younger self ever could. “At the very beginning of the show, Shauna was just trying to get by, and so she wasn’t really feeling anything. Now, she’s embracing her rage a lot more,” Lynksey says. “She’s just such an impulsive person that she doesn’t really think about the repercussions of things and acts first. Then it’s messy and she’s like, ‘Oh no, that’s annoying.’” 

When it comes to consequences of Shauna’s anger, “messy” is an understatement. While embracing rage can be a good thing, it’s more like Shauna’s decades-old anger is controlling her. Having never learned how to confront her anger head on, it’s arising at inopportune times. Even as an adult, she’s mean to people, like Misty, who are on her side. At an important business dinner with her husband, Shauna eviscerates the two pompous men across the table from her — it’s thrilling to watch, but you can’t help but notice a sinking feeling in your stomach knowing that this will cost them the deal (and her family’s livelihood) and put a huge strain on her relationship. Like in the wilderness, Shauna’s unresolved anger is pushing away the people closest to her, threatening to leave her totally alone, and, this time, there’s no far-fetched hope to cling to that someone will come along and rescue her. As good as a burn-it-all-down attitude might feel in the moment, leaving your anger unchecked for so long ultimately does more harm than good.

Back in the wilderness, characters like Misty (Samantha Hanratty), Van (Liv Hewson), and Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are handling their anger in a way that’s much more familiar to those of us not living in a supernatural Lord Of The Flies: by suppressing it. 

Take team equipment manager teen Misty, for example. An eager-to-please outsider among her teammates, she always tries to grit her teeth through her anger, but is totally transparent in doing so and always ends up unleashing it on someone or something. Young women are taught to hide their anger in order to be more appealing and palatable, and Misty has taken that to heart — when she’s left out of a meeting, she accepts the girls’ half-hearted excuse with a sad smile instead of showing her true emotions, worried about the consequences of releasing their anger. 

“These girls can’t really lash out at each other because then the whole group will turn on them,” Hanratty says. “It’s almost like [saving] face with people — if you make an enemy of one or two people, then suddenly you can be the outcast.” Which, in the world of Yellowjackets, means you might become dinner. While keeping the peace is important for survival (or functioning as a regular human being), letting your anger compound isn’t healthy either. In the real world, holding it all in can put you on the fast-track to becoming stressed, burnt out, and unable to intentionally use your rage.

Young couple Van and Tai also don’t want to let the others see their anger, which means it’s often simmering in their relationship instead. That blind insistence leaves no room for flexibility, and you can feel the tension build between them in each episode, putting the unity they represent to the group at risk. We know that, as adults, Van and Tai were out of touch for years. Does the way they deal with — or ignore — their anger go on to play a role in their split? 

Creatively, anger is an excellent source of drama in Yellowjackets Season 3 that is far more exciting (and interesting) than the looming threat of more stomach-turning cannibalism. You will be at the edge of your seat waiting for Shauna’s next cutting, rage-fueled outburst, or another character to blow up. But watching characters you care about struggle with so much anger is difficult too — when you hold onto such a strong, negative emotion for so long, it weighs on you heavier, and heavier, and you can see that starting to happen to every person on screen. 

“Anger will be there whether you’re ready to engage with it or not. It’s a natural human emotion, the same as any other,” Hewson says. “But it’s all about what you do with it, how it sits within you. You have to know how to let anger move. If you can’t let go of it, then you’ll be chained to it. If you can’t experience it at all, then it will express itself in other ways that you won’t be able to be as in touch with.”