Warning.
This episode contains spoilers for season three, episode one of Yellow Jackets.
You warned.
Hello, my name is Jason Keccepsio and I'm risday Night and welcome back to x ray Vision, the podcast where we dive deep to your favorite shows, movies, comics, and pop culture comedy from our podcast where we'll bring you three episodes a week every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Don't forget listeners, Our dear listeners, what's your feedback? Give me
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In today's episode, we are talking about Yellowjackets.
We talked about season one and we loved it. We covered season two every single week and we were a little bit disappointed. What is season three offering.
We have checked in on the first premiere episode and we will be talking about it along with our general feelings.
About puzzle box mystery box shows. How'd you do them right? How'd you do them wrong? How many are there? There's a lot of them? Guys. So yeah, let's talk about it.
But first shipping out of their lock for the season three premiere of Yellowjackets. Okay, Rosie. Yellowjackets is back for season three after as you mentioned up top, a stellar and quite intriguing for a season, followed by a second season where we started to get into crazy Riverdale territory.
Yes, lots of wild stuff going on.
If you haven't watched Yellow Jackets, you can go back and listen to our We did an episode about Yellow Jackets season one. You can go back and listen to that. We also did coverage of the whole of season two. You can go back and listen to that. Season one basically dual timeline show in the nineties timeline a group of girls who play soccer crash in the woods and have to survive, and in the future, the adult survivors of that group deal with someone blackmailing them about the truth.
That was very intriguing.
It was also weirdly intimate and basically just a character piece, and that really pushed it through. There was lots of hints of what could come. Is there something supernatural? Is they're gonna be cannibalism? Will the girls survive it? Ended with the death of one of the girls, Jackie. That was a big deal Ella Pernell's character. We also discovered who the blackmailer was. It was one of the main girl's husband, Jeff. We have Shanna and Jeff. That was
very messed up of them. And then we leave the show and go to season two where everybody is just oh, and by the way, the girls killed someone.
Will that come back to want them? We don't know. They killed someone In the modern day.
They killed a sexy guy who called Adam and they chopped him up. It was pre messed up. Season two, they finally succumbed to cannibalism. That was basically the moment everybody waited for. We saw them eat Jackie's body. Did they choose to do it? Did the Woods want them to do it? Then we got in the modern day into the truth about one of the girls from the forest, Lottie.
Was she running a cult?
Was it just the wellness center? Had she been in charge? Was she mentally stable in the woods and in modern day? All those answers were left open to us as we continued towards season three. But the biggest thing you need to know about the end of season two was that one of our favorite characters, Natalie in the modern day, she was killed Juliette Lewis accidentally killed by her bestie want to be bestie Misty played by Christina Ricci, and an injection of bentanol. So, as you can tell, lots
going on in this show. Jason, what did you think of episode one of season three?
Did it hook you back in? Did it leave you with more questions? What did you feel?
I'll say this and stay tuned for a broader conversation about mystery box shows in general, which this show most definitely is.
Absolutely.
I will say that one thing that I appreciated from this episode was that it displayed a self awareness about where the show was after season two and what the audience is looking for, and I think it tries in various ways to deliver those things and to subvert the expectation of those things in interesting ways. There's a I kind of I thought that intro was cute in which you think, oh, here we are, We're like going into cannibal territory with the girls like running around in the
woods and biting each other. But then it just turns out there playing like a kind of tag game with a totem, but there's still a lot of kind of like a diffuse direction and a lack of a drive towards moving the plot along at times that makes me feel as if the show is still kind of spinning its wheels for it here, and even when the plot is kind of moving and you feel like we're driving
towards these answers. For instance, Vans, there's a scene in which, after the the reveal of the game is made, then you get Van like addressing the girls in this kind of pithy monologue that.
It's kind of like she's the storyteller, but she's that morphs into this kind of like into this speech of sorts in.
Which it's clear that the girls look to her in a way that is different than they have looked to her in the past, kind of as a leader. But yes, to your point, also was a storyteller, someone who like gives structure to their experiences there on the island, And I like that in theory. My issue was it just didn't feel like it landed to me. Yeah, and so I appreciate that they did that, but it didn't feel
like it was really working. And and then there were other things that just just like why is this happening? When you know when adult tyson, adult van go on there kind of relive the old days, kind of teen style trouble making tour of town. It was a little bit like why, like what's so?
Why?
Also is your I's not still in a coma? Like what is going on there? Like this is a Taisa come on?
They at least addressed her political career in a very quick line exposition DVID, which she's like, yes, uh the quickest like state senator ever to be impeached.
Yeah, actually, like I'm out, I'm out. They just cut that head of the way. I definitely agree with you, I don't.
I don't think it was like the shining kind of like burning immediate capture that a lot of us wanted to feel like, oh, we're hooked back into this show.
But I do think the show.
Is still relying on the one thing it knows it has, which is an unbelievable cast and very interesting characters. I am still dedicated to finding out what happens to these girls because I do care, but.
It is interesting and once again, as if you ever.
Listen to our speed recaps of season two, so much happens in these episodes like this episode, we're back in the forest.
The girls are trying to survive.
They've got these new witchy huts because at the end of season to Coach Ben tried to burn them alive in the house they were staying in in the forest, which was because they were cannibals, So you know what, I'm not even going to judge him that much.
But they are now living. Spring has come.
They're doing okay. Seanna is not doing okay. She lost the baby in season two. She's very bitter. She's very sociopathic towards the other girls in the group.
She's not feeling happy. It's going bad.
In modern day, we see Natalie's memorial rap to her. Then we see Misty getting drunk and she kind of assaults some guys at a bar, but is saved by Walter. We still don't know if he's a cannibal or a serial killer or something.
He's just her fellow citizen detective. We then also see this.
Is the big moment that I think has inspired the larger part of our conversation that we're going to go on to have, which is Coach Ben, who is trying to survive without the girls and their weird kind of supernatural tinge structure that they created in the forest, but is digging around and he finds a military hatch, and he finds a bunch of military supplies, food, dried goods that he can survive on, and they say k uh on the top and it's very lost.
It's very much leaning into that.
Idea that a lot of us had theorized about in the first and second season, on whether or not the island was not in fact supernatural and was instead a place that they had done some kind of experiments hallucinogenic.
Experimental, chemic chemical weapons.
Would kind of and that definitely feels that way.
Shawna's daughter, Callie, who we were big haters of, she's a very good, haterable character. She throws some entrails on people at school who were chatting shit about her mom. She bonds with her mum, Shana over it. The beloved and delightful Melanielinski, around who the whole show basically revolves, and of course they bond over it because Shawna's a terrible person.
And then the episode ends, I think with a really interesting hook.
That was the thing I was thinking about the most, which is coach Ben digs a hole and catches one of the girls, Mari, who Shuna has been kind of fighting with, which makes me think we probably won't notice Mari's gone for too long. But it's very interesting to me because while we've seen these girls, you know, cannibalize another person, kind of fight amongst themselves, decide that they're
gonna hunt one of their own. We saw them do that with Natalie, but they ended up, you know, with Harvey dying, so.
They decided to eat him instead.
And it's very interesting to me that the moment you see an adult man standing over a girl in a ditch, you're like, oh, this is the bad guy though, like he's gonna do something bad, he's gonna capture And I'm interested to see how they play that because it could bring the girls together. It could be an interesting kind of commentary on what we view as evil or what we view as dangerous. I thought that was an interesting end,
but yeah, I'll be happy. I'm going to be intrigued mostly to see how our listeners like this episode and how other people in our space are the critics like it, because I do think Yellow Jackets is probably this show in the last few years.
That had that unbelievable.
Stirling first season and has kind of struggled to catch up thanks to the nature of mystery box storytelling, which we are going to come back and talk about in a minute after a message from rock Cocky.
And we're back, Okay.
The mystery Box Rosie, which I think this show definitely is, which I would define as shows that are built around some kind of riddle, some kind of puzzle, and that missing piece or missing pieces of information create an air of strangeness around the show that, if it works correctly, really hooks the viewer. Shows in this genre include, currently in season two, Severance.
Oh, that's the biggest one.
I think is a huge mystery box show right now. The originator of the form is probably Twin Peaks Lak, I think, and.
Then obviously early ones I would say some arcs of The.
X Files, some arcs of the X Files. I think The X Files is a is a Monster of the Week show with through the snow Smoking Man and the kind of like loose conspiratorial threads that kind of like go through seasons with those particularly things. Has mystery box elements, but is mostly a Monster of the Week show. Then there is of course Lost, which was I would say the probably the most successful, and.
Also I would say the reason that any of us even know what this is. I feel like without Lost this concept and conversation, and also the expected kind of reaction to a mystery box show, which even on the Wikipedia for mystery box I think this is really funny.
It's like viewers are drawn by the lure of the mythos of the program, but can lose interest if the program sets up too many mysteries but fails to resolve them in a.
It's literally Wikipedia, Wikipedia, thank you.
Like the funniest thing about it is the mystery.
Box show is known in part because of the lack of success of mystery box shows, including Lost. Even though Lost definitely hooked people for the longest amount of time, solving the ultimate can of what Lost was and where Lost was going, and where Lost was set and whether Lost was the afterlife or whether it was purgatory. Those questions hooked viewers, but whether or not the show landed
them is another question. And then you have Yeah, it's very interesting because also you have other shows with fantastic concepts like Under the Dome from twenty thirteen, A.
Dome dot, and we mentioned Under the Dome as we were as we were compiling our list of misery Box shows, I screamed because first of all, I completely forgot about cost dome, and second of all, Under the Dome like came out hot, like first two three episodes of.
Under the Dome, yep, went crazy. I was like, what is up with this dome?
Dude?
Truly, I was like that Under the Dome is one of the programs that I And this is a conversation for a different day, but I do think it's very interesting.
On reels and.
TikTok, there is an entire cottage industry of people just sharing moments from movies and being like, what would you do?
Or he saved this guy's life?
And Under the Dome is one of the most TikTok and real shows because it has so many great moments in the pilot of the truck almost crashing into the dome and people trying to communicate through the dome. It's a great concept based on Stephen King's best selling novel.
But again, could I tell you what happened at the end of that show?
No, because it was canceled, first of all, and also because a lot of times mystery box shows do not keep us going, keep us connected and having those water cooler conversations throughout their multiple seasons.
Let me ask you this, This is a conversation I've had a lot about. I think Lost is a good way to kind of unpack the kind of two philosophies of the Mystery Box Show. I'm my co host malr Rubn really enjoyed the Lost finale because for her it's about the characters and the emotions, and I was disappointed in it because for me, I feel like there's a social contract with the Mystery Bock Show in which you
use the mystery to keep me engaged. Therefore, when we get to the end, you gotta throw me a bone on the answer for the mystery, or else I'm going to feel like strung along. Where do you fall on character versus answers?
So I would say generally I am an answers person, though Yellow Jackets for the first time has gotten me to the point where I care about these characters enough that I will keep watching it, and if they got satisfying conclusions, I would maybe feel okay. But that is the first show where I've really felt that way. Often I want an answer. I want, or at least I want some cool like existential journey. You know, people talk
about The Leftovers as a puzzle book show. I don't really know if I it is kind of agreed it kind of is. But really, to me, that's the most effective where you have the characters. You also kind of have the answers because it's the rapture, but the conversation around what it means to be left behind.
You almost answer the question at the beginning and then look at the fallout. I think that works really well.
Again, like we've we've talked a lot about like Severance. It's great, but I need to know season two, I need to start knowing.
I am definitely at that point with Severance, And I will say that like to me shows that Silo is a good example of a show that has mystery box elements but also basically resolved the the kind of the big show initial strange puzzle rather quickly so that you could move into the story. And I think that's an effective way to do it. Westworld, to me, is a
show in which they could have done that right. You could have resolved the mystery box element rather quickly and then got into the reality of what this simulated western town world really is. But instead they put like the mystery box show inside of another mystery box show inside of it, and that, to me is where I get
frustrated and begin to lose interest. I agree with you with severance, where I'm starting to feel like, okay, now, just kind of lay it out and let the characters and let the characters drive the stories.
I want to know a little bit. I don't want to just be watching.
I think that's the issue is do you get to the point where you're just watching only to find out the answer? That can become an it's a good viewing experience. I would also say something I think is most interesting about mystery box shows is the way that they've influenced other shows that are.
Not technically mystery box shows.
Like True Detective first season, let's talk about that. That's really just a murder mystery, right. But HBO, Prestige TV, you have these this incredible cast. They're like, Okay, we're gonna make it weirder, we're gonna make it more supernatural, we're gonna make it potentially elements a mystery box great that hooked me, but then at the end they were like, well, we only have like this many.
Forget about guess what forget about?
Actually it was just this one like Gunna Hansen inspired, like kind of leather Face esque killer and you wait a.
Minute, what, like why make me watch the rest of it? Why?
And that's I think the unanswered unsolved teasers can be very frustrating. And that's not to say we want to show that has no you know, no conversation about what it's really about, or an ambiguous nature to an ending.
We love that kind of stuff. That's some of the most exciting stuff.
But mystery box shows can get trapped in a space where they're constantly just trying to keep you guessing, and that can become its own cycle, which I think is what happened with Westworld.
To me, the most effective recent mystery box show is The Good Place. Mike Sure is a good Place because because the mysteries basically resolved at the end of season one, in which you realize, wait a second, this is they're actually I don't want to Well, everybody, if you don't have to watch the first season of.
This show from five years ago.
Big spoiler here it comes, in which it is revealed there actually in the bad Wow, spoiler over, spoiler over, spoiler over. Okay, now with that reveal basically done, now with the audience and the show kind of on the same page. You've basically spent all of that season training the audience about what the reality is, and now the story can progress in really interesting and unexpected ways. And to me, that's kind of the platonic ideal of how
you do a mystery box show. You have this incredible mystery that you lay out in a relatively brief time a season or a season and a half. It's then revealed, and now the characters take it from there and really propel the story forward. I'm not saying that's easy to do. I do think that's something that Yellowjackets could have done.
You could have basically said, Okay, it's a military thing, and this is why they're doing that, and this is and here are the things that have happened, and here's how it's affecting them now that trauma now in the present day. I think that could have happened, and that would feel pretty good.
And that's what hooked a law people because of the incredible casting of these old teen actors and kind of in this metaspace of them being adults and dealing with the trauma of being kids.
But that's not I do think that. I do think that when to me, when a show is giving you mystery after mystery after mystery, the feeling that I get, and you tell me what the feeling it gives you, is the feeling I get is like they don't know.
They don't know where we're going.
That is that concerns me.
That's my biggest fear with any show that I love. I mean, we are obviously you mentioned you know, you and Mallory were right there in the trenches.
During Game of Thrones, like you guys saw how that was.
Those creators have talked about how they didn't know where the show was going to go. You know, we have dealt with that multiple times with people pitching for shows where they don't know the ending, massive shows that aren't supposed to last this long and streaming like Stranger Things, and you end up with five seasons and suddenly it's like.
Wait a minute, how do we finish this?
That is my feeling I get with Yellowjackets. I get slightly reassured because I know that it was planned to be five seasons and I feel like if you had a plan, then maybe you at least.
Know a little bit.
But even Lost they didn't know where that was going to go at the end, And I think that that is a troublesome situation to be in because, as you pointed out, Jason, when we were just talking about this, like off Mike, Lost had like twenty episodes a season, twenty three twenty four episode seasons, Like, you're basically in a situation where you're spending so much time in this
world that the mystery can become secondary. But if you're waiting, you know, two years between and then you're getting seven to nine episodes, it's a very different situation and you have to fit in a lot more and a lot more hooks, a lot more emotional investment in a much shorter time, let alone solving your overarching mystery.
I completely agree, and this is my I want to be clear that I'm enjoying seven season two, and I thought season one was amazing, and I love the finale, But I think you've hit You've hit onto something, which is that I think you need to factor in the real world, Cadence. It's been two years since we saw Seven's one, right, seven season one, and that while it would make sense in the interior fictional chronological chronology, in the interior fictional chronology to like Cadence out the reveals
at the pace that they're coming out. I also think that part of what's frustrating is when you're waiting two years for a show that you really are are hot for, it can feel like I really need something quicker, I need these answers faster. I think Yellowjacks is another version
of that, in which there's less episodes. You feel like there is, you know, this various obstacles between you know that happened between seasons, and so give me, you know, give me more of the answers because we have less actual runway, whereas to your point and Lost, you can just kind of like be like, Okay, we're not gonna find that out, but like what are the what are the characters up to you?
Yeah? And also as well, that's like the funniest thing
about the you know, we talked about Riverdale. Riverdale's probably one of the last big genre shows we're gonna get that had like twenty two episodes a season, so you could set up these insane subplots about like evil D and D cults or characters becoming witches, real things that happen in Riverdale, while also kind of kind of pushing character forward, pushing plot forward, Like when you have that much time and your seasons are not so far apart
because you're basically constantly in production, as was the case with most of those CUB shows, it's very it's a very different experience than I am covering Yellow Jackets at IGN and I covered it all last season with you on here and the IGN, and I was putting together a kind of updated.
What do you need to know?
Before season three, and I still had to go back and just rewatch the whole of season two, Like I was just like, you know what, I was like, I just have to rewatch it all because I'm going to miss something otherwise. And that was because even though this was a show I was heavily invested in, it has been two years since the show was lost on air, and in that two years we have all lived, you know, fifty years, so it's extremely hard to keep up with.
But you know, this is just more of an interesting conversation than any kind of critique, because mystery box shows are also fun, you know, it's like.
They're also fun, but when they hit, they really fun. When they hit their Yeah, when they hit it's that it's the kind of thing that you watch television four where you're like, oh my god, did you see that? Like what the hell is going on?
Lightning in a Bottle? Which was the first season of Yellowjackets.
So I'm hoping that this season ends up in a place where we are hooked again and we're checking back in and our discord's going crazy for it because I believe that the juice is there.
I believe we've seen.
That they have the juice, but the question is can they squeeze the juice out of season three?
I hope.
So in the next few episodes of X ray Vision, we're diving into.
Stuff, so many stuff.
That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening. X ray Vision is hosted by Jason Concepts Young and Rosie Night and is a production of iHeart Podcast.
Our executive producers are Joelmanek and Aaron Cortman.
Our supervising producer is Abu Safar.
Our producers are Common Laurent Dean Jonathan, and Bay Wag.
A theme song is by Brian Vasquez, with alternate theme songs by Aaron Kaufman.
Special thanks to Soul Rubin, Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman, and Heidi our discord moderator,