‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Ep 1: Recap & Ending Explained

The first season of Yellowjackets left us hungry for more. The show follows an all-girl high school soccer team that ends up stranded in the wilderness following a horrific plane accident. During the ordeal, the team reverts to their less civilized nature to stay alive and adapt to the new environment. In the first season, we’ve seen the girls that survived dealing with the aftermath. Shauna, Natalie, Taissa, and Misty got themselves into far more trouble than they ever anticipated in an effort to hide what actually happened while they were stranded. And the finale ends on a cliffhanger, revealing to us that Lottie, the girl who seems to be a central figure in the group’s descent to madness, is alive after Shauna, Misty, Natalie, and Taissa. 

The winter came to the forest 

The first episode of season 2 starts with shots of the cabin in the forest, which is currently snowbound. Food is scarce, and scavenging for resources is hard due to the challenging terrain. The survivors of the plane crash are hungry, cold, and hopeless. It’s a perfect scenario for what the show has been insinuating so far. 

Lottie takes on a role of a spiritual leader for the group and performs a strange ritual for Natalie and Travis before they head to the forest to look for food and, basically, anything that they can find. 

We find out what happened to Lottie after the group has been found and rescued 

The second flashback sends us to the past again, showing us the aftermath of the rescue when Lottie finally joined her family. Her parents saw that something was wrong with her. She refused to speak to them and developed a tendency to sleepwalk. Considering her history with schizophrenia, her parents submitted her to painful electroshock treatment to alleviate her delusions. Fast forward again, we see that Lottie’s treatment was “successful,” and in the present day, she works as a motivational speaker for troubled people.

Shauna is preparing for her conversation with the cops 

Shauna and Misty practice the interrogation that will inevitably happen now that the news of Adam’s disappearance has spread. Shauna’s daughter Callie might turn out to be the key player in this mess since she is among the few people aware that her mother had an affair with him. Misty is convinced that cops are coming for them because they have certainly missed something while they are getting rid of the body. 

Later, Misty logs into the amateur detective forum to check out any news on Adam’s disappearance and notices one user who suspects that Adam was killed by his mystery “girlfriend” due to some odd charges to his credit card, which had been made over the last couple of weeks before his disappearance. 

Shauna meanwhile has a confrontation with Callie, who knows everything and makes no attempt to spare her mother from her anger. Shauna’s flashback scene takes us to the cabin, and we can see her conversing with Jackie’s frozen body. She has a hard time dealing with her death, but her coping mechanism is beyond creepy. She recounts to dead Jackie how the affair with Jeff started. “Jackie” starts insulting her, which results in Shauna pushing her frozen body and her ear falling off. 

In the present day, Shauna reveals that she hadn’t got rid of all of Adam’s stuff. She remembers that he mentioned that he has an art studio, and she found an address. Shauna contacts her husband, Jeff, and they both make their way promptly to check out the studio. What they find is terrible, rows upon rows of paintings of Shauna. Both Jeff and Shauna realize that they have to get rid of the paintings before the police can properly identify Shauna as a person of interest in the investigation. 

They have sex in the studio after Shauna confesses some of her fantasies, and after, they proceed to destroy the evidence. 

Taissa is being blackmailed by Simone 

Taissa picked out a new dog for her son after the previous dog died. She makes her way to her son’s school, but before she can pick him up, hysterical Simone, her soon-to-be ex-wife, confronts her about the horrific stuff she found in the basement in the final episode, a dog’s severed head and what appears to be the human heart. Simone tells Taissa that if she doesn’t get some serious and professional health and abandons her new position as a state Senator, she will go to press and reveal what kind of monster she is. And she is serious. 

Travis’ brother Javi is still missing 

In the flashback, we see Natalie and Travis in the glacial forest. They failed to find food or any kind of supplies, and they likewise failed to locate Travis’ brother Javi or his body. In one scene, Travis mistakes a frozen corpse of a fox for his brother’s cop and has a temporary meltdown. Back at the cabin, the food is scarce, and the rations are not enough to sustain them. After what transpired during “Doomcoming,” Misty finds herself a target of bullying, and she is assigned all the toughest jobs. She finds an unlikely ally in Crystals, who annoys the group to no end with her singing. 

Meanwhile, Natalie and assistant coach Ben work on creating the map of the surrounding area.  

Natalie figures out who her captors are

Misty makes her way to the motel where Natalie has been staying for the past couple of weeks, and there, after bullying the receptionist, she finds out that she took off in the middle of the night. But this is not the truth. 

And after examining the doors to Natalie’s room, she figures out that she was taken. 

Natalie is meanwhile strapped to a bed, and a female that brings her food has a necklace with the symbol of a pierced man around her neck. Natalie has a good idea of who might be behind the kidnapping but doesn’t reveal it out loud. 

Both Taissa and Shauna have evidence to burn 

Back at home, Shauna and Jeff attempt to burn the rest of the evidence using barbeque as an excuse. Taissa, at the same time, finds herself in her basement and discovers stairs leading deeper into the bowels of the house. Once there, she finds the same thing that Simone found, a severed dog head and a human heart. She is sick but does not attempt to hide the fact that she might be responsible for it. In one of the flashbacks, it’s revealed that she has a history of such behavior while sleepwalking, and we can see her biting Van when the two were sleeping in the same bed. 

Natalie escapes her captors and makes a run for it 

Back at the cabin, Travis has a panic attack because he and Natalie are discussing the fact that Javi might be dead because it’s been two months, and the conditions outside are unhospitable, to say the least. Lottie manages to calm him down and convinces him that his brother is alive, no matter the odds. While Lottie was touching him during the panic attack, he sees a vision of a tree. Natali confronts her about it and tells her that she shouldn’t be giving him false hope. 

In the present, Natalie manages to set herself free and attacks one of her captors. She stabs the girl with the fork and escapes the compound. She is in the middle of nowhere and makes a run for it through the forest. 

In the forest, she sees a group of people, a cult, wearing animal-themed masks, attempting to bury a man alive. The cult leader turns out to be Lottie herself, and before Natalie attacks her with a branch, Lottie reveals that she has a message from the deceased Travis. 

In the last scenes, we see Shauna’s daughter Callie finding Adam’s half-burned license on the grill. In the flashback from the past, Shauna eats Jackie’s ear that fell from her frozen corpse earlier in the episode.