It’s 1998 and the girls are finally coming home. They spent 19 months in isolation in the mountains doing all sorts of things, predictably horrible things that we still know little about. A small group of lightning greets them upon arrival, and we can’t tell the survivors apart at first glance. The second season of Yellowjackets (Movistar Plus+), the nineties phenomenon created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson – in female ferocity – thus inaugurates a third timeline in one of its first scenes to expand the future crime drama of adult entanglement. and the past of macabre adventures and very strange coming of age, expanding a story with the emergence of a minefield – the suspense begins with what is still hidden – in an unexpected and frankly masterful way. Was everything planned from the start? how would i be
“Writing a TV series is the closest thing to a war. My feeling is that I’m on a battlefield. The one speaking is Jonathan Lisco, writer of this second season. He sits in Los Angeles in what looks like a director’s chair against a black background. Next to him are Lyle and Nickerson. They nod in amusement. “Let’s say we had some kind of road map where we only saw the destination. Everything we would find along the way was a mystery,” adds Lyle. “We work from the sound and the sound makes the rest possible. We’re open to anything that might happen,” Nickerson said. And here lies the reason for the fascination of this second part. That it doesn’t start at the exact moment it left off – that is, a closed universe – but that from that moment on it creates a whole new universe.
Let’s recap. A girls’ soccer team suffers a plane crash en route to national competitions, and the survivors try not to – in more ways than one – kill each other by living together in the frozen mountains. In the future, four of them get back in touch after receiving a strange letter that alerts them that someone else knows what happened there. Little or nothing is known about what the girls did in the mountains during those 19 months. But it wasn’t good. The end of the first season made it more than clear. And the wound will only grow. But in a different sense. If in the first season the references were Live!, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Lost and Carrie by Stephen King, here there is more David Lynch, Desperate Housewives and Bored to Death from the start.
Lauren Ambrose in the second season of ‘Yellowjackets’.Movistar Plus+
The addition of Elijah Wood as Walter, a repulsive and extremely astute citizen detective, points in that direction. And also the renewed marriage tandem that consists of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff (Warren Kole). One tries to investigate what happened to busybodies Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot) and the others try to cover it up. And there’s a nod to the movie Blue Velvet – something to do with an ear – that reactivates the sense that the series pays tribute to everything that can be honored as long as it’s connected to the ’90s. “Oh! Of course! It wasn’t conscious at all, but it’s definitely there,” says Nickerson. “There’s a lot of The Donner Party – a true survival case set in the mountains of California’s Sierra Nevada – and also classic 70’s psychological horror. We wanted to explore what happens when you lose your mind due to isolation,” says Lyle.
The adult character of esotericist Lottie (Simone Kessell) dives into the idea of mental health from the future, but not in a smug or accommodating sense. Nothing in Yellowjackets is. “We wanted to say loud and clear that all this stuff about the wellness industry or wellness is just stuff. Deep down we are as miserable as ever. Only now we feel guilty about it too,” says Lyle, who says there’s a lot of “cabin syndrome” in the girls this season, hence the loss of sanity in the face of isolation. Though Misty (Christina Ricci in an already mythical character in her career, and she’s not the only one, for Juliette Lewis also Nat) also goes insane in the future, precisely because of what she’s longed for. When Walter shows up, she begins to be seen, which is what she’s wanted since she was a child. “And that destabilizes them. It makes me lose control and it’s a lot of fun,” adds Lyle.
Joining the cast alongside Wood and Kessel is Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under). “We dreamed of her growing up as Van, but we never thought that when we called her, she would blame us for not calling her sooner,” says Nickerson. It’s something that has happened to them in all cases. The music selection is a good example. If Hole and PJ Harvey sounded like season one, Sharon Van Etten sounds here – the opening with Seventeen is pure grunge spectacle – and Tori Amos repeats itself in more than one chapter. The rage at the ’90s – and the salvation of all those women who started their careers at a time when what was popular and visible was essentially male – is still there, true to its status as the show’s helm. “We were teenagers in our ’90s, and what we saw and heard was so connected to us that it just couldn’t be there,” admits Nickerson.
Ashley Lyle tells an anecdote about going to a Sleater Kinney concert when she was 16. “Nobody understood anything in my class. Everyone should like Britney Spears. But I was a real riot girrrl, and I talked about the riot girrrls in a connection on the MTV news at the entrance to the concert, in high school they freaked out!” she recalls. “We didn’t plan for the show to be so ’90s, but I think we are. There was a part of us that stayed with us forever,” says Nickerson. That the cast has simultaneously grown as artists, embodying everything they loved, while also knowing so well what fiction was made of back then helps in many ways. “In fact, sometimes they’re the ones who give us the best ideas,” Jonathan Lisco admits, referring to ideas from this script where they know where they’re going but figure out how to get there along the way.
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