Why Shauna & Jackie's Conversations Make The End Of Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 6 Heartbreaking
Spoilers follow. This subject deals with infant loss, so if that may be difficult for you, feel free to avoid.
It's hard not to feel bad for Jackie on "Yellowjackets." After all, just imagine telling her back in the pilot exactly what the next few months would have in store for her: not only does she find out her best friend's been sleeping with her boyfriend, but when her other friends find out about it, they immediately take her best friend's side. To add insult to injury, they also eat her.
Although her ex-best friend Shauna has had years of built-up resentments towards Jackie, she's still devastated by Jackie's death and wracked with guilt over her own role in it. Even though Jackie dies sad, quiet, and alone, in Shauna's hallucinations she's defiant, full of life, and still in control like she always used to be. It's easier for Shauna to imagine her as an antagonistic force because the alternative is remembering her as the trusted friend she severely betrayed, someone whose biggest crime was being kind of passive-aggressive sometimes.
Shauna and dead Jackie's conversations at the beginning of the season also provided some vital foreshadowing for the events of this week's episode. Here, Shauna successfully delivers her baby, has some initial trouble with breastfeeding but eventually pulls it off, and then gets to talk to her newborn child about how much she loves him and wants to keep him safe. Things shift to full-blown horror as she walks in on the rest of the team eating the infant, and then she wakes up and finds that all of this — not just the cannibalism stuff — was a dream.
Although "Yellowjackets" has never shied away from these sorts of prolonged fake-outs, this whole sequence easily could've crossed the line into way-too-manipulative territory, if Shauna's early visions of Jackie hadn't set the groundwork.
Does anyone on this show not have hallucinations?
Shauna's hardly alone when it comes to losing her mind. Lottie constantly sees visions of things that aren't there, whereas present-day Taissa has had an hours-long hallucination where she thought her son had walked home from school to visit her. Even skeptical, straightforward characters like Natalie and Coach Ben still have their moments where their subconscious seems to fully take over. Really, the only still-living character who never imagines anything is Misty, but she's got plenty of other issues on her plate.
Shauna has always been one of the more grounded members of the team, uninterested in entertaining many spiritual/supernatural notions of the world, but that has not freed her from the same occasional detachment from reality her other friends have suffered from. But whereas we still don't know whether Lottie's visions are real, at least Shauna's hallucinations have fairly clear-cut psychological explanations. She imagines Jackie's corpse talking to her because she wishes Jackie hadn't died. In the present-day storylines, visions of Jackie seem to represent Shauna's conscience, popping up mainly when Shauna's doing something she knows is wrong.
It also doesn't take a genius to figure out the cause of the fever dream where she imagines living out the early days of motherhood. Even when there's no cannibalism going on, it's not uncommon for women in Shauna's situation to have longing dreams where the baby was delivered alive and healthy. But with the specific circumstances going on around the delivery, it's likely that Shauna's latest hallucination is caused by factors more complicated than regular grief.
Holding onto Jackie
Shauna became pregnant because she was sleeping with Jeff, but why was she sleeping with Jeff in the first place? The affair we see with them in the pilot made things pretty clear: it's not because teen Shauna loves Jeff as a person all that much, but because she wants to be Jackie. She wants her confidence and popularity, she wants her boyfriend, and she wants her boyfriend to tell her he loves her before he says the same to Jackie.
Shauna's final mission involves giving birth to the baby Jackie should've had, fathered by the guy Jackie should've married. We know from the present-day storyline that Shauna does eventually pull this off — admittedly, with questionable results — but maybe this was attempt number one in a life-long goal. This might all sound psychotic and cruel, but it at least partially comes from a place of genuine love. In a twisted sort of way, teen Shauna's baby is the last thing she has of Jackie's. She might not literally have been carrying Jackie's child, but the metaphor is certainly there. Maybe keeping her child alive was, in some small manner, Shauna's way of keeping part of Jackie alive too.
Those haunting final moments
Shauna's psychological peculiarities aside, the final moments in this episode are undeniably heartbreaking. When she wakes up from the worst of her fever dream the initial sensation is relief, but that's immediately undercut by the realization of just how far back this dream sequence began. Sophie Nélisse gives an Emmy-worthy performance as Shauna desperately tries to cling to the good part of the dream, and the episode ends with Shauna asking her friends, and then seemingly asking us, if we could hear her baby crying.
We can't anymore, but thanks to her hallucinatory conversations with Jackie, we can believe that Shauna still can. It's with those final moments that the importance of those early scenes becomes clear: when Shauna asks that question over and over again, now we know it's not just rhetorical. We know now that there's actually a good chance Shauna can't tell the difference between her imagination and reality at this moment, which further showcases the sheer extent to which the grief and trauma of the past nine months have broken her.
Although deep down I think we all kind of knew Shauna's baby wasn't surviving, it's the way "Yellowjackets" delivered the reveal, and the season's worth of build-up towards it, that make for quite possibly the darkest moment in the show so far. And sadly, with nearly a year left to go before the team is rescued, things will probably only get darker from here.