Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 6 Is Filled With Easter Eggs
This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets" and discusses potentially triggering content.
"Yellowjackets" has finally revealed what happened to teen Shauna's (Sophie Nélisse) baby in the past timeline, and it's more or less a case of Occam's razor, in the most harrowing meaning of the term. It's a testament to how bad things are on Showtime's hit series about a high school girls' soccer team resorting to cannibalism after their plane crashes deep within the Canadian wilderness that a teen girl being pregnant hasn't always registered as the biggest concern. And yet, that's long been the case.
That changed when teen Shauna suddenly went into labor, kicking off the events of season 2, episode 6, "Qui." What easily ranks among the show's most grueling hours (which, again, is saying something) culminated in Shauna giving birth and the others eating her baby while she was unconscious ... only for her to wake up and discover it was all a hallucination (brought on by her losing so much blood during the birthing process) and her baby was stillborn. It was a truly horrifying turn of events made all the more disturbing by just how believable and logical it was, given the circumstances.
"There are people out there who have lost babies and have had miscarriages, so it's a heavy episode," said Liz Garbus, who helmed the episode, speaking to Variety. "There are all the fantasy and horror and genre elements that 'Yellowjackets' plays with, but this is a very emotionally raw moment, and not funny at all." Like the show's other directors, Garber messed with the episode's visual elements in order to further blur the line between what is really happening and what the series' characters are imagining. In fact, those willing to rewatch "Qui" might be shocked to realize how many glaring hints they missed the first time around.
They gave us all the clues
Is there a supernatural presence in the woods or not? it remains one of the series' most hotly-debated mysteries and we're no closer to an answer after "Qui." True, teen Lottie (Courtney Eaton) and her followers were unable to save Shauna's baby by performing their usual blood sacrifices and prayers to the magical forest entity they've come to believe in. But did they fail, or did the entity merely decide to save Shauna rather than her baby?
"Qui" leaves it open to interpretation, with pragmatism winning over spirituality this round. "If you're near starving, and you're in the wild, you're probably not going to have a healthy pregnancy," as Liz Garbus pointed out. At the same time, she put a lot of thought into staging Shauna's hallucination so as to avoid giving away the twist too early. Because of this, the sequence is loaded with what Garber referred to as "Easter eggs," although not in the Marvel-style meaning of the term:
"When we entered into the dream sequences, what I call the Lottie theme, there were slight differences to camera movement and sets that we made with Easter eggs for people who might want to watch the episode 32 times. The Lottie reality is also nightmarish — the feast on the baby. We looked at 'Rosemary's Baby' and the scene where Mia Farrow comes into the room and sees the grotesque faces of all the neighbors. And we had fun figuring out how far out to take that particular moment for Shauna."
The results speak for themselves. "Qui" is a riveting hour of television from top to bottom, from the direction to the writing and, of course, the acting. If there's any justice, Sophie Nélisse will be an Emmy winner come the fall.
"Yellowjackets" airs on Showtime and is streaming on Paramount+.