Yellowjackets Season 3 Continues One Of Season 2's Biggest Complaints

Yellowjackets is back for season 3 and the show is still in fine form, but it’s also continuing one of the biggest complaints about season 2. Yellowjackets season 3 marked its highly anticipated premiere with a two-parter picking up where the shocking season 2 finale left off. While the series’ concurrent timelines are starting to give it an uneven pace, the show’s atmospheric terror and powerful performances from its dual ensemble casts ensure that it’s still compulsive viewing.

The unique structure of Yellowjackets’ complicated timeline simultaneously follows a high-school soccer team stranded in the middle of nowhere after a plane crash in 1996 and the survivors of that ordeal processing their trauma and holding onto their secrets in 2021. The 2021 timeline slyly hints at what will happen in the 1996 timeline, because not all the teenage characters in 1996 have adult counterparts in 2021, foreshadowing a grim fate. For the most part, this has been a great way to tell a story, but there’s also a problem with it that’s more apparent than ever in season 3.

Yellowjackets Continues Season 2’s Complaint About Random New Teen Wilderness Characters

There Are Plenty Of Unfamiliar Faces

Three seasons in, when a given Yellowjackets viewer glances around at the ensemble, there are still characters in the wilderness who they’ve never seen before. This was already a problem in season 2, and it’s still a problem in season 3 — especially after the Gen recast. The presence of unfamiliar faces in the wilderness isn’t quite as extreme as it was in season 3, but it’s still pretty distracting. Lost had developed plenty of its background characters by season 3, and then it streamlined the ensemble of survivors.

Yellowjackets season 3 will air new episodes weekly and conclude on April 11, 2025.

The first episode of Yellowjackets established immediately that the survivors of the plane crash would eventually become a murderous cult cannibalizing their own to survive. It makes sense that there are characters in the past who don’t appear in the present, because they’re probably the candidates for cannibalization. But after three seasons, they shouldn’t still be faceless background characters. They’ve made it this far; the audience should at least know a little bit about them.

Yellowjackets Season 3 Needs To Finally Flesh Out All The Minor Teen Wilderness Characters

It’s Time To Get To Know These People

In season 3, it’s time for Yellowjackets to finally round out the background extras in the wilderness scenes as actual characters. If they’re essentially just going to be designated as a source of food for the survivors, then the writers should at least let the audience get to know them a bit. If they have no discernible personalities (or even names), then their inevitable deaths in Yellowjackets’ future will lack the emotional weight they require — the weight that Jackie and Javi’s deaths had.