Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 9 Review: How the Story Ends

Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 9, “How the Story Ends,” sees tensions escalate between the adults while the teens splinter into factions. It’s an engrossing penultimate episode that deftly lays the groundwork for the season finale. “How the Story Ends” also adds to this season’s already high body count, proving that, especially in the present timeline, nobody is safe. 

A Hero’s Journey 

“How the Story Ends” closes the book on Vanessa Palmer, our resident storyteller. In true Van fashion, pop culture and film are driving factors in her hero’s journey. The Goonies, a film Van’s undoubtedly watched countless times, impels her to find that coveted buried treasure. She helps our titular Yellowjackets “find” Melissa and breaks her Taissa free from the clutches of Other Tai. 

However, it’s a punch to our collective gut that Van only gets minutes with the real Tai before Melissa plunges a knife in her chest. In a cast with multiple queer characters, the amount of queer death in Season 3 is disappointing. That said, Van gets a poetic, artful sendoff, and Lauren Ambrose’s portrayal of this nuanced survivor deserves its flowers. 

If anything, Season 3 truly encapsulates the crux of this series: How far will you go to survive? While the Wilderness timeline has kept this question at the fore, allowing it to propel the narrative, the present timeline finally embraces this. Sure, the adults don’t have the environmental threats of the Wilderness in modern civilization, but when you suppress your trauma, it will inevitably claw its way to the surface. 

Kill or Be Killed 

Did Melissa kill Van in an act of self-defense? Or is Melissa more like her teammates than she’s willing to admit? She accuses Shauna of getting a thrill from stirring the pot, which is true. However, Melissa refuses to acknowledge her own desire to break free from her “normal, boring life.” Pot, meet Kettle. 

Perhaps it’s a mixture of both — Melissa wants to protect herself, but despite knowing Van has terminal cancer and needs oxygen, she finds a euphoria in overpowering an “enemy,” in quashing a threat, regardless of its size. 

Morality Is Death 

Season 3 reminds us that Van, like Ben, is a moral compass of sorts. In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to kill Melissa to potentially save herself and appease It. We see Van and Tai reverse roles this season regarding their beliefs. Whereas teenage Van initially believed in the Wilderness and was Lottie’s most devout acolyte, adult Van knew how corrosive this belief in a fictional entity was. 

Through it all, Van was a morally sound character. She emerged from the Wilderness not totally unscathed, but also not completely lost. She held onto her principles and often voiced her scruples to Tai. 

Yellowjackets boasts a clear pattern concerning its deaths — those with the strongest moral tether to society bite the dust. If you can’t play the game, the game gives you the boot. We’ve seen it in the Wilderness timeline, but now this pattern is surfacing in the present. Nat and Van, and even Travis, to an extent, retained their humanity as adults. Lottie, too, tried to turn her back on It and make conscious steps toward change. 

Survival of the Smartest 

In the Wilderness timeline, Hannah drives a blade through Kodi’s eye in a move that feels like a reference to The Goonies‘ One-Eyed Willy. Sure, this feels like a waste of Joel McHale, but the real story here is Hannah’s drive to survive. That shift into all-or-nothing mode. Much like the harsh, unforgiving, and capricious nature of the Wilderness, humans are prone to being just as unpredictable. 

Hannah is a scientist who finds the teens’ dynamic and survival story quite fascinating. She recognizes Shauna as the alpha, making a grand gesture to show she’ll follow Shauna into the dark. Like Melissa before her, this is an act of self-preservation.

At the same time, though, perhaps there’s a degree of curiosity for Hannah and an opportunity to bring this story to the scientific community upon her return to civilization. Again, it’s all about the lengths one will go to stay alive. 

Performances 

“How the Story Ends” boasts its fair share of compelling performances. Ambrose really delivers, as does Hilary Swank. Swank captures Melissa’s duality quite well. Tawny Cypress also depicts Tai’s abject grief and heart-wrenching sadness with raw, visceral emotion. 

Kevin Alves nails those subtle moments for Travis, and Season 3 is when we see him develop his substance addiction as he spends most of it intoxicated on berry wine. The reveal that Travis inadvertently becomes Pit Girl’s downfall is also interesting, as is his moral struggle in whether to trust Lottie or decry her as a fraud. 

Sophie Thatcher delivers one of the most heartbreaking performances (and moments) in the episode as Nat cries while the snow falls around her, signifying another cruel winter on the horizon for the Yellowjackets. We seldom see the teens weep due to their circumstances — they’re always in survival mode, engaging their trauma responses, or dissociating altogether. 

To be fair, anyone in her shoes would be sobbing after a failed rescue attempt. Who would want to be stuck in the woods with a bunch of ravenous, feral teenage girls? 

Stray Observations: 

• I love the callback to Colonial Williamsburg with Misty’s comment (Jeff tries to take Shauna there in Season 2 as a romantic getaway). I hope this continues to be a running gag in the adult timeline. 
• Listen, all anyone ever wants is to smoke some chronic with Jeff Sadecki. I’ll be a lady who lunches with him any day of the week. 
• Someone, please call the humane society to swoop up that poor cat. 
• If Shauna shot at me, I, too, would piss my pants. Good grief. 
• Is Lottie the Wilderness Messiah? Or did Travis pad the opening of the pit with enough branches to hold her weight while she crossed it?
• I love that we see the wedge being driven between Melissa and Shauan in the Wilderness timeline as they’re on opposite sides of the battlefield in the present. 
• RIP, Wilderness Jeff Winger. We hardly knew ye. Joking aside, Joel McHale knocked this role out of the park, toeing the line between sardonic and somber. He wasn’t too Jeff-y here. 
• Whenever this show starts playing a Radiohead song, you know someone’s gonna die. “Exit Music (for a Film)” is a great needle drop, though. 

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Yellowjackets drops new episodes every Friday on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME and airs on the SHOWTIME network every Sunday at 8 pm EST/PST. 

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