15 Yellowjackets Characters Who Deserved Better — Ranked!

Yellowjackets follows the survivors of a plane crash — a girls’ high school soccer team from suburban New Jersey, who spend most of 1996-1998 trapped in the Canadian wilderness. While they await rescue, they create a pagan religion and devour each other. Sometimes for survival, sometimes for blood sacrifice.

Because of this, there’s a sense that the Yellowjackets are cursed and doomed to meet horrible ends regardless of whether they survive the wilderness or not. But not all members of the condemned team deserve the fate the cards deal them.

Here’s a list of characters who deserved better fates — ranked by how emotionally distraught their arc made us!

15. Callie

It’s not just the Yellowjackets themselves caught in the wake of the plane crash; the people around them are too. The clearest example of this so far is Shauna, who lives a “normal” suburban life with her husband, Jeff, and daughter, Callie.

Shauna and Callie don’t have the most open relationship. For understandable reasons, Shauna is too afraid to let herself get close to Callie, fearing she’ll lose her.

However, as mother and daughter spend more and more quality time together, it appears increasingly that Shauna is a corrupting influence on Callie.

Given who Callie’s parents are, she was practically destined to be a messed-up kid, and it is only a matter of time before she tips the scales.

14. Shauna (yes, really)

It has become a joke among Yellowjackets fans how awful teen Shauna is, especially by Season 3, when she becomes angry, violent, and power-hungry.

It’s not like Shauna became like this out of nowhere, though. Yes, she’d been jealous of her best friend Jackie for a long time and sleeping with Jeff is a betrayal. But that’s all teenage stupidity.

Shauna wasn’t destined to be evil. She just had the bad luck of being trapped in a situation that brought out her worst self.

Even so, Shauna goes through a lot to get there. She loses her best friend in a way where she feels personally culpable, and then her baby is stillborn. Even though Shauna did not handle that grief well, it’s still more than she deserved to endure. 

13. Crystal

Misty Quigley is only half a Yellowjacket — she’s the equipment manager, and none of the team treats her as a friend. 

Teen Misty’s arc in Yellowjackets Season 2 is all about her making a friend. In turn, it shows why she’s pushed them away her whole life.

Stuck in the frozen-over cabin, Misty bonds with former background character Crystal over their love for musical theatre. They get so close that on Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 5 “Two Truths and a Lie”, Misty fesses up her worst secret: she destroyed the plane’s transponder.

Crystal is shocked and horrified, so Misty inadvertently pushes her off a cliff. As quickly as Crystal’s body vanishes, the team forgets about her too.

12. Edwin

This show doesn’t lack for shocking moments, but the biggest jaw-dropper thus far is likely the ending of Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 6, “Thanksgiving (Canada).”

The team is sitting by a bonfire sharing a cannibalistic feast… and then a pair of frog scientists wander in. 

Edwin spots a severed head, but as he seemingly pieces together who these feral girls are, his life ends. Lottie, believing the “It” in the Wilderness doesn’t want them there, throws an axe into the back of Edwin’s head, killing him instantly. 

This marks the group’s first active human murder. The show didn’t give a lot of time to get to know Edwin, but he seemed like a decent, innocent man, in no way deserving of a hole in the head and an unmarked grave.

11. Hannah

Edwin isn’t alone on the research trip. Accompanying him was his girlfriend and scientific partner, Hannah Finch and their guide Kodi.

Hannah isn’t immediately killed, but she is still doomed the moment she walks into the Yellowjackets’ camp. 

Hannah has extra determination to make it home to see her daughter Alex, but she’ll never get to. In the 2021 timeline, when the Yellowjackets suspect Alex is stalking them, they confirm that they killed Hannah. 

To prove herself to Shauna, Hannah kills Kodi and joins the Yellowjackets in a hunt. She then helps Natalie escape to get help.

We don’t know exactly what Yellowjackets Season 4 has in store for Hannah, but it’s a foregone conclusion that she’s going to die. All of her sacrifices and compromises to survive aren’t even rewarded.

10. Kevyn

Kevyn Tan is a childhood friend of Natalie, whom she reconnects with in 2021. A teen goth turned cop, Kevyn finally gets to act on his teenage crush on Natalie. From there, it goes downhill for Kevyn fast.

Natalie steals his gun and when he finds out, their fling ends in a nasty break-up — and they never get a chance to make up.

Kevyn spends most of Yellowjackets Season 2 investigating the death of Shauna’s lover/murder victim, Adam. In the end, on Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 9, “Storytelling,” Kevyn is murdered by Walter Tattersall and posthumously framed as a dirty cop who killed Adam himself.

Even if there was nothing left for him to do, Kevyn’s story ends in the cruellest, unluckiest way imaginable. 

9. Travis

The first survivor to go in the 2021 timeline, Travis Martinez is found hanging in a barn. His death is more than it appears (i.e. not a suicide). It’s easy to believe it was because Travis went through absolute hell in the Wilderness.

His father (the team’s coach) dies in the plane crash. Then, on Yellowjackets Season 1 Episode 9, “Doomcoming,” he’s assaulted and nearly murdered in the team’s first hunt. The one good thing that happens to him in the Wilderness? His puppy love with Natalie slowly falls apart.

By Season 3, Travis has become a shell of his former self and is desperate to escape the wilderness. As we know from where he was in the adult timeline, he’ll keep trying to “escape” with alcohol, drugs, and a toxic codependency with Nat.

All of this because his dad wanted to bring him along on a work trip.

8. Jackie

Yellowjackets sets up team captain Jackie Taylor to fall from the first episode.

Her coach tells her that when things get rough, the others will look to her for guidance and asks if she can handle it. The team winds up facing much worse than being down at halftime, and Jackie can’t rise to the occasion.

At the end of Season 1, she’s cast out and freezes to death.

You think you know Jackie from many other high school stories: the infallible but petty girl at the top of the social pyramid. The show lets the viewer rest on those assumptions at first. Then, in stripping Jackie from the high school environment where she thrived, it unearths her sensitivity. 

Jackie is neither perfect nor a cruel queen bee. She’s a pretty nice girl, all things considered, but as insecure as any teenager is. She didn’t think Shauna was lesser than her; she loved her, and finding out Shauna’s true feelings went right through her heart.

Jackie’s fate is nothing short of tragedy, even if Natalie says she got the better deal dying early on.

7. Laura Lee

Yellowjackets pulls a fair bit from William Golding’s famous 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. The whole show feels like the answer to the question of what would happen if that story followed schoolgirls, not schoolboys. 

Continuing the analogy, Laura Lee is the story’s Simon: the most innocent of the plane crash survivors and also the first to die. (Representing a larger loss of innocence, of course.)

A devout Christian, Laura Lee focuses on the positive sides of her faith — loving others, welcoming people into your flock without judgment, etc.

She keeps her innocence until the very end. She dies trying to pilot a biplane that the team found to bring rescue, only for it to combust after a few moments in the air. It’s no shocker that, with Laura Lee gone, the Yellowjackets start placing their faith in a different higher power.

6. Javi

Travis’ younger brother, Javi, was also on the flight and had to see their dad die.

During Season 1, Javi is the naive little brother of the group. He vanishes near the end of the season, but miraculously resurfaces no worse for wear.

On Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 8, “It Chooses,” the starving girls are hunting Natalie, chosen by the (un)luck of a card draw. Javi tries to save Natalie by taking her to his underground hiding place. On the way there, the frozen lake beneath Javi gives way, and he falls.

The girls — Natalie included — choose to let him drown so they can feed themselves.

With a mix of disturbance and resignation, the girls butcher Javi’s corpse like livestock. Like Laura Lee on Season 1, Javi’s death is the death of innocence, but this time, the Yellowjackets themselves killed it.

5. Van

Vanessa “Van” Palmer survives more than a few brushes with death in the wilderness.

An exploding plane? Hungry wolves? She walks it all off with only scars. But when she’s reintroduced in the present (played by Lauren Ambrose), she’s about to die from cancer.

Her ex, Tai, refuses to let Van die. They try to make sacrifices, just as they did as teens, thinking the Wilderness might reward them for the spilled blood. On Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 9, “How The Story Ends,” Van has the chance to stab Melissa (Hilary Swank). She chooses to listen to her human side, not the hunter. So Melissa stabs her instead.

Then, she’s buried on the side of the road, and Tai eats her heart in tribute.

Sitting on another plane of existence with her teen self, Van can barely believe that this is how her story ends.

4. Mari

Yellowjackets Season 1 Episode 1, “Pilot,” opens with a girl being hunted in the wintery woods, dying when she falls into a skewered pit trap.

We had to wait three seasons to find out who “Pit Girl” was. By the time we do, it is hard to feel too happy about it. 

On Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 10, “Full Circle,” the Pit Girl is revealed to be Mari Ibarra. Shauna, who hates Mari, rigs the card draw to make Mari the prey, and she fulfills her Pilot-ordained destiny.

Mari could be snippy and unlikable, but only in a catty teen kind of way. She was hardly deserving of her brutal fate.

She has plenty of funny lines, too (“I walked back to civilization so I could f*** your dad!”). Her sharp tongue will be missed next season. The Yellowjackets’ butchering and feasting on a member of their team is a new low for them. A shot of Mari’s dead face being dragged along a trail of her own blood to be butchered is the creepiest the show’s cannibalism has gotten. 

3. Lottie

Lottie Matthews is one of the most intriguing of the Yellowjackets.

In the wilderness, she becomes a prophetess, divining the will of the wilderness that the girls worship. Alternatively, she’s just off her meds. 

Season 2 brings Lottie into the adult timeline, where she runs an intentional community, making it seem like she hasn’t changed. Still, she is trying to stave off her hallucinations. In the end, she fails, slipping back into her old beliefs before her abrupt death on Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 4, “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis.”

The context of her death comes during the season finale. Even though it helps Lottie’s end feel more fitting, it’s hard not to feel wistful because she (and actress Simone Kessell) had so much more to offer the show.

2. Ben

No one has suffered on Yellowjackets the way that Coach Ben Scott has.

The assistant coach lost his right leg in the plane crash and is dependent on the girls. His adult authority erodes, and in Season 2, he stops even trying to lead the girls, preferring daydreams of his boyfriend Paul. With how bleak things are, it’s hard to blame him.

Tried and convicted by the mob for burning the survivors’ cabin shelter down, Ben is saved from execution but has his remaining ankle slashed. He spends months tied up as a prisoner, wasting away in a hunger strike.

By the time Natalie delivers him a mercy kill, he’s begging for her to plunge the knife into his chest.

Ben’s character arc is brutal. Yet, while he didn’t survive the Wilderness, one could argue that he weathered it the best. He never loses his moral compass and fights off the temptation of cannibalism until the bitter end.

1. Natalie 

When we say Natalie Scatorccio “deserves better,” I mean both as a moral person and a character.

Even though Natalie is not entirely innocent, she was the most heroic Yellowjacket, i.e., the one who tried the hardest to selflessly keep the others alive and get them rescued. After the wilderness, Natalie became the most messed-up survivor because she is the best of them.

Natalie deserved to reach a point where she could forgive herself. However, she never got the chance due to her death on Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 9, “Storytelling.” The narrative failed Natalie, and she never completely achieved catharsis. In her last moments, she still wasn’t over her fear of death.

Teen Natalie remains a gripping screen presence, but her scenes (and Sophie Thatcher’s spectacular performance) are no longer as sweet because her ending is so bitter.

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All seasons of Yellowjackets are available to stream on Paramount+.

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