Here’s a concise report on Season 1 of Yellowjackets (Showtime, 2021–2022).

Report: Yellowjackets – Season 1

The Crash and The Crawl

The pilot opens with a brilliant misdirect: a terrified girl in a nightgown runs through a snowy forest, falling into a pit of sharpened spikes. She is hunted, killed, and then—ritually butchered. We don’t know her name. We don’t know why. We just know it’s happened.

Then we flash to New Jersey, 1996. The Yellowjackets are a champion high school girls’ soccer team bound for nationals. They are cocky, vibrant, and utterly normal. Within twenty minutes, their plane goes down somewhere in the remote Ontario wilderness.

The show’s secret weapon is its refusal to draw easy lines. In the wilderness, these aren’t saints turning into savages. They were always complex. The crash just removes the social scaffolding that kept their darker impulses in check.

The Premise: Two Timelines, One Trauma

Yellowjackets S01 introduces us to a deceptively simple premise: In 1996, a New Jersey high school girls' soccer team, the "Yellowjackets," travels to a national championship in Seattle. Their plane crashes deep in the remote Ontario wilderness. The survivors must scavenge, hunt, and eventually, resort to unthinkable acts to stay alive.

Twenty-five years later (the present-day timeline of 2021), the surviving adults are still haunted by the secrets of the woods. They receive a series of mysterious postcards with a symbol—the same symbol they carved into trees in the wilderness. As the past threatens to consume the present, the survivors realize that what happened out there may not be willing to stay buried.