Yellowjackets: Religion and Crazy Women

Yallowjackets is certainly the kind of show that strikes me as new and creative - we haven't seen the formula 100 times already, and it has been done well. Both the writing and acting have been high quality. It's also a cultural phenomenon I watch, like From, to observe fan engagement and widespread desire for watchers to have theories and uncover possible mysteries contained in the story.

It also attempts, sometimes overtly stated, to examine hypothetical social questions. Most recently, one character said she found it to be the fascinating study of survival. Even though it's entirely fictionalized. The real life stories that inspired it did not involve people stranded in the wilderness for over a year, for example. So I observe that it studies some anthropological questions, but does some things well and some things not so well. For example, the question of an isolated society in cold winter regions could suggest how some societies turned to aggressive overuse of human sacrifice. In Norway, one king who observed pre-Christian beliefs once sacrificed 9 people a day during Yule. That's 80 people or so. That's excessive.

However, as a student of comparative religions, I can observe it is a cyclical nature for how many belief systems are formed, even current Christian beliefs, operate on a supposed cause and effect correlation that people try to find. If they perform a certain ritual and see desired results, they assume causality and want to repeat that ritual. If they forget a ritual and see negative results, it's confirmation bias.

In this way, the show explores how the forgotten practice or context of societies which practiced human sacrifice might have evolved. Even though this cyclical belief pattern is of course not unique to that kind of belief system.

There are other odd choices for the show to explore, and it has gone down a strange path lately that is losing my interest. One question I have is correlated to something I predicted in another show. In this season of White Lotus, I predicted the show was headed in an incestuous direction given the overtly sexual topics in a certain family discussion. Sure enough, they showed an incestuous scene between two of the members of that family. In the most recent episode of Yellowjackets I started to see potentially similar subtext between a daughter and father and have a feeling the show. may be going in that direction as well.

Why is this a trend that are being explored in TV series? That is a question I as myself. I find these choices odd to include.

However, the thing I think the show has chosen to do incredibly badly this season is the direction they have taken Shauna, becoming increasingly unhinged. It's clear they are showing a progression in past and present in paralell, but Shauna has become a character I can't watch. In the last episode I was actually hoping the character that would be killed would be her, just so I wouldn't have to watch the painful performance anymore. It's just too unhinged the way she's going around jumping at every shadow and being overly paranoid to a degree of mental illness without any self-refliction or breaks for self-care to ground herself.

This was the woman in season one was accepted to Brown? There's no real logical grounding to her spiral either. There's nothing that makes me want to stay invested or continue watching this character go an on unhinged murder spree.

What's worse? Inroducing the narrative of "men calling women crazy." Don't do it. No one needs that. In a show that's supposed to explore this survival phenomenon and trauma impact. I absolutely will not tune in to watch another episode where a woman is called crazy. That's a hard pass for me! What abou tyou? What points have you found explored well or problematic in this show? Do you think this season is going in the wrong direction?