Figuring out how and why things got so grotesque has been the dramatic thrust of the series ever since. And as “Yellowjackets” heads into its third season, we’re closer to discovering the mechanics of the girls’ wilderness cult than ever before. The series toggles between 1996, when the members of the Wiskayok High School girls’ varsity soccer team — a.k.a. the Yellowjackets — crashed in a remote Canadian mountain range on their way to nationals in Seattle, and the present, where the surviving members of the team are all super f**ked up from the ordeal that followed. The girls were out in the woods for 19 months before they got rescued, and clearly things got spooky and intense out there.
Things started to get really bad — like, cannibalism bad — during the team’s first winter in the woods, which coincides with the beginning of Season 2. Popular girl Jackie (Ella Purnell) was the first to get eaten, her body conveniently flash-frozen when she went outside to sit in the snow after an argument with her best friend Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) in the hunter’s cabin where the girls sheltered during the summer and fall of 1996.
