Shauna doesn’t really want her legal advice - written out on a cookie cake - and Natalie has gone missing. (Pray for Steve, an adorable little Yorkie who doesn’t deserve what could be coming to him.) Meanwhile, Misty (Christina Ricci) is back to feeling neglected. Taissa (Tawny Cypress) has been elected as a state senator and is trying to patch things up with her son, even getting a new dog to replace the one she butchered in a hypnotic state. It remains to be seen how she fits into the dynamic of the Yellowjackets survivors, who in the present day are all off on their mini plots. The past Lottie might be magic the present Lottie seems to have lost or suppressed that for something based in capitalism rather than mysticism. Simone Kessell makes a striking debut as the elder Lottie, the newest member of the present day squad, turning the sort of shamanic qualities that Eaton gives the younger version into something steelier, maybe a little more calculated. Her group kidnaps Natalie (Juliette Lewis), but they seem more artisanal than evil, at least at this point. She emerged from that trauma with a mission to help others and now leads a commune where her followers wear purple and participate in rituals involving animal masks and burying their members alive. Lottie, upon being rescued in 1998, refused to speak and was sent to a mental institution where she was given electroshock treatments. The mystery of “who the is Lottie Matthews?,” as articulated last season by Natalie’s former sponsor, was the most tantalizing one that the series’s showrunners - Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco - left dangling, and now they give us only half an answer. And then there’s Lottie (Courtney Eaton), who has made herself the group’s healer, offering up blessings for those going out on the hunt and curing panic attacks. Misty (Samantha Hanratty) remains an outcast for her unintentional drugging of everyone. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Van (Liv Hewson) sleep in the attic so Taissa’s sleepwalking and sleep biting stay under control. Travis (Kevin Alves) remains dedicated to searching for his little brother, Javi (Luciano Leroux), who ran away during the hedonistic “Doomcoming” episode, when everyone accidentally ingested psychedelic mushrooms. Jackie is now a manifestation of Shauna’s guilt and the two “talk” frequently - scare quotes necessary - a fact that rightly weirds out her teammates. Jackie is still dead, her corpse left in the meat shed for Shauna to visit. In the ’90s timeline, two months have passed, and everything has remained mostly static. (Messy!) Shauna’s idea of marital rehabilitation? Having sex with Jeff in the dead artist’s studio as they stare at portraits that said artist made of Shauna. Her husband, Jeff (Warren Kole), you’ll recall, is Jackie’s aforementioned former beau. And not in the present, where she is still trying to cover up the murder of the artist with whom she had an affair. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey when all grown up), we can fairly say, is not a “cornflake girl.” Not in the past timeline, where she has taken solace in talking to Jackie’s frozen body while carrying Jackie’s boyfriend’s baby. (Amos counts herself as a “raisin girl.”) We hear Amos’s jaunty piano and her incredible range as Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) eats the ear of Jackie (Ella Purnell), her best friend, who froze to death in the Season 1 finale after being exiled from the warmth of the other girls’ cabin in a fight. The Amos track is an apt choice for framing some of the prevailing themes of the series, delineating between the boring and repressed “cornflake girls” and the more thrilling “raisin girls,” who are freethinkers. Based on the premiere, Season 2 seeks to double down on that. In its sensational first season, “Yellowjackets” blew through any notions that young women in a “Lord of the Flies”-type situation would be kinder or less messed up than their male counterparts. (Amos’s song “Cornflake Girl,” which appears on “Under the Pink,” plays over the episode’s final moments.) And boy, does that quote ring true for the series. I found the interview after watching the Season 2 premiere of “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s hit drama about a high school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness in 1996 and their counterparts in the present day. “But the concept of a sisterhood,” she continued, “is not real.” In a 1994 interview with The Baltimore Sun about her album “Under the Pink,” Tori Amos explained: “Part of this record is dealing with the betrayal of women, by women.” She went on to say that “the history of woman has been very lonely, and when you think that we should support each other, understand each other, that makes sense to me.” Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’
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