Yellowjackets “F Sharp”

So, apparently, the various survivors of that plane crash all got postcards with the same weird symbols drawn on ’em.  Said symbols may have been on some trees from before the crash.

Nothin’ eerie about that.

At first glance, Yellowjackets is a show about how a traumatic event affected a group of kids.  Most of them are girls, but there were two boys on the plane, brothers, the sons of the head coach.  The older boy, Travis, looks to be about the same age as most of the soccer players.

He’s not the one who finds his dad’s body speared through a tree branch.  That honor fell to Laura Lee, the devout Christian seconds after she was happy to find her teddy bear survived the crash unharmed.

Oh, things are not going to go well for that girl.

However, while the present-day story of Shauna and the others continues, with more development given to aspiring politician Taissa and a look at how Shauna is having marital problems but she will gladly butcher the rabbit that’s been messing around in her garden and cook it for dinner, the main focus here is on Misty. She was the smart girl, the equipment manager, possibly more of an outcast than Natalie the burnout, and…man, is she both handy in a crisis and a master manipulator at the same time.

It helps, I think, that adult Misty is played by Christina Ricci, and while Misty looks nothing like the character that made Ricci famous, there is a sort of Wednesday Adams-ish coming vibe off the girl in that she seems to be very good at not reacting when things go horrifyingly wrong.  Adult Misty on a date manages to push a reluctant partner into getting what she wants out of said date to the point of getting the man inside her house, only to find the recently released Natalie in her house with a rifle.  The man makes an excuse and leave.  Misty doesn’t even bat and eyelash at the sight of her former classmate with a gun, instead staying calm and finding out what brings Nat by.  Misty also had a postcard, noteworthy since it was the postcard thing that got Natalie to think Misty was up to something.

Misty’s being up to something fits the flashbacks.  Her general knowledge of first aid means she does save the life of the only other adult survivor, an assistant coach whose leg was badly mangled in the crash.  She can amputate and cauterize the wound, and that doesn’t seem to be something anyone else can do.  It’s not completely surprising, then, that she destroys the plane’s emergency tracker after, for the first time in her life, hearing kids her age say how glad they were to have her around.  Does that mean Misty is doing more than just wrecking things in the past?  Natalie certainly thought so, but Misty is both cool under pressure and perky, so that didn’t hold true.

Then again, Travis hasn’t been seen in a while, so there are always other survivors.

Point is, so far, there’s a lot going on both past and present, and that’s not even getting into Shauna’s marital problems, Taissa’s son acting weird, or how in the past Jackie pulled Shauna from the wrecked plane rather than help a presumably doomed teammate only to find the girl alive, well, and casting some major dirty looks not long after that.

I’ll probably cover that sort of stuff in a future write-up.