Yellowjackets “Friends, Romans, Countrymen”

And Yellowjackets, the show about teenage girls stuck in the middle of the woods back in the 90s and the adult survivors still dealing with that, is back.

Oh how I missed it.

For a better example of what makes this show, well, this show, this episode gives the viewer:

• Teenage Shauna eating her frozen dead friend Jackie’s severed, partially thawed ear
• Adult Shauna and Jeff having sudden sex in the art studio of the man Shauna murdered last season when they go to do more cover-up
• Adult Taissa finding the weird altar in her house’s crawlspace that still has the dead dog’s head there after she adopted a new, very cute puppy that better still be alive by season’s end
• Teenage Lottie giving out more visions to Travis when he and Natalie go off on another fruitless hunting expedition
• New girl Crystal befriending Misty as the one girl who doesn’t mind this JV player just breaks into song all the time
• Adult Misty trying to groom Shauna on how to answer the cops’s questions
• Shauna and Jeff’s teenage daughter Callie’s first getting mad that her mother didn’t tell her father about the affair and then getting even angrier when she learns Shauna told Jeff everything
• Jeff telling dad jokes after covering up a murder
• And Misty just being Misty as she goes looking for the missing Adult Natalie

No, the highlight of this episode, one that features all that glorious crazy, is a motel manager Misty goes to for information about Nat’s disappearance. Here’s a guy who just doesn’t care much what happens as long as people pay their bills, gives a gloriously poetic description of his humdrum life, and then ends up giving Misty the information she wants to know anyway.  Where did this guy come from?  Does he have a name?  Will I see him again?  I think the answers to those questions are basically he’s a one-off character given what for most shows would be far too much personality

And that is why I love Yellowjackets.

So, as Shauna and Jeff cover up crimes, as Lottie promises Nat information on Travis’s death, and oh, did I mention Adult Lottie has a cult and Elijah Wood is on the show this season?  What a gonzo show.  I’m gonna enjoy this season, especially when it gets that dark comedy groove on.  This is LOST if the show was self-aware and didn’t limit the humor to whatever Hurley was doing.

Also, there may still be mundane explanations for, oh, everything. But I am not sure it matters either way.