Black Knight

I wonder if the waitress ever came back at all after she awesomely turned on her heel. I winced at Van's "You ate her face." Not the best thing to say to Tai! But since she said it, well, we may as well go ahead and get gross here: Does that mean Tai, who has the eyeless motif going on, ate Jackie's eyes? My ears perked up at Ben's comment about burying what was left of Jackie's body with the plane crash victims making it look like Jackie died with them. It's been a theory of mine since S1 that the survivors gave out a story that everyone who died, died in the plane crash. It's the simplest story. It's not the most believable, which might explain why people have questioned it for 24 years, but it's the easiest to stick to without getting tripped up. It was chilling to see how what was left of Jackie fit into that relatively small backpack of Natalie's. We already know the showrunners watched The Challenge, because they picked that clip from it for the season premiere. That means they most likely watched Real World too, which makes me wonder if giving Ben's boyfriend the name Paul is a nod to Real World: New Orleans. Interesting that Walter chose Moriarty and Sherlock for what he and Misty might be, because those two were enemies, and I'm sure Misty is aware of that. Saying that threw a wrench into their bonding, which surely Walter must have known would do. Tai tried to call Jessica Roberts, so it looks like we're getting back to that and Tai should be learning Jessica's dead soon. Misty is still sitting on the information that Tai hired Jessica to investigate the survivors. I'm not sure what's going on with Mari hearing dripping noises. Is it related to some unknown person pooping in the pee bucket, or not?

I binged the whole series yesterday. The middle act had some middle-act problems, but then they wisely jumped forward in time. The first and third acts were awesome and the series as a whole was great. I was so impressed by Yeun and Wong, and there wasn't a weak link in the cast. It was great in the finale to finally see Amy and Danny really talk with each other, and ultimately bond.

Yes. There's video footage of the GoT cast doing the table read for the final season. Kit Harington reaches a certain point and tears up and looks across at Emilia, who of course already knew about it and looks back at him kind of sadly. Not all showrunners will share advance information with actors even if they really want to know.

Here's a joint interview with Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nelisse on Bustle.com. There are a lot of fun details, and only one extremely minor spoiler. But in a sense the most important bit is this: Lynskey says that in addition to getting a detailed rundown of S1, she was also given a broad outline of the remaining seasons. So the showrunners do have a plan and know where they're going. (I remember reading an interview with the showrunners where they mentioned that they tell the actors as much as they want to know. Actors have different processes, so some don't want to know anything, others want to know a lot.)

It's interesting to think about how X:WP would have been written today, when basically all non-reality TV shows except for sitcoms and procedurals are heavily serialized. Back then on TV, episodic was the rule rather than the exception, and at most there might be the occasional doubleheader for really big events, which X:WP did a few times. It's not only S5. Think about how much ground is covered in Return of Callisto, or how Gabrielle and Xena become majorly estranged at the end of one episode and reconcile the very next episode. The first part of that, yes, but she should have gone off "on her own journey" to do that and found her own Gabrielle. X:WP was never going to turn their core duo into a trio.

I liked how this episode partly focused on interactions we don’t see much generally. I can’t even remember the last time Melissa and Gregory had a 1-on-1 scene, and I don’t remember Barbara and Jacob having one since their storyline about the garden. It’s good for the show. I felt for Janine in the conference, but I also appreciated the nuanced portrayal of the mom. She works hard, she loves her kid, she rearranged everything to come in. I think ultimately she’s overwhelmed and just felt like Janine should be able to handle it. It’s not the right thing - it is best when the teacher and parent work as a team, as Janine was trying to accomplish - but it’s not as simple as a parent just refusing to believe their kid behaves badly. A telling moment early on was when the mom asked if the answers her kid was giving were the right or wrong answers. Janine sidestepped the question, which indicated that he does give the right answers. As a Black woman with a Black son, she’s used to having her behavior and her son’s behavior policed and exaggerated in ways that white people would not typically experience, and I think she had a bit of a chip on her shoulder as a result. And I would say Janine made an error in moving the meeting up; it could have waited until the following week it’d originally been scheduled for. When one asks a working single parent to rearrange everything at the last minute, it had better be an emergency, and I think that also created issues. She didn’t hear anything from Janine that she didn’t feel couldn’t have waited a week. She’s more concerned about his academic performance than whether he’s the best-behaved kid, and that’s not an invalid perspective considering how often we hear about successful people having not been particularly well-behaved kids. There’s also probably an element of “he’s in second grade, this boundary-pushing stuff is normal” in her thinking. I would have liked the mom to work with Janine, but it’s complicated. I think that’s what made it hard for Janine, too - the mom couldn’t just be written off as some uncaring parent. She cares. They have different perspectives and priorities. It’s interesting to contemplate how it might all have worked out with the other second grade teacher, Melissa, who routinely breaks rules and is not a people-pleaser. Janine has a teacher’s-pet personality and naturally prefers that in the kids she’s teaching.

No, we've only eliminated who it couldn't be, either because we've seen them in the present or they're dead already in the past. Mari is arguably the strongest possibility now, if one thinks the showrunners would prefer it to be a girl we knew from S1 instead of one of the "new" girls getting cycled in from background/offscreen. In that case it has to be Mari as she has the right color hair and she's not black. (I know they used a stand-in, as is normal for mysteries, but they're not going to radically change hair or skin color.)

A quick google search indicates 3-4 months for certain types of frozen meat and as long as 4-12 months for other types of frozen meat. Jackie was frozen for 2 months, so they're good there. Which makes me wonder how Adult Shauna felt about what Jeff said last season about how he was the high school boyfriend. He knew he and Jackie wouldn't have lasted beyond then, which I agree with because Jackie never seemed very into Jeff and it's hard to believe she wouldn't have met someone she liked better in college. It's bad enough to be living the life your dead best friend would have had instead of the one you wanted for yourself because you feel guilty or whatever. It's even worse to be living the life your dead best friend wouldn't actually have had because you feel guilty or whatever! (Shauna's subconscious speaking as "Jackie" was interesting on a related point here, when she said that she was smart too and Shauna just preferred to think otherwise.)

There was never a "will they/won't they" in regards to cannibalism. As the showrunners said, they showed us the cannibalism in the pilot. The questions have always been "how and why did they do it," since we were also shown in the pilot that the Antler Queen's group didn't just eat people who were already dead, they killed at least one girl and then ate her. I agree eating Jackie wasn't morally wrong, since she was already dead and everyone else is at the risk of starving to death. It's not an easy thing to do psychologically or emotionally, which is why they dissociated from the reality of it and imagined themselves feasting on normal food, but that's separate from questions of morality. The men's soccer team that crash-landed in the Andes had already set a precedent; the movie dramatizing that came out in 1993 and since Ethan Hawke was in it, I'm sure at least a few of the girls saw it, just like I did (I was a senior in high school in the spring of 1996, just like most of them). Murdering people in order to eat them, OTOH, is a different story, and we have yet to see how and why they got to that point. That's a great point and I forgot about that. But Natalie is also so overwhelmed with guilt about something or other; Shauna was nasty to her about it when they were on the stakeout last season. Granted, the guilt could have something to do with their departure from the woods, though, as opposed to what was done while living in the woods (thinking of that theory that they knowingly left someone behind). Or maybe Natalie is just intended to be someone who's deeply conflicted. Tai seems pretty firmly on the side of being glad to be out of the woods, while Misty and Shauna are in the "that was my best time" camp. It would make sense to have someone in the group who's quite ambivalent.

Yes. And I suspect Natalie is in the vegetarian camp too, or at least tries to be, given her remark to Misty about jerky. She either abstains, or gives in occasionally and hates herself whenever she does. With Lottie, so far we've only seen her take a brief sip of a smoothie. But it would be in keeping with her current shtick if she's also vegetarian. So really, the only survivor we have no idea about is Travis. I think Shauna misses being in the woods. I've thought that since I noticed early in S1 that she keeps a pine air freshener in her car. It's like she's been sleepwalking through most of the last 25 years, living someone else's life instead of the life she wanted to have. For both Shauna and Misty, it feels like the woods was the high point of their lives. I guess it's not surprising those are the two who eat meat quite happily.

I think there will be plenty of humans messing things up in baseball regardless. The thing is that it's an enjoyable part of a sport when it's the player doing the messing up. That goes directly to their athletic ability and mental makeup, and it's literally part of the game play action - swinging and missing, not fielding that grounder, etc. It feels different when it's a referee or umpire making the mistake. They aren't the athletes, they're not the ones playing. Viewers watch sports to see the athletes succeed or fail, not the officials. If computers do take over balls and strikes, I think any moaning or negative feelings will dissipate quickly. And there'll still be other situations in which to boo the umpires!

They got some humor in with Adult Lottie. The actress is doing a great job with the little bits of comedy. And I just always generally find Adult Misty hilarious. The kittens on the desktop! Clocking Elijah Wood's muscular calves (one of the things she listed as a turn-on during her date last season)!

Yes, the speaker at the press conference said they were over 600 miles north.

I really like this Slate article about the ways Yellowjackets uses its casting to trigger reactions in viewers. No spoilers if you’re current on the show (S2 E2).

There were probably a few things at play there. First, probably nobody wanted to risk triggering the unhinged BFF Shauna in some way. Second, the show skipped the two months since Jackie died. They probably talked about her until they didn’t have anything left to say. Third, perhaps they were just at something of a loss. The person who talked at the previous funeral was Laura Lee, who of course wasn’t here. Such great possibilities! I also think there’s a chance that Laura Lee is who manifests at specific times for Lottie, like how “Jackie” seems to manifest for Shauna and the eyeless man for Tai. If Travis was a sacrifice, to the wilderness, Laura Lee was arguably the original sacrifice. That could be a reason for Lottie to see her, especially since Lottie was bonded to her. I need to go back and rewatch, but someone online said that you can see the crane raising Travis higher in the background behind Lottie while she’s having her vision of Laura Lee. Creepy!

Totally understandable. I mostly felt terrible about the fact Tai was yelling that stuff about what Shauna was doing with Jackie's corpse in front of everyone else. Pull her away into the woods and scream at her in private! Tai probably would not appreciate it if Van outed her sleepwalking to everyone in such a fashion. Speaking of, it's been interesting to see how Van has stepped up with Tai while Shauna's been preoccupied with Jackie. Last season Shauna was the one sleeping upstairs with Tai, while Van stayed below because she felt it was too creepy in the attic. With Shauna no longer spending all her time with Jacksicle, I wonder how things will shift again. I was also struck by the shot where Shauna was in the middle with Tai and Lottie flanking her. We know the latter two don't agree with each other, and we know Natalie also doesn't agree with Lottie, but we've not really seen Teen Natalie and Teen Tai interact thus far. Shauna said something at Jackie's funeral pyre about not knowing where Jackie ends and she begins. I wonder 25 years later how much that still holds true. Especially given what Shauna's conscience/subconscious-via-Jackie said to her about sleeping with Jeff because it made her feel like she was Jackie. Is that why she ended up marrying him, too? Last season she talked to Tai about what kind of guy she'd imagined she'd get involved with in college, and it wasn't someone like Jeff, it was someone like Adam. Speaking of college, I noticed that when Callie pretended to be a college student, she chose Rutgers - the college Jackie was going to attend and which she'd assumed Callie's mother would be attending with her.

And we were told in this episode that the crash site was over 600 miles north of expectations. And we know they were flying to Seattle, so we have a good idea of the original flight path. So, that puts the Yellowjackets about two-thirds of the way up one of the Canadian provinces in between NJ and Seattle, most likely Alberta. Canada gets less and less populated the further north one goes, and at that point on the map they're much closer to the border of the desolated Northern Territories than they are to the American border.

I don't think it means anything. He's a major supporting character, but not one of the mains, and this show has a huge ensemble of characters they have to service. They'll have him in episodes when they have something for him to do, and it's hard to see where he would've had much to do here. Maybe they shot a scene of Shauna updating him on Kevyn's visit and then cut it for time because we already saw the visit for ourselves and so it was an easy scene to cut. I watch YJ on Hulu, and so far they've been consistent about having each episode available right at midnight eastern at the start of Friday, 9pm Pacific. It would be so much easier if I still lived on the west coast! Jessica Roberts said last season that she met with Travis; she was the one who brought the expensive bottle of whisky that he didn't drink and left on the kitchen table. So did her visit trigger his freak out? Hmmm.

(Yes, I'm quoting myself!) After thinking it over, I think I know why I found this so horrific. The part where we see the girls (and Travis) in the forest is the physical reality of the situation, while the banquet is the psychological/emotional reality that the girls are experiencing. What we see in the former is terrible in that we see the group being like vultures, tearing into the dead body of another human being. What we see in the latter is how much they've psychologically and emotionally distanced themselves from the physical reality, turning it into this celebratory banquet that they are enjoying so much as they dine on their food, forgetting that it's actually human flesh. (I just imagined Jackie's mother saying, "Jackie was very generous in that way.") Elijah Wood's character totally has Misty's number, by the by: "the all-too-common sadist." That should be fun. Finally someone who is on Misty's level. Speaking of such, Misty was right about Shauna and the cops. WTF was Shauna doing giving Kevyn a cover story about filing claims? That's way too easy for him to check! Shauna was lucky Callie put a stop to that interrogation before she could say any other stupid things. But then Callie herself falls for that other detective's trap hook, line, and sinker. It's funny how last season I was so sure that Adam was doing something like that with Shauna, and then he turned out to just be a regular guy, but now that situation actually happens with Shauna's daughter.

I know Shauna was having a total breakdown and that whole thing was very creepy and needed to end, but I still felt horrible for her for the way Tai handled it, screaming at her in front of everyone. Lottie was too far in the other direction, she probably would have let Shauna chill with Jacksicle forever. LOL at Mari - she was doing her best to become Jackie's BFF early last season, then she turned on Jackie, then she pretended to care enough about Jackie again to get into a fight over her here. The way the show intercut the scene of them eating Jackie was so well-done and creepy to the max. I don't know how to explain it, but the combination of the two different ways depicted was somehow more horrible than if they had just gone with one or the other. Interesting that Ben chose not to participate. He didn't try to stop it - I think he gave up on trying to be the responsible adult after he failed to keep Laura Lee from flying the plane - and was maybe a bit tempted himself due to his hunger, but I think mostly he seemed a little freaked out. He's now an outsider in the group in this specific way, so I wonder how that will play out. I woke up very early to watch this episode, and then went back to sleep after. Yeah, never doing that again. I had some sort of fever dream, being in the cabin with all the girls, and then I was whispering to Shauna that I don't trust any of the girls and hoping that she wouldn't notice that the way I phrased it indicated that I didn't trust her either, and mercifully the alarm woke me up before anyone could start slicing up my skin.

Thanks a lot, Terry Sanderson, for making me side with Gwyneth Paltrow on anything. I imagine the jury felt much the same way as they voted in her favor. Drew Magary's column about the trial is hilarious.

I think the way that "Jackie" acted during the initial part of the conversation about how Jeff and Shauna started, plus her blase reaction to the MASH game saying that Shauna would marry Jeff, indicated that it was an idealized version of Jackie at that point. Shauna was getting to talk about it all in the way she would have liked, but clearly IRL Jackie would not have been speaking that way, like a happy girl cheerfully gossiping with her BFF about her BFF's adventures. Later it switches to the other Jackie I spoke of, where she acts as Shauna's conscience. I agree IRL that Jackie did have a way of cutting through Shauna's BS too, which is why Shauna's subconscious has now cast Jackie in the role of her conscience. The million-dollars thing wasn't an instance of negging. Shauna was the one who started being derogatory about her mother, like oh, she's gonna be just like her mother then. Jackie then pointed out her mother doesn't have a million dollars; in other words, the game has Shauna doing better than her mother. I agree the real teen Jackie wasn't any sort of villain and I've always appreciated the show's nuanced writing of her. We know that Shauna genuinely loved her but also got annoyed at times with Jackie's flaws. Before the imaginary conversation switches to Jackie-as-conscience, Jackie's not saying or doing anything that's annoying Shauna. Shauna's just having a great time hanging out with her BFF...the frozen corpse. LOL (I wonder if any of the other girls have dared peek at any point. Misty, probably.)

Well, it’s not like Jackie had a need for hers anymore…

That makes me think a little bit about the characterization of "Jackie" in the scenes with Shauna. That's not Jackie, and I don't mean in the literal sense. She's partly Jackie how Shauna wanted her to be - nice and upbeat, interested in Shauna's thoughts, no negging or self-centeredness. Like in a way it's a relief for Shauna that Jackie's dead so that now she can have this "perfect" version of her best friend instead. But because this is a manifestation of Shauna's subconscious, she's also the voice of Shauna's conscience. We had hints of that last season from the points she'd turn up in the present and what she'd say, but it was pretty explicit here. Shauna can't fully control her conscience talking back to her and so she's getting into physical fights with a frozen corpse, LOL. I'm not sure how the show's going to top that for bizarreness, but I have a feeling they will manage! By the way, for those who weren't aware, Akilah was recast for this season, I think due to actress commitments. So the "new" black girl we're seeing isn't new the same way that Crystal is. We didn't see a lot of Akilah last season, but she wasn't a nonentity either - she was basically on the same level as Mari, not a main but had enough lines and bits of action to be known to us and give us a sense of her personality.

More tidbits: At the press conference before the survivors come out, the lady speaking says something about the crash site being "over 600 miles north of" something. Maybe over 600 miles north of where the search efforts had been focused? That would fit with my theory that the pilots never actually communicated their amended flight plan to Flight Control and so searchers had no idea they should be looking in Canada instead of America. It's another reason for the survivors to sue the plane company. I hadn't thought about this, but the survivors would've had to first be flown from the crash site to this airport. Then after going through some processing, they then had to board this next plane to go home to New Jersey. After first enduring their own plane crash and then watching that other plane blow up with Laura Lee inside, that had to be quite triggering. No wonder that except for Misty they all look so grim. There's a red-headed survivor who pushes away some nosy reporter, but doesn't really look like Van. It's probably just the angle though because I don't think there are any other redheads besides Van (and Jackie, obviously not a possibility). Nat's blonde dye is entirely gone, as it should be after 19 months. Maybe it was a Nat/Travis/Lottie triangle that Nat never wanted to accept existed. It's going to destroy Nat if Lottie and Travis stayed in touch as adults. It's increasingly clear the reason Shauna doesn't like Callie is because her daughter is too much like her. It feels like karma. Shauna as "Jackie" writing the MASH game lends support to the thought that Shauna also wrote all that stuff that she was reading last season in Jackie's bedroom. I didn't understand that theory at the time - I just couldn't visualize how that would work - but now I do. Tawny Cypress killed that moment of "I'm gonna do better with you." So creepy, and line of the ep for me.