The third season of Showtime’s dark and acclaimed horror series Yellowjackets has arrived and one thing many viewers have immediately noticed going into season 3 is just how colorful the wilderness scenes are, especially in comparison to last season. They’re really hitting the “yellow” in yellowjackets.
But filmmakers don’t just make arbitrary design choices, even if some people don’t like the way things look stylistically there’s always a reason behind those decisions. For this season, it feels like the most obvious reason for the saturated yellow filter is to create contrast between where the girls are now vs. what things were like during the harsh and brutal winter.
In the season 3 wilderness timeline, the survivors have finally reached spring. The game is plentiful so no one is starving and even though someone burnt down their cabin, they’ve become resourceful enough to build their own huts and teepees out of foraged resources. As far as the first two episodes of the season go, the girls (and Travis) are doing about as well as they could given their circumstances.
Or are they?
Yellowjackets has toyed with our perception before
Does anyone else feel like the current wilderness storyline is almost too good to be true? Especially in light of how twisted things got at the end of season 2?
What if the strong filter is less about differentiating between seasons and more about establishing the sense of unreality growing around the survivors? Maybe the “filter” is indicative of something being hidden, both from the characters and from the viewers. It’s a protective barrier between their fragile psyches and the harsh reality of their circumstances.
Maybe there aren’t nice teepees or a pen of healthy-sized rabbits. It all looks and feels a little too perfect, doesn’t it? If the filter is an illusion of sorts, maybe beneath it the girls are living in something more akin to a rundown hovel and to maintain sanity they’re all part of some shared delusion.
Thing is, it wouldn’t be the first time Yellowjackets has employed a tactic like this. In season 2, the girls imagined themselves at an elaborate feast with real food when in reality they were eating Jackie’s dead body. And toward the end of season 2, we learn that Akilah’s beloved pet mouse was long dead, that she’d been carrying around its skeleton for who knows how long. All of this established that the girls and Travis might be unreliable narrators.
New episodes of Yellowjackets stream Fridays on Paramount+ with Showtime.