Warning: Spoilers ahead for Yellowjackets

The latest season of Yellowjackets wrapped over a month ago with a brutal finale that brings the story “Full Circle” (as the episode is aptly titled) to the pilot’s very first scene. However, discourse surrounding the characters hasn’t stopped among fans, who see themselves switching their stances on characters they used to root for—looking at you, Shauna Shipman and Lottie Matthews—and vice versa.

But that’s the point: Yellowjackets never wanted its women to be likable; it wanted them to be real. 

Christina Ricci, who plays the polarizing Misty Quigley in the adult timeline, went into how the character struggled to connect with her grief, especially with the emotional aftermath of the previous season’s fatality, praising the show’s representation of women’s complex identities that “doesn’t need to justify or explain.”

The Showtime original series follows the eponymous girls’ soccer team from Wiskayok High School stranded in the Canadian wilderness for eighteen months following an ill-fated plane crash in the 90s. As they descend into a Lord of the Flies-esque madness, the unfolding story makes good on the cultism and cannibalism promised in the pilot. What makes things even more compelling is the present-day timeline of the survivors as adults interwoven in between, revealing the trauma and mysteries yet to be solved from their teenage years.

Premiering on Valentine’s Day earlier this year, the third season peeled back even more layers for the characters, shifting the narrative from asking What happened out there? to demanding What kind of women does survival in the wilderness create?

It’s best seen in the main character Shauna Shipman, played by Sophie Nélisse as a teen and Melanie Lynskey as an adult, who has seen the most change throughout the series’s three installments. Radically shaped by guilt, rage, and repression, her teenage dirtbag era fueled her crippling paranoia as an adult that rendered her dysfunctional as a friend, wife, and mother—an echo of her younger self that lost her best friend Jackie, girlfriend Melissa, and stillborn baby.

While it’s easy to reduce her character to a mere caricature of chaotic evil, untouched by the supernatural and/or mental disorders, that only happens by underestimating the weight of her wilderness-induced trauma and codependency on her small female circle that was detached from modern social politics. In a way, she’s the antithesis to the queen bee archetypes common to female high school-set films.

One of the girls that enabled Teen Shauna’s wilderness rebellion the most is none other than the messianic visionary, Courtney Eaton’s Lottie Matthews. Often labeled by fans as a schizophrenic, cannibalistic cult leader, she was given more nuance this season, particularly regarding her psychosis. Off her fictional medication Loxipene (a nod to the real drug Loxapine), Lottie's visions intensify in the wilderness, though it’s never certain whether they’re divine, delusional, or both. What is certain is that the wilderness gives her something she’s never had back home: hope amidst the irrelevance of morality. While her actions can easily be mistaken for a desire for control and power, she has consistently been the team's sacrificial lamb and scapegoat, evidenced by instances when she fearlessly tamed a bear and allowed Shauna to beat her senseless. 

Lottie’s shift into a more violent figure this season—killing a hiker, enabling Shauna’s cruelty, and imploring the group to stay—has divided fans. Still, many see her as deeply human, especially after her haunting monologue where she tries to explain her reluctance to leave.

“I can't go back. If I go back, nothing will be…well. I won't…I won't be well. I won't be me. The me that was made out here. And that unwellness that I feel, I feel it so deeply in my bones.”

The wilderness, with all its horrors, gave her freedom from the treatments and medication that suppress her ability to perceive so intensely. She has never felt so liberated and authentic to herself, no longer needing to mask parts of her or feel ashamed. It is tragic because it rings true; Simone Kessell’s Adult Lottie still struggled to reacclimate into society twenty-five years later following her harrowing institutionalization post-rescue, and it ultimately led to her demise.

Beyond the show’s most controversial leads, the third season also carved out space to give more depth to several characters. There’s Mari Ibarra (Alexa Barajas), who has long been driven by her self-preservation. The culmination of her arc—becoming the long-speculated Pit Girl—was ultimately not a desperate bid for safety, but of sacrifice for the greater good of the team. It mirrors the fan-favorite Natalie Scatorccio (Sophie Thatcher), whose leadership was contested due to her groundedness in humanity, but ends up being the possible catalyst for the survivors’ rescue.

And the insanity doesn’t stop with the teens. Though not a totally new character, this season introduced Melissa (last name Hat as the fans dubbed) as an adult, played by the Oscar-nominated Hilary Swank. Her unfolding was shown in parallel with her teen self’s (Jenna Burgess) toxic relationship with Shauna, resulting in one of the most hated characters most notably for killing Van Palmer (Lauren Ambrose)—a reminder that she is a product of the wilderness and a morally questionable person beneath her facade of a normal life.

But that’s the whole point of the show. Women who are unapologetically sapphic, angry, traumatized, and having different moral compasses.

It bleeds into real-life empowerment for the actors, some of whom are also queer like Liv Hewson, Tawny Cypress, and Jasmin Savoy-Brown. The latter even cited her character Taissa Turner and Van’s relationship as the opposite of the queer trauma trope; instead, it’s “the bright spot” amidst the show’s central themes of trauma. (Although, despite all that, many of the actors who met their demise this season weren’t happy with their exits.)

Ultimately, though, Yellowjackets season three delivers not just a more chilling, gorier comeback, but a deeper exploration into the complexity of female nature, refusing to simplify its women into heroes or villains. It thrives in moral ambiguity, and that’s what makes the show unforgettable.