Review of Yellowjackets Season 1

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I’m writing this blog post in early August 2025, even though, due to my publishing schedule, this is going to come out in probably November. Editorial calendars on my end are very backed up, which means that a solid chunk of my blog posts are going to be released much later than expected unless it’s timely. I also found a job soon after writing this, which is a good sign for me!

Anyways: I was watching a lot of television when I was unemployed and really catching up on the books I was reading. I was in the financial situation where I could sit back for a bit and wait to see what happens. I did end up needing to desperately find a job for health insurance in the end, but I did enjoy the brief period of rest I was able to get before needing to work.

Yellowjackets was a show that had been on my to-watch list for the longest time, but I kept using the same excuse of not having time or the fact that there was always something I wanted to watch before it. When season 3 came out while I was unemployed, I kind of just shrugged and pressed play.

I knew very little about this show going into it. I basically only knew the simple premise, but it was enough to generate interest for me and watch it. I finished the show after three weeks, as I took my time with this one.

Let’s get into the review! Don’t want to keep you waiting forever.

The past and present stories of a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash landed in the wilderness.

This show takes place across both the present day (when the girls are now adults struggling with various issues) and the past (where they are on a high school varsity soccer team). For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to split each timeline while I briefly describe them.

In the past timeline, which takes place half of the time, the year is 1996. A girls’ varsity soccer team from New Jersey, lovingly called the Yellowjackets, are doing well in the national circuits and even have the chance to participate in the national championship. Excited for what’s to come, one of the girl’s parents, who are wealthy, lend them their private plane to go to Seattle in.

But trouble is amiss when they’re on their flight, then the plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. With a chunk of the adults dead, with only the assistant coach still living (but missing half of his leg, as one of the girls had to amputate it), these teenage girls (and the two boys alive) have to learn to survive in the wildrness.

We know from the adult portions of the show that the girls were out there for nineteen months, which is an impressive amount of time. As we see from the flashbacks and in the present day though that not everyone survived the harshness of the wilderness, which leads to an incredible amount of trauma.

In the present day, every single one of the survivors is grappling with the impacts of their days in the woods. There’s still some public interest in what happened to them, but some have moved on to more normal jobs, while others are in rehab and trying to get clean. For Taissa, who is pursuing a political campaign, her rival even goes as far to call her a cannibal publicly.

And yes, this show does depict cannibalism when the girls are stuck out in the Canadian wilderness. There is some violence that’s associated with what happens, so if you’re queasy about these kinds of things, then you might want to figure out what the limits of what you can watch is. I didn’t find it too particularly bad, but I could how someone else might want to avoid these portions of the show.

All in all, there’s a thread between the past and present that shows us the ripple effect this one event had on everyone’s lives involved, as well as how these girls reacted to the extraordinary circumstances they live within.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was such an interesting and unique show. I think that when we get disaster narratives like this, they tend to be within the realm of young boys and men, not a large group of girls without an authority figure. The one assistant coach who survives is basically useless and traumatized himself, so it’s these young high school girls calling all the shots. This isn’t a Lord of the Flies narrative.

That was particularly interesting to me, so when I was watching this show I was particularly looking at the dynamics between these girls and their decisions. That’s what made the past sections more interesting to me, as the present day was good for showing how their time in the wilderness impacted them.

All in all, this was such a unique show. I don’t know how it’s going to sustain itself beyond the three seasons it already has. I do wonder if this would’ve just worked as a two-season show, but we’re going to watch season two and see where this goes from here.

I recommend watching this if you have’t already! I thoroughly enjoyed watching this and wanted to continue on to the second season, which means I was interested enough to want to continue going with it. Too bad Netflix currently doesn’t have season three available on it in the United States though.

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