Toward the end of “Full Circle,” the final episode of Yellowjackets season three, Shauna picks up a pen and starts writing. It’s a significant symbolic moment. While she journaled a lot after the Yellowjackets’ plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 and left the survivors stranded for 19 months, we’ve never seen her do it as an adult. 

“I’ve tried for years to remember what happened out there, to understand why it seemed like I couldn’t remember so much of it,” she narrates. “Why none of us could. I’m finally starting to realize we can’t remember it because, at some point, we became so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection. Except it’s all coming back to me now. The danger. The thrill. The person I was back then. Not a wife or a mother. I was a warrior. I was a fucking queen. I let all of it slip away from me. It’s time to start taking it back.”

“It Girl,” this season’s first episode, picked up a few months after the final episode of season two concluded with a devastating cliffhanger: The cabin where the stranded plane crash survivors had been sheltering all winter burned to the ground. But by the time “It Girl” opens, they’ve already constructed an idyllic pastoral camp with goats and bunnies and aesthetically pleasing huts made from branches and leaves. We only get a narrated recap of what happened in between the cabin burning down and being presented with the fully formed new camp. We don’t get to see the rebuilding process—the hard part, the one that requires heartbreaking, backbreaking emotional and physical work. It’s the kind of work that’s necessary for the audience to empathize with these characters, or at least understand where they’re coming from. 

Throughout this season, we’ve seen Shauna’s behavior become more and more inexplicable. Her “Full Circle” monologue is supposed to explain why she’s been so erratic, and it should be a major, character-defining moment, but much like with the new camp, the show hasn’t done the necessary work to make the story it’s telling us believable, so it falls flat instead. We’ve never seen Shauna struggling with her memories of what happened in the woods—in fact, until now, she’s seemed to recall everything that happened out there with perfect clarity, immediately recognizing the tape contained evidence of Edwin’s murder and remembering why it would be bad if anyone found out about it. Until just a few months ago in the show’s timeline, she even had extremely detailed journals cataloguing exactly what happened. Maybe what Shauna means when she says she can’t remember what happened out there is that she remembers outlines—the big moments but not the details. Maybe she means she remembers that these things happened but not how they happened. But that’s a more generous interpretation than that muddled monologue really deserves.

Midway through season two, Natalie asks Shauna, Taissa, Van, Misty, and Lottie what they remember about their time in the woods, telling them that she recalls most of it, but some things are hazier than others. “If I’m repressing things that I don’t know about, I’m very okay with never figuring it out,” Shauna responds. That goes against what Shauna’s telling us here. Back then, she said, “If I’m repressing anything, I don’t want to know,” and now she’s telling us, ” I know I’ve been repressing things and I’ve always wanted to know why.” And yes, there is often a difference, especially for people who are keeping such high-stakes secrets, between what we tell others and the things we only admit to ourselves. But this shouldn’t be the first time we’re learning about that difference as it pertains to Shauna’s memories. If we’re meant to believe Shauna’s monologue, then this season should’ve been about Shauna’s journey toward self-discovery. But because we got so little insight into what was going on in her head, it turned into a series of baffling moments that don’t fit with what the show is just now telling us was going on all along.

Similarly, the payoff of Callie’s story in this episode doesn’t match what Yellowjackets has been implying all season. The show has played up her devious behavior and hinted that she’s had some sort of ulterior motive. But the reality is much more sad and mundane: When Misty confronts her, she admits she killed Lottie—but it was an accident. She tells Misty that after Shauna kicked Lottie out of the house, she discovered the tape was missing and went to Lottie’s dad’s apartment building to confront her about it. They got into an argument in which Lottie said some genuinely disturbing stuff. (One example: “You are the child of that place. It took our baby. And it gave us you.”) And Callie ended up pushing her down the stairs. Callie’s been acting so weird this season because she’s afraid she’s just like Shauna, not because she’s been embracing being just like Shauna. 

After Callie confesses to Misty, she tells Jeff what happened, too, and it leads to the only earned moment of character growth in this whole episode: Jeff finally realizes that he’s been protecting Shauna at the expense of Callie, and Callie is suffering because of it. So he and Callie pack up their things and leave while Shauna’s gone. Once Shauna comes home and discovers that they’ve disappeared, Jeff tells her only that they’re safe and not to contact them again. It’s good to see him finally thinking for himself, standing up to Shauna, and protecting Callie instead of just playing the comic relief. And I hope it’s something we see more of next season.

The show has marginally more success with its ’90s plotline this week, which opens with Shauna fully embracing her dictatorial power and tossing Natalie’s bunk in the middle of the night for a bed search. Hannah is now one of Shauna’s trusted lieutenants, helping her maintain control over the camp. When Shauna and Lottie call for a new hunt because all of Akilah’s animals have mysteriously died, though, Tai and Van target Hannah by manipulating the position of the Queen in the deck of cards the group uses to determine who they’ll be hunting. Tai and Van set Hannah up to take the fall, but Shauna realizes what they’ve done and intercedes, throwing off the order of the draw. Instead of Hannah, it’s Mari who eventually ends up with the Queen, and the eventual hunt for her solves the very first mystery the show laid out: Mari is, indeed, Pit Girl. She leads the group on a good chase, even stripping off her clothes and leaving them behind to throw off her pursuers. But eventually, while running away from Lottie and her cryptic Wilderness bullshit that Mari definitely does not have time for right now, she falls into the spike pit, bringing us full circle with the series’ opening scene.

There are a few significant moments during the hunt, too: We see Shauna growing more paranoid as a leader, afraid that the group is starting to turn on her. She desperately doesn’t want to be on her own in the woods, and her fear proves justified when she ends up by herself anyway and Melissa attacks her, nearly choking her to death before letting go at the last second. We also see a mysterious figure following Nat as she grabs the satellite phone, which Van has continued to work on, and heads off further into the woods. After Nat confronts the person following her, we find out it’s Hannah, and she’s offering to help with whatever Nat is doing. Hannah claims she just wants to get out of the woods, too, and she only murdered Kodi because, if she hadn’t, Shauna would have killed both of them. It’s not completely unbelievable, but because it played out over the course of only two episodes, Hannah’s storyline and character development feel incredibly rushed here. 

More significant to the show’s ongoing Wilderness mystery, though, is the confrontation between Akilah and Lottie. Killing Edwin allowed Lottie to hear the Wilderness again, and while everyone else is out hunting Mari, Akilah finds Lottie speaking to It in a cave. Akilah tells Lottie that even though she killed her own animals to force the hunt, she no longer believes in the Wilderness. She thinks Lottie has been lying to her and manipulating her. But Lottie is unbothered by Akilah’s accusations and tells her, “This place is in us now. Even if we go home…It will come with us.” 

Whether or not that’s actually true, Lottie’s belief in It followed her for the rest of her life. During her conversation with Callie just before she dies, Lottie tells Callie that Shauna felt It more strongly than anyone else and she can see It growing in Callie too. “It undergirds everything. It is the pulse of life. It’s why we did what we did out there. It’s why we couldn’t stop,” Lottie explains when Callie asks what the hell she’s talking about. It’s the most solid explanation we’ve gotten so far about what It really is, or at least what Lottie believes It is, but it’s frustratingly vague. It still feels as though the show has backed itself into a corner by focusing so much on whether or not the Wilderness is actually real instead of exploring how that belief affects everyone It touches. And while Lottie’s plotline in this episode is intriguing on the surface, it ultimately feels hollow because it doesn’t advance our understanding of what’s going on in any meaningful way.

The episode ends with a triumphant moment for Nat: After sending Hannah to the feast dressed in her costume to trick Shauna, Nat sneaks off to bring the satellite phone to the top of a mountain. After several tense seconds of static in which she repeatedly screams “Can anyone hear me?!,” the phone connects, and a voice on the other end tells her, “I can hear you.” Maybe this is just another fake out, but we know it’s getting close to the time when the Yellowjackets were rescued. And we know Tai believes Nat was responsible for that rescue, so it seems like this might be the beginning of the end of the crash timeline. It’s another example of why killing off Nat so early was ultimately detrimental to the show. Having her adult self around to reflect on what happened in the woods, especially if she was so integral to their rescue, would’ve been a great opportunity for some real character development between the teen and adult timelines.

The major failure of “Full Circle” isn’t that the plot twists are unbelievable or that the answers it provides are unsatisfying. It’s that the audience doesn’t buy the twists and the answers don’t feel satisfying because the show hasn’t done the work of building out the characters’ internal lives. Their actions feel arbitrary, like they’re coming out of nowhere. And three full seasons in, we should have a much better understanding of who these characters are and what they want by now.

Stray observations

• • The scene in which Taissa buries Van is really sweet and sad until Tai cuts out one of her organs and eats it raw.
• • Shauna finds the letter Melissa sent with the tape (it fell under the fridge when Callie hid the package from Jeff), and it does, in fact, say exactly what Melissa claimed it did. So I truly do not know why Melissa stabbed Van and ran off claiming she did it for the Wilderness. Also, where is Melissa??
• • It’s now clear that the stairwell Lottie had visions of in the woods is actually the stairwell where she died.
• • Some season-four intrigue, courtesy of Taissa and Misty:
• Tai: “The worst of what we went through, [Shauna] fueled it. She thrived on it. I forgot that for the longest time. But I can’t anymore. If we keep letting this slide, she’s gonna end up being the last one standing. And I don’t want that. Do you?”
• Misty: “No. I definitively do not.”