Sammy's doll. As progressive parents Taissa and Simone would be fine with their son playing with a doll while being conscious of him having toys that look black like him. So Sammy has a boy doll with brown skin and hair similar to his own. When the doll is later found torn to pieces, it's almost like seeing the little boy mutilated.
Misty's bird Caligula is an African grey parrot. These parrots are very intelligent and as a result, they form a very strong bond to their owners. They can also be very emotionally needy, making it the perfect pet for Misty.
In the present, the survivors have differing attitudes toward eating meat:
At the party where she's courting donors, Taissa takes a bite of an appetizer and spits it out when she realizes it's meat. Also, when she and Simone hear that the evening's dinner is a giant roast pig head, Simone comments that Taissa forgot to eat beforehand. The repulsion for meat makes sense given what the girls had to do to survive.
Misty's reaction to meat is the opposite. She enjoys snacking on beef jerky and even suggests she and Natalie go out for wings.
In 1996, Shauna was the one who volunteered to bleed out the deer. In 2021, she bludgeons a rabbit menacing her garden to death and later butchers another one to make chili with Dissonant Serenity, showing that her brush to cannibalism has still left her desensitized.
The Yellow/Purple Contrast in adult Lottie first appearance. She wears a flowy dress in goldenrod yellow while addressing her acolytes, all of them in purple. Furthermore, in Classical Mythology, a nymph named Clytie pined away after the sun god Helios rejected her and finally transformed into a heliotrope flower, constantly turning toward the sun. It is later revealed that the cult members make the dye for their clothes from heliotropes. The resulting color is muted, in contrast to Lottie's dress which is bright as the sun. Lottie is thus portrayed as a leader and the cult members as followers.
The Yellowjackets is a fitting name for the crash survivors, as it gives the gang an interesting Animal Motif of bees and wasps:
Yellowjackets are a type of wasp, and are territorial and quick to sting. The survivors (that actually make it to adulthood, at least) have been turned bitter, violent and defensive from their trauma in the forests. They also all have difficulty trusting others beyond their group.
Against Common Knowledge, only female wasps and bees sting humans, as they are the ones who are typically guards of the hive and go out in search of pollen. The group of survivors (the girls' team, Coach Ben, and brothers Travis and Javi) is mostly female
Adult Lottie outright explains that newborn bee queens often kill each other so one can rule alone. This isn’t just reflective of Lottie, but to the girls' increasing sycophantism and eventual cannibalism.
In the Season 2 Finale, Coach Ben tries to murder the Yellowjackets by boarding up all the windows and doors before setting the cabin on fire. In Real Life, it’s commonly known that the best way to ride oneself of a yellow jackets infestation is to destroy their nest.
With real Yellowjackets, a queen only lives from one winter to the next. During their first winter, Lottie abdicates the position of leadership to Natalie.
Drones are there for the queen, in season one Travis fails to perform with Natalie but succeeds with Jackie, the original queen bee of the group. In season two he does finally sleep with Natalie but has Lottie on the mind, the current queen
Jackie’s entire life was going pretty good before the plane crashed, only for her to be unwilling to work for her load, inevitably pushing away her peers and dying alone in the snow. One could read Jackie as an Allegorical Character for the social conventions the girls slowly lose as they resort to more and more depravity. Out of all of the girls, she clings the hardest to civilization, and ultimately dies because she is unable to adapt to the wilderness, and when the girls eat her, it’s a direct way of showing how they physically and metaphorically have defied those social norms.
Shauna's baby seems to follow the Three-Month-Old Newborn trope to a T, but then we find out he was never alive to begin with and we don't see his body. He only looked like that because Shauna had probably never seen an actual newborn and the baby we see was all in her mind.
The repeated use of "Frère Jacques" in "Qui" was actually foreshadowing the twist at the end. The chorus "Dormez vous" means "Are you sleeping?" and Shauna is.
In the Season 2 premiere episode, Misty has Shauna submit to a mock police interrogation, and even has a cookie made with the words I want my lawyer written in frosting on it. There is no indication she took it home or that if she did, Jeff saw it, but he benefits from the advice on it when he is questioned in the Season 2's Episode 8, "It Chooses".
In "Pilot", the adult Natalie is seen wearing a purple sweater while meditating and attending group therapy at the rehab she is about to leave. She returns to wearing purple despite initially rejecting the color when at Lottie's compound.
Coach Scott gives Travis a large amount of condoms that he was planning to use on the trip:
It's later revealed that Scott is gay, so of course he'd need two for each encounter.
And Coach Scott giving Travis a warning about safe sex makes even more sense when you know he's a gay man in the 90s, and STDs would be nigh-untreatable in the wilderness.
Natalie also has a reputation for sleeping with a lot of guys (even if in reality it's just two), so Ben might also worry that she could have an STD she might not know about.
The survivors' relationship with food makes a lot of sense considering how long they were stranded for:
Taissa forgot to eat before an event, prolonged starvation can cause survivors to no longer notice when they are hungry and thus cause them to unintentionally skip meals.
Misty claims to always buy two of whatever treat she buys for herself so she has something to share and also tells her coworkers when she's going to bring in sweets. For a social pariah like Misty was in high school, sitting down and eating food with the group might have been the only time she ever felt included in something and left the wilderness seeing food as a way to connect with people and why she's one of the only survivors who has no issue eating meat. We see in both the 90's timeline that she stole food from their rations to give to Ben and in present day immediately offered to make the reporter something to eat after she acted nice towards her, she views offering food as a way to show that she cares which could explain why she looked so happy offering meat to the Antler Queen in the pilot.
Present day Misty is frequently talking about food or shown snacking. A common behavior adopted by survivors of prolonged starvation is to stockpile snacks and store them in random places throughout the home as the thought of being without food again is distressing.
Van seems to live off of junk food in the present day. The 90s was a golden age of snacks so it makes sense that she finds comfort in the foods she ate before the crash as part of her efforts to envelop herself in the comforts of the past.
Several of the survivors show a strong preference towards sweets. Once the Yellowjackets ran out of the sugary snacks they brought they had no sugar for nineteen months. Of course they would crave it now.
Yellowjackets draws a lot of parallels to Greek mythology. One of the most famous tales is Persephone and Hades; Persephone could leave the underworld so long as she did not eat anything but became trapped there when she ate pomegranate seeds. What does Jackie do in her dying dream? She consumes hot chocolate.
In season two when Lottie is unconscious in the snow and dreams about sitting in the mall food court with her friends, Laura Lee had food ready for her but Lottie never gets the chance to actually eat it. She wakes up.
In Shauna's dream she tries repeatedly to get her baby to nurse and is overjoyed when he finally does. She then wakes up to find out that the baby was stillborn.
In season 1 when Coach Ben gives Travis the talk, he has the exact statistics about how risky the pull out method is. Come season 2 we find out he's the high school sex ed teacher, so of course he would know the percentages off the top of his head even though as a gay man he has no reason to worry about pregnancy scares.
The show is very clever with how it makes its Dawson Casting more believable. Before the crash, the teenage cast rarely interacts with adults other than Ben, who is rather tall. When they do, the teen and adult characters are rarely standing up straight next to each other (Jackie sits when talking to Coach Martinez; at the pep rally, Misty is jumping up and down while the adults were standing further back, etc). It tricks you into believing Teens Are Short when in reality the actress playing teen!Lottie is taller than most of the adult actresses.
Why did Misty point out that Jackie didn't thank the wilderness for the bear meat when Jackie was one of the only girls who was nice to her? Misty's poisoned mushrooms had been discovered, making her once again the social pariah and on the bottom of the social ladder. Even though Jackie had been nice to her in the past, Misty threw her under the bus so that resentment would be redirected towards her and ensure that Misty was no longer the biggest pariah in the group.
The families of those aboard the doomed airplane. For how long did they hold hope until authorities gave up on finding the airplane? And once their loved ones are declared dead, they don't even have any remains to bury. Coach Martinez's family has three members lost.
In 1.6 "Saints", the way Natalie describes her second sexual encounter, "He was older and I was kind of fucked-up and it... (laughing softly) It wasn't great.", suggests at best, Questionable Consent, at worst rape. Worst of all, she sounds like this is just yet another traumatic experience in a life full of them.
Van is farther away from the others when Taissa returns to the camp and finds it under attack by wolves. Given that Taissa had disappeared while sleepwalking, it's likely that Van had gone out in search of her lover, resulting in her injuries.
Taissa awakens from a sleepwalking episode with a mysterious bite on her hand. It's possible that she simply bit her hand while eating dirt, but in the season 1 finale, we discover a horrific altar with Biscuit's head on it. It's likely that the dog bit her while she was killing it.
Laura Lee went on her flight despite the coach voicing his objections multiple times. As she herself put, there was nothing he could realistically do to stop her. By the time on the Season 1 finale when Shauna and Jackie are having their confrontation and Jackie stomps off and out the door, he, the one remaining adult and who has no conflicts cuts with Jackie, makes no effort whatsoever to check on her or even ask someone to do so. He has internalized the group's attitude to his authority.
Natalie guesses that the coach is gay because he coaches a girls' soccer team and never acts inappropriately or checks them out. At only sixteen, she's defaulted to adult men perving over her that when one doesn't, she just assumes it's because he's gay.
In retrospect the outcome of the birth was a Foregone Conclusion. Even if Shauna hadn't been stranded in the wilderness and starving no one in the cabin had the knowledge to recognize how badly things were going after she delivered the placenta first since between them and Coach they had only a single video on birth and whatever sex education in the 90s amounted to. And even if they did, a case of placental abruption almost always results in a C-section if the baby is to survive (because the placenta is the baby's source of oxygen via the mother's blood stream) and that simply wasn't an option for them.
Shauna’s pregnancy in the woods might have affected her far more than we think. Pregnancy severely alters a woman’s hormones as it is, and it can be downright dangerous for a teenager whose body is still developing; not just physically but psychologically, as postpartum depression can affect even a healthy adult woman and last for years. Postpartum depression can cause suicidal or violent behaviors and even symptoms of psychosis (which Shauna was likely suffering from given how she hallucinated her baby being eaten by the other girls, and becomes convinced that they killed her baby). This combined with the added stress of being trapped in the woods, the lack of medical care, undergoing extreme starvation, and suffering the grief of a miscarriage while her body and brain was still developing all likely didn’t just traumatize Shauna, but altered her brain chemistry in a way that makes it difficult for her to be maternal in any way.
This also explains her immature tendencies and shirking of responsibility, as it's entirely possible that she's mentally stunted from her time in the woods. It's no wonder that she's so cold to Callie and wishy-washy in her marriage; all of her trauma is directly related to motherhood, pregnancy, and sex.
Lottie's parents send her off to an insane asylum in Switzerland, almost certainly by plane— this is, at most, months after Lottie finally returned home after over a year of being deserted because of a plane crash.
"Saints" features Kevyn Tan introducing his son, Mason, to Natalie. Walter's Frame-Up of Kevyn as a Dirty Cop and murderer has made Mason (and whoever else Kevyn may have named as beneficiary) unable to qualify for the type of compensation awarded to families of cops killed in the line of duty. So in addition to losing his dad and coping with Kevyn's soiled reputation, Mason is likely to experience financial hardship.
Sammy, by the end of season 2, has it pretty rough. Not only is one of his mothers in the hospital and potentially dead, but Taissa has not reached out to contact either of them for days. The poor kid has essentially no one.
, making it the perfect pet for Misty.