Headscratchers / Yellowjackets

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Misty vs. the Emergency Transmitter

• Misty deliberately ripped out the wires of the emergency transmitter, true. But she did not do this until a few hours AFTER the plane crashed. So a signal must have gone out for at least some time. Is that signal not enough to summon help? More importantly (though perhaps along the same lines), if there really is something in the woods that is screwing with technology, does it really make a difference whether Misty sabotaged the transmitter or not?
  • She actually ripped out the wires of the airplane's "black box," a.k.a. the flight recorder, which doesn't transmit a location signal at all.^note Black boxes are investigative tools containing flight data and voice recordings that help inspectors figure out the cause of a crash. Aside from an acoustic signal that helps with locating the box if it lands in a body of water, they have no tracking capabilities whatsoever. This only raises further questions: are we to assume that the box was transmitting an emergency signal, and this is a case of Artistic License? Did Misty just think the box was signaling for help, and really she made no difference? Or, given that we still don't know why the plane crashed, was there something on that recording that Misty didn't want getting out?
  • Perhaps it is Artistic License, it does transmit, but has a limited range, and Misty destroyed the transmitter before searchers got in range.
  • Although that raises another question: why did it take searchers 19 months to find them when presumably they'd just have to follow the flight plan of the plane and be able to find it eventually?
  • Canada is the second biggest country in the world, and the plane crashed down in the wilderness. The fire from the crash was very minimal, meaning there were probably no sightings of it before people realised everyone was missing. The girls also moved from the crash site to quite a distance away (the lake was a few miles at least). Even knowing the rough flight plan, there's a lot of forest to search once they narrow it down. And while we'll have to wait for Season 2 to answer this question, there's implied to be something supernatural about the area, so perhaps that interfered with tracking and the like.

No follow through for Natalie and Misty's B&E

• Natalie and Misty are arrested for breaking and entering into the cabin where Travis was living. After they are bailed out of jail, the two of them proceed to the ranch where Travis was working. Once they discover Travis's body, they hightail it before the police can find them and arrest them again. Even so, why haven't the police come calling after them by now, if only as persons of interest? You would think they would want to talk with them.
  • The death was ruled a suicide, so why the need to question them? Or perhaps the fact that Natalie gets abducted by a cult in the finale suggests that they have someone in the police who at first wanted to keep track of how much she knew before making a move.
  • Lottie was the one whose prints would be on the mechanism, so it's her they'd be looking for if they were trying to find persons of interest.

Odds of success for Laura Lee's plan

• Assuming no supernatural shenanigans, did Laura Lee's plan to fly out of the woods have any chance of succeeding?
  • The plane had a full tank of gas and appeared to be fully operational, so her intent was to fly it as far as possible to civilization. As we don't know how far from civilization the area is, it's hard to say. A small plane like that wouldn't be able to fly too far before needing to refuel, but Laura Lee could plausibly have gotten it closer to help if circumstances were different.

Adam's real identity

• So Jeff was the blackmailer and Adam was apparently nobody, at least as far as we know for now. But why are none of the other characters, including Shauna, asking who sent the postcards? And if Adam really is just some random dude, why was he carrying a possibly fake ID and why is there nothing about him on the Internet?
  • Priority one was to dispose of the body, which took most of the day. Shauna at least leads the others to believe Adam was behind everything, so Taissa and Natalie believe he sent the postcards. As for nothing about him being on the internet, perhaps as an artist he used a stage name, and Callie didn't find anything because she just googled his legal name. He might simply not have social media, or uses a different name.
  • It's a holdover from when he was planned to be an older Javi, where then it would make perfect sense for him to hide everything, so obviously they had to do a bit of hand waving when they changed the plans.

Jackie and Travis: Questions about consent

• Did Jackie rape Travis? He was high on shrooms. He wasn't in his right mind, so how could he have consented to that? In episode 10 he said he didn't want to.
  • Given that she was sober and he wasn't, she did rape him.
  • On the other hand, she didn't know that he was on shrooms, and he appears to be fully consenting when she tell him the choice is his.
  • This would be deemed 'Grey Rape' -a situation in which consent was unclear. Jackie did not know Travis was on shrooms and believed him to be consenting. He retroactively decides, when he tells Natalie, he didn't want to do it so it was unwilling on his part.

Why Allie as ' 96 class reunion president?

• In the Pilot episode Allie is said to be a freshman in 1996 while the main four characters are seniors. So why is Allie class chair of the Class of 1996 reunion?
  • Perhaps nobody else wanted to do all the work. Plus, if she volunteers, it gives her the opportunity to insert herself into the Yellowjackets survival narrative. "See, I was one of them too!"

No parent chaperones in the flight?

• The team roster on the plane consists of Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, Jackie, Van, Laura Lee, Mari, Akilah, Lottie, plus Rachel (who perished in the crash) and Yellowjackets #1 and #2. Adding Misty gives us a total of 13 girls. Yet the only adults flying with them are their two coaches. It is hard to believe that nobody had a parent who would insist in chaperoning. Is a situation like that common when it comes to high school sports teams traveling such a long distance (a fictitious town in New Jersey all the way to the opposite side of the country in Seattle, Washington)?
  • Why would the parents want to chaperone? They have two adults supervising them for what's likely going to be a two day trip. The parents trust the coaches to take care of the girls when they're in school five days a week. And it was the 90s, where parents often weren't as hands on as today.
    • Travis mentions to Coach Scott that they were meant to be in Seattle for a week, which is a long time to wrangle a dozen teenagers with just two chaperones.
    • The 90s was a different time, where there was less emphasis on hands-on parenting, and teens in that era were expected to be left to their own devices and behave like adults. The majority of the team are on the older side, and so would be expected to be like adults. Not like today where parents keep track of their kids with various technologies and devices.
  • A possibility is that there wasn't the funding for it. In the 90s and 2000s, it was a recurring issue for girls' sports teams to not be funded as well as boys', so maybe the school just didn't have the budget to fly additional people out to Seattle - as it's not just the plane tickets, it's the hotel rooms and other transport too. And since the girls were all on the older end, they felt they could trust the likes of Jackie, Taissa, Laura Lee etc to be responsible and keep the others from misbehaving (the principal even gives Jackie a pep talk on how to be a good captain).
  • And Lottie says her father paid for the plane, meaning the school otherwise wouldn't have had the resources to fly more people out (even considering the plane, they have hotel rooms and other transport like buses to cover).
  • The rule back then was one adult for every twelve children. So Coaches Scott and Martinez were it. There was a third adult in the pilot script but she was cut.

Fishing in the lake

• Why nobody tried fishing in the lake? Hook from earring, some string, worm and wait. Most of them mope around the cabin anyway so why nobody thought about getting fish?
  • I double-checked the recap for episode 1.08, and there's a mention of Travis hanging out at the lake with Jackie, checking out traps.
  • I mean, do we know that there are fish in the lake? The place is weird enough that while anoxic or limnically active lakes would be surprising given the location, I'm not actually willing to rule it out. Either condition might result in a minimal or extinct fish population in the lake, and some causes of anoxic conditions would make the lake water repulsive to animals that might come to drink.
    • It's a valid point that they don't try and seem to be unfamiliar with it.

Why all the secrecy?

• Why would the surviving soccer team think they have a secret to keep in the first place? Isn't it pretty excusable that horrible things would have happened if they were lost in the woods indefinitely? They were minors and no one at that time could have possibly foreseen that they were running for office.
  • To put things in perspective, consider the survivors from the 1973 Uruguay flight. Resorting to eat the bodies of the deceased when there are no other options available is one thing. What we are shown in the opening scene of episode 1.01 is ritualized human sacrifice and that is a little harder to explain. That is not even contemplating supernatural elements.
  • Taissa would realistically want to keep any dirty laundry well hidden—since she's not only running for office but she's doing so as a queer woman of colour, meaning she has to be extra squeaky clean so her opponents have nothing to use against her.
  • Episode 8 of Season 2 reveals that they let Javi drown after he tried to stop them hunting Natalie down to cannibalise her. They murdered a 12-year-old so they could eat him, and one who died trying to save another girl who had been picked to die in a Lottery of Doom. And the bottom line is, whatever hasn't been revealed about them yet, the likes of Shauna and Misty are most definitely not good people (the jury is still out on Taissa and whether her sleepwalking alter ego absolves her of some of the worst crimes), and bad people often don't want their dirty laundry exposed so as not to ruin their reputations.

Why would Tai not think the journalist was in danger with Misty?

• That was way too big of a risk sending a journalist to Misty. Tai knew that the journalist was murderous.
  • Jessica Roberts was resourceful; Misty is murderous. It is likely Tai has suppressed memories. If she remembers things Misty did back in the past, she has to confront her own actions (eating Jackie, hunting down Natalie, letting Javi drown, whatever happens on Season 3). Either that, or she told herself that Misty has outgrown that aspect of her personality.

"Torsos are useless"

• First of all, DNA exists and would be able to confirm that the torso was Adam's. Second, Adam is repeatedly shown to have a very specific tattoo on his back that friends could use to identify the remains as his. Sure, no one finding it until well after decomposition would take care of the latter but the others give plenty of examples as to how someone might stumble upon it in the park. For someone as intellegent as Misty, the handling of the torso feels weirdly unthought by her.

Why didn't they try farming?

• They crashed in the late spring, found the cabin a few days later, once they realized rescue might not be coming why didn't they try to farm? We can see when Nat and Trav come back with the first deer that the girls did find some leafy greens and at one point berry picking was so plentiful that Mari was able to fill up an multiple jars with berries in an attempt to save them for winter. We see they've set up snare traps and fish nets even if they don't catch anything, it just feels weird that none of the characters ever thought to take the edible plants they found and start a produce patch near the cabin.

How do Natalie and Travis not pass out?

The two of them exert a lot more energy than the others by going out hunting everyday but no one is allowed any more food than the others, not even the pregnant Shauna. Like in season one, Tai estimated that the lake was about four or five miles away from the plane and Natalie estimated it was longer on their trek to it. Even if Nat and Trav figured out the most efficient path and cut it down to four miles, that means every time they go to the plane they're walking a minimum of eight miles a day. Not counting all the extra walking they might do if they go off the path for an animal or the energy they exert carrying what they catch. And then again in season 2 when Natalie said that they were covering seven miles a day, in snow and at higher terrain. Yeah Natalie and Travis are the best shots but you'd think that they'd need to tag someone else in sometimes because they need to recuperate.