Yellowjackets’ season 3 trailer finally looks like the show we were promised

Yellowjackets has always shown a lot of promise — that’s part of the problem. Since the show premiered in 2021, the potential for chaos, conspiracy, and cannibalism seemed ripe for the taking; the show would get crazier, and we’d find out the answer to all the various questions of what happened and how things exploded as badly as they did. But that promise hasn’t quite paid off, with the first two seasons being instead more notable as plodding and a bit of an anticlimax. (I hate to say this but: they didn’t even eat the baby!)

But season 3’s trailer? It’s enough to make a person believe in — well, whatever they’re praying and sacrificing to out in the woods.

The trailer is more or less all paranoia and, blessedly, weird cult shit: In the past, one of the yellowjackets is saying that people are “willing to do some messed up stuff just to see another day.” We’ve got girls running through the woods in weird ceremonial costumes, performing rituals, questioning who should be the leader, and promising that “tonight, we’ll give the wilderness what it wants.” Modern-day Misty (Christina Ricci) might protest about the fact that they ate each other out there in the wilderness, but the supercut here begs to differ.

Clearly the secrets are catching up to them — though, it’s unclear how just yet. The remaining yellowjackets team members seem alarmed that anyone else could know, given that the circle is small, and everyone who knows what happened out there is either them or dead. That’s not preventing it from making them panicked though; as Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) says, the “only way to be safe is to be the only one left.”

All that and Jackie (Ella Purnell) is back! I might be made a fool, but given all the potential and lingering mystery of Yellowjackets, I certainly want to believe the show’s capable of really going there. Three seasons in (to a reportedly five-season plan), we might finally be entering the “find out” portion of all this fucking around. Now that’s some weird cannibal cult stuff I’d like to see.

Yellowjackets season 3 premieres on Paramount Plus on Feb. 14, with two new episodes. (They will air on Showtime on Sunday, Feb. 16.)