Yellowjackets director unpacks that hallucination scene in new episode
It wouldn't be Yellowjackets without a trippy moment or two, and in season three's most recent episode 'Them’s the Brakes' which dropped on 21 February, three of the Yellowjackets Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Van (Liv Hewson) and Akilah (Keeya King) experience some serious hallucinations. And now series director Jonathan Lisco has unpacked that collective dream and what it meant for the three to see dead teammate Jackie (Ella Purnell).
After Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) lets Mari (Alexa Barajas) go following his capture of her in the previous episode, she returns to the camp and promptly tells the rest of the camp his location. They go on a man hunt to bring him back and enter the caves he was hiding out in. They split up to find him and Shaun, Van and Akilah team up, and then experience a collective hallucination.
Shauna sees the son she lost, and endlessly swimming towards him but is no closer to touching him. Van sees the cabin burning down and Akilah hears from a talking llama. The episode ends with all three of them seeing Jackie again, their former teammate who they ended up eating after she died in winter. They're in a classroom, Lottie is the teacher and they see the man with no eyes. Jackie then ends up hurting Shauna and Akilah rushes to help her.
This collective dreaming was inspired by Indigenous cultures beliefs of dreams, with Lisco explaining to the Hollywood Reporter, "Many cultures, the Mayans and other Indigenous cultures, felt that collective dreaming was part of the Shamanistic culture. That it was a way for societies to determine what their conventions would be moving forward and often give them really important information about society."
He continued: "This syncing up of their dreams is based in those cultures, but also something they can either totally lean into as a way to move them forward, or see as something toxic and corrosive that they then have to untangle from."
As for why Shauna, Van and Akilah were the ones to have the dreams? Well Lisco explained any of the characters could have been chosen for the moment, however they picked Akilah because of her innocence and connection to nature, and wanted to upend her perceptions of the "goodness" of the wilderness. With Van, the series creators wanted to almost take Van back to the plane crash and questioned if they actually are over it.
"Van has this way of being sarcastic and irreverent and acting like that didn’t really affect them at all and they’ve moved on. But, have they moved on?" Lisco explained.
And for Shauna it was all about exploring the guilt she feels over what happened to her son, and her suspicions of what the others may have done to him.
The episode ends with Coach Ben pulling them out of their trance. Will his good deed serve him well in the next episode? We're not so sure.
Yellowjackets is available to watch on Paramount+ now
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