James Delingpole James Delingpole

A dog’s breakfast but I’m rather enjoying it: Sky Atlantic’s Yellowjackets reviewed

It’s William Golding meets Alive meets Heathers meets Midsommar meets Bear Grylls

Yellowjackets continually jumps from past to present, from small-town banality to splatter and gore in the Rockies. Image: Kailey Schwerman / Showtime 
issue 22 January 2022

It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the Flies horror scenario, perhaps including cannibalism and ritualistic tribal sacrifice. All of which might explain why the forty-something women we meet today are so raddled, bitter, secretive, paranoid and messed up.

Perhaps the biggest red flag is the dread memories it invokes of Lost, the plane crash TV series that ran in the Noughties for six seasons but still left you none the wiser as to why you’d bothered watching because none of its mysteries was ever satisfyingly resolved. I really hate being strung along to no purpose, which is why I’m hesitant about committing to that BBC series The Tourist about a man who wakes up from a coma after a Duel-like encounter in the Australian outback with a malevolent trucker.

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