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Yellowjackets is about cannibalism. It's also about how we face trauma.

At the core of the show is a chilling question: how far would you go to survive? By Katie Underwood

Under what circumstances could you be persuaded to eat human flesh? You may already know the answer. (The only acceptable one, by the way, is: extreme duress.) If you happened to be one of the many millions of viewers masochistic enough to mainline the first season of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s breakout survival sensation, then cannibalistic hypotheticals have, at the very least, crossed your mind. On March 24, the show’s second season continues the wild, subversive horror story of a varsity girls’ soccer team from New Jersey whose fantasies of championship glory meet a violent end when their plane to nationals crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness. (The show, which airs on Crave, was filmed in the gloomy forests of British Columbia.)

In a storyline that expertly mimics the timeless headspace of anyone touched by trauma, Yellowjackets pitches back and forth between the present-day lives of the survivors and the tragic events of 1996, a year once coincidentally dubbed “the year of the teenage girl” by the New York Times. Crucially, the show attempts, in nauseating detail, to make sense of the middle. How, in 19 months, could a group of superficially basic high school students devolve from Chuck Taylor–sporting athletes into dead-eyed, pelt-draped huntresses who cook and ritualistically consume their friend—or, maybe, friends? What makes Yellowjackets so compelling is how it circles a truth that’s simultaneously soothing and hard to digest: the fall into the recesses of our back brains is nowhere near as steep as we’d like to think. Any one of us could conjure our animalistic sides if pushed...

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