Yellowjackets is a TV show I should like. The theme song and opening credits are pretty cool. It features a lot of 90s songs and actors who were popular in the 90s, triggering my nostalgia. The image they use to advertise the show of someone wearing antlers and a veil is pretty cool and makes you think the show will be pretty wild. However, by the end of the first season, I wasn’t planning on continuing to watch it.

For some reason, I recently binged seasons 2 and 3. It’s frustrating because it’s an almost-good show. It reminds me quite a bit of Lost which also featured a group of people having to survive the wilderness after a plane crash. Lost had a great first season, but as the series continued, it became obvious the writers were making things up as they went along. Like Lost, Yellowjackets switches between different time periods, has some vague supernatural entity, and sometimes introduces us to new characters who seem like they’ll shake things up, but instead they get forgotten about or killed off.

There are cool dream and hallucination sequences in Yellowjackets which I like, but they get a lot of things wrong that bug me. For example, after the plane crashes and the girls soccer team is living in the woods together for a while, they all start menstruating on the same day. It’s actually a myth that women living together all menstruate at the same time. This belief is an example of confirmation bias. Sometimes, the periods of two women will happen to line up by chance, and they’ll count this as proof and remember it. When their periods don’t line up, they’ll dismiss it and not remember it. It wouldn’t be so bad if period synching was presented as one character’s belief, but it’s an actual plot point in the show!

Another plot point is people getting amnesia from traumatic events. This idea was first proposed by Sigmund Freud and much popularized during the Satanic Panic, but it lacks scientific evidence. What people consider recovered memories are usually (if not always) false memories that are created later on. In the real world, people who experience trauma don’t repress their memories, but the opposite: they can’t stop thinking about the trauma no matter how much they want to.

The way repressed/recovered memory is used in the show is particularly silly. In Yellowjackets, we switch between the plane crash which happened in the 90s and the present day in which the survivors are now adults. The adults don’t remember what happened in the 90s until the audience sees the flashbacks of the events. Seriously. We don’t see past-Shauna being a villain until the season three flashbacks, and likewise, the adults in the present day don’t remember that Shauna was a villain until season three. Basically, it’s lazy writing. The writers didn’t know they would make past-Shauna a villain until season three, but if the adults had functioning memories, they would have behaved differently towards her in earlier seasons. Therefor, the adults have to not remember she was a villain in the past until season three happens.

There’s a scene in which Shauna is mad at Lottie and Lottie allows Shauna to beat her nearly to death because Shauna has to get her anger out. This is more bad psychology. Studies have shown that if you express anger by yelling or punching things, it actually causes you to hold on to anger rather than release it. Anger isn’t something that can be purged by expressing it. It’s something that gets stronger the more you feed it. Shauna actually stays angry after her supposed catharsis, so I guess the show is demonstrating that it didn’t work, but Lottie never acknowledges that her approach was a mistake.

There are other little things. The show acts like “chronic” is an old-fashioned way to refer to marijuana, when chronic is actually a slang term used to refer to high-potency marijuana to this day. Not exactly the same thing, although this is an admittedly minor mistake.

In order to keep the show going, they keep giving us surprise reveals that yet another Yellowjacket we thought had died in the past has actually survived to the present day. Characters keep secrets from each other for no good reason, just so there can be drama later when it’s revealed they’ve been keeping something secret! The characters try to kill each other, then act like nothing has happened the next time they see each other. They don’t even consider turning on each other after an attempt on their life. There’s scenes in which someone kills someone else for no apparent reason other than to surprise the audience. Why don’t the characters act consistently?

I’m going to get specific about the season 2 ending which is particularly sloppy, so beware spoilers ahead. At the end of season 2, the Yellowjackets who have been revealed to still be alive in the present are all at Lottie’s commune. Lisa, one of Lottie’s followers, learns too much about the Yellowjackets, so Misty tries to kill her, but accidentally kills someone else instead. The show forgets all about Lisa at this point and doesn’t remember she exists until about half-way through the third season! It seemed like killing her was pretty important… until never mind, it’s OK if we let her live even though she has even more reason to tell everybody about us than she did before. Also, the cops don’t bother investigating the death of the person Misty killed. A cop also gets killed during this time and his death is quickly brushed under the rug as well. It’s obvious the writers wanted to wipe the slate clean and get a fresh start for season three, so they chose not to deal with the consequences of the season two finale and expected the audience to just forget what happened.

There’s lots of other problems. When their coach is going on a hunger strike, he hides his food instead of feeding it to the goat locked in with him. This is so the food he hasn’t been eating can be discovered later, but wouldn’t it have made more sense for the goat to have eaten it? When Travis’s brother dies, he doesn’t ask any questions because the show just wants to move on to the next thing. When the Yellowjackets have the opportunity to be rescued and most of them want to leave, Shauna just says everyone has to stay, so they do. What? Don’t they realize they outnumber her? I believe they even had the gun at this point. Why do they just do whatever she tells them?

I do like parts of the show, particularly the performances of Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood. Their characters are both delightful and a lot of fun to watch. However, the sloppy writing makes it difficult for me to enjoy the show overall. I don’t intend on watching the fourth season when it comes out, but I vowed to stop watching after the first season and didn’t, so who knows?