ISSUE NO. 71
Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry Buffy the Vampire Slayer May Be Getting a Reboot, But Maybe That's Not a Good Thing
This column contains spoilers for the Yellowjackets Season 3 premiere. If you need a refresher, check out our Yellowjackets Story So Far.
Anyone else feel like the past storyline in Yellowjackets’ Season 3 premiere is just a little too idyllic? And what’s the deal with those screaming trees? As is the case with much of Yellowjackets, I think it’s all tied together in a gruesome web. The trees aren’t just a jarring bit of supernatural mayhem, but a hint as to what’s going on in the broader series.
At the end of Season 2, a panicked Coach Ben burned down his and the team’s shared shelter after having just about enough of their cannibalism nonsense. Now, at the start of Season 3, the girls (and Travis) have managed to build an oasis. Spring has sprung, food is now abundant, and each of the stranded team members has their own cozy little shelter. Each shelter even has its own unique style based on the preference of its inhabitant, and not a single word is shared of the struggle they faced as they grappled for shelter or food after their coach finally turned on them (though Shauna does remain rightfully pretty pissed about her baby). One of the girls even throws away a bowl of food in the episode! Given that they had just been eating one another not that long ago, this seems like an unbelievable sin. But all is not what it seems.
Halfway through the episode, Travis (Kevin Alves) gets high on some forest mushrooms and has what we at first believe to be a bad trip. While talking with Lottie (Courtney Eaton) he hears the trees start to scream, but Lottie doesn’t hear a thing. Obviously, he panics, but then he offers Lottie an ominous condolence after she says she can’t hear the trees. “You will,” he says.
While the moment is creepy as hell, it was easy to write off right up until it wasn’t. As Travis predicted, soon all of the girls begin to hear the screams.
Now, half the fun of a show like Yellowjackets is speculating wildly when it comes to the what does it mean of it all. Usually there are snippets of evidence here or there within the show that lead citizen detectives in one direction or another, but it can be hard to speculate so early into a new season’s arc. In the case of the trees, though, the timing doesn’t actually matter. This time, we’ve got science on our side, and it may just explain why most of the girls seem so chipper while going through hell.
Yellowjackets Screaming Trees Explained
What if I told you that screaming trees are real? Ok, they’re not screaming in the way they were at the end of the episode, but they are making noise. You know what leads them to make that noise? Stress. Despair. Dehydration. Hunger.
Basically, a bunch of tiny bubbles form inside of the starving tree to make their noise different from the white noise that trees traditionally make (yes, trees make sound, and not just because wind blows through them). The noise is louder, sadder, and, when dramatized for use in a television show, makes both quite the lasting impression and one hell of a metaphor.
The Yellowjackets have fallen victim to mass delusion in the past, and I’m relatively convinced that’s what’s happening here. It’s not unprecedented to see people going through terrible events experience joy. It is, in fact, necessary to survival in many cases. But there’s something about the team’s oasis that seems uncanny. It feels almost incorrect, like a sparkly sticker on a decaying coffin.
While my prevailing theory is that Travis and the girls heard the trees screaming because they themselves are the ones dying of starvation, there’s an equally nefarious option that would mean that they really did build out their own little paradise in hell but are not out of the figurative (and literal) woods yet.
In Season 2, Lottie gave the same platitude to the group when Javi died in the past and Nat died in the present, noting that the wilderness was pleased with the Yellowjackets’ sacrifice. If the team really has had several months of posterity, then that means that the trees have not been fed in some time, whether via the girls’ own cannibalism or Javi’s unwitting sacrifice. It’s possible the noise the team hears is a warning that their pissed-off gods are dissatisfied and hungry but, if that’s the case, it’s odd that Travis heard them first instead of Lottie.
What do you think? Is the team’s paradise real and the wilderness demands more blood, or are the trees’ screams a signal of another mass delusion from the Yellowjackets?
