Buzz Buzz Buzz! After Yellowjackets made its debut on Showtime, its audience was quickly immersed in the questions posed both in the past and the present timeline.
The show, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, follows a team of high school soccer players who end up stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. More than 20 years after their rescue, how they survived continues to fascinate and interest people as the remaining team members spark further speculation about what really happened during those 19 months in the woods by choosing to keep the full story between them.
According to Nickerson, the writers didn’t expect the fans to become so invested in trying to piece together where the show is headed.
“Obviously, a part of you fantasizes about, ‘Everyone’s gonna love this thing that we’ve been working so hard on.’ I don’t think even I had the audacity to imagine that there would be this kind of engagement,” he told Insider ahead of the season 1 finale in January 2022. “It’s just been so fun to see it play out, the creativity and the talent that seems to have been tapped into online. Some of these theories are so elaborate, delicate, and well-researched. They’re not right, but they’re still cool.”
Lyle, for her part, found the interest to be a “little terrifying” because of the pressure that came with providing the audience with worthwhile answers.
“I feel like the more people engage, the higher the expectations, which is always a little bit anxiety producing,” she noted. “But I think my favorite part, like Bart said, is the creativity — not just with all the theories, but there’s been really incredible fan art. And I am buying all of it. I am a one woman cottage industry right now.”
The former Narcos: Mexico writer explained that it was hard for the writers’ room to feel like they had fully wrapped up a story line when there was always the potential for more, saying, “I feel a very sort of instinctual reluctance to fully answer it just because you never, as a storyteller, wanna close a door. Even if you think that it’s an absolute dead end, you never know what spark of inspiration you may have a couple weeks down the road.”
Following the season 1 finale, the co-creators revealed that although Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) death didn’t have any twist to it, the interest for the character would make her live on.
“I guess what we can say is that Jackie, not only as a person, but as a figure and a symbol, looms large for all of these women, particularly Shauna, and I don’t think that that’s going to change moving forward. In fact, it’s going to deepen,” Lyle said at the time. “I think that this isn’t necessarily the last that we’ve seen of Jackie, I’ll put it that way.”
Yellowjackets was renewed for season 2 in December 2021.
Scroll on for the most intriguing Yellowjackets theories ahead of its season 2 return:
