Hide your muscular calves! On "Yellowjackets," sex is violence

There's a scene in "Edible Complex," the second episode of "Yellowjackets" Season 2, in which Walter (Elijah Wood) shows up at the medical facility Misty (Christina Ricci) works at, and she takes notice of his muscular calves, of which we know she's a fan.

As he walks past her station, pushing his mother in a wheelchair, he gives her a little grin that could be read as flirtatious or menacing and she titters in a way that could, in turn, be interpreted as repulsed or intrigued. For a show with zig-zagging storylines, all of them soaked in duplicity and questionable motives, this brief exchange feels like a flashing warning sign. As we've learned in past episodes, "meet-cute" goes to "meet your maker" real fast for anyone affiliated with the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets soccer team and referring to orgasms as "the little death" is not just poetics for them; it's a threat.

Within the horror and thriller genres, a sex scene is usually a pretty good indicator that someone is about to die, so much so that it's become a trope. This series follows those same rules, but the deaths here don't happen right away, prolonging the dreadful suspense. Rather than dying quickly,

characters marked by the Wiskayok kiss of death are left in the delusion of safety, only realizing the terrible mistake they've made when it's much too late. 

At the end of Season 1, Jackie's (Ella Purnell) fate was sealed when she slept with Travis. At the time, we didn't quite know what Lottie (Courtney Eaton) meant when she admonished her for doing this, saying, "He doesn't belong to you." It could have been assumed that she was referring to the fact that Travis had been romantically tied to Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), but Season 2 points to a larger meaning.

In a fight with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) over years of pent-up grievances with sexual betrayals at the top of the list, Jackie was sent out of the cabin and froze to death in the snow. Picking up months later, her body is set aflame on a makeshift funeral pyre, but she'll find no peace in that final memorial — further punished, made useful as a form of penance for the sins of her sexuality.

In "Edible Complex," as Jackie slowly burns just outside, Travis and Natalie engage in a sort of psychic orgy, having sex — possibly for the first time, successfully — while Travis fixates on a vision of Lottie bathed in light, flashing in and out, keeping his mojo running. While they go at it in the increasingly stinky cabin that most of the show's '90s timeline takes place in, the heat of Jackie's burning body causes snow to fall from an overhead branch, extinguishing the flames just enough to cook her, but not cremate her. It should be noted here that it takes a temperature of at least 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to turn a body to ash, and since a normal campfire only reaches temps of 1,500 to 1,650 Fahrenheit this wouldn't have worked anyway, but still. There she lays, like a deep-fried turkey, and the smell of her flesh leads most of the team outside to feast, with very little hesitation. 

Sophie Thatcher as Teen Natalie and Kevin Alves as Teen Travis (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)"She wants us to," says Shauna, hand over her pregnant belly. And what's not clear here is if she's talking about her unborn child, Jackie, or Lottie. Whether Lottie's "visions" are real or delusional, she finds purpose in people. With Jackie fully out of the way, having served a purpose of her own by feeding her teammates, Natalie, Shauna and Travis are the three lovers left to pay for their sins. We know what becomes of Travis, having died by what's explained by adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) as an "accidental" death by hanging — in her presence — while attempting to pass out just enough to commune with the darkness that haunts him. So that leaves Shauna and Natalie. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Van (Liv Hewson) are two other characters who have had sex scenes in the '90s timeline, but we haven't met adult Van yet (played by Lauren Ambrose) and, so far as we know, their sins of sexuality — as pertains to all of the above — only tie them to each other. Literally.

With a reunion that we know is coming, either adult Van will help pull Tai from the darkness, as she did so many years before, or sink into it with her.

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Everyone in the present timeline is worse off than they were when they were stuck in the wilderness, which is saying a lot because . . . cannibalism. Lottie is definitely up to something, feeding Nat lies and then giving her a comic book villain's stink eye as she walks away. Tai has gone into such a fugue state that she's hallucinating visits with her son and causing accidents with her ex-wife in the passenger seat. And Shauna, on the brink of being arrested for murder, has no one to cling to but her husband, who we will henceforth refer to as Papa Roach, and her daughter, who she only spends time with to try and keep her from ratting her out. 

There will be many more deaths to come in this series, likely in this season alone, and with all the other mysteries floating around the biggest in my mind is who will be the next to go? From "tiny deaths," to actual ones, spring is a long ways away, and the wilderness — of then and now — is hungry for more hearts. 

QUICK BITES:

• "It's heliotrope, it's not purple. We make the dye ourselves from the flowers used to treat wounds." Okay, hippie.
• Callie, very much her mother's daughter judging by the way she treats men, should have waited till after she had those chocolate chip pancakes before breaking up with Kyle. God knows she shouldn't trust her mother's cooking at home; best to fill up when she can.
• A popular theory is that Mari is the "pit girl" featured in what we assume are flashbacks. Seeing her pull stuff like threatening to eat Shauna's food and rip Jackie's coat off of her dead body, I'm not doubting this. Even though she's one of the funniest members of the team, she's not making much of an effort to endear herself to others, which would seem like an important strategy here, now that humans have made it to the menu.
• What is the meaning behind this guy with no eyes? Tai's grandmother saw him on her deathbed, and she almost followed him off a cliff in this episode. Is he a personification of "the bad one" that lives inside of her, or nothing more than a hallucination? 
• "Does it look like girl poo? Or boy poo?" I'm with Misty. This is, in fact, a thing. 
• At Lottie's cult, Natalie lays down on her bed and has a memory of what looked to be a past OD. From what I could tell, she was being treated by medics while Travis stood in the background. Let's put a pin in this. If it was just a simple memory, why did it seem to scare her so badly?
• In the next episode, Misty and Walter will interview some guy who's been living at Nat's motel for three months. Why do I always think every new turn will lead to Javi? Seriously though, is this gonna end up being Javi? Where's Javi?? I go back and forth on him being dead or not. Right now I'm leaning towards no. Just finding his dead body somewhere would be too simple.