By Rosie Knight
Posted: May 12, 2023 10:14 pm
This piece contains spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 2. If you haven't watched yet, catch up with our Story So Far. Also, trigger warning, we guess? It's a dark episode!
It's a near concrete TV rule: no one ever kills the baby. But in Yellowjackets Episode 6, the creative team do just that, ending the life of Shauna's newborn child before it even begins. And as the showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and Jonathan Lisco told IGN, the tragic outcome was always part of their plan.
The shocking reveal upends a million fan theories and sets the Yellowjackets and the now grieving Shauna on an extremely dark path as we head into the final episodes of Season 2. And it was a choice informed by a very real and rarely shown aspect of pregnancy. "Childbirth is a trauma in and of itself, and we didn't want to shy away from the realities of that," Lyle shared.
It's also an event that Lyle knows will shape the whole team going forward. "This is a truly formative experience for Shauna, but I think for more than just Shauna, I mean, every single person in that cabin is going through it with her. She's going through it in a very different way. But it felt important for it to be real and visceral and raw and exacting."
She continued. "I have friends who've had kids recently, and it is not fun and not even in the way that you traditionally think. It's painful and you're shouting and it hurts, and you have contractions. But a very close friend of mine recently had an emergency C-section and she was fucking terrified. And I think that that baseline fear is something that I haven't seen really represented in this way before. And we just wanted to show the whole damn thing."
The “whole damn thing” begins as Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) finally goes into labor in the depths of the wilderness. Her teammates huddle around her in the cabin they've tried to make into home but none of them are really prepared to deliver a baby. Meanwhile,Shauna only has one thing on her mind as the young woman who brilliantly brings her to life tells IGN. "Well, my perspective is making it get out of me, surviving," Nélisse said. "Obviously the circumstances are far from ideal and I think she's just so concerned about surviving."
For months, new BFFs Misty (Samantha Hanratty) and Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) have been part of the plan to keep Shauna and her baby alive. But, after the unfortunate cliff incident, Misty is left alone to deliver the baby, a fact that quickly becomes too much as she hides away from the birth in tears leaving Akilah (Nia Sondaya) to take over. For Hanratty, it was a key moment for the young woman who rarely gets to show her human side and finally breaks after losing her only good friend, Crystal. "She's just gone through her own traumas," Hanratty explained. "When Misty actually cried, [that was] true heartbreak. To see that side of her was kind of nice in a way. I was like, 'oh, there's a human here, and I like that. Good for Misty!"
While Misty eventually makes it back to help Shauna, the soon to be mother is surrounded by the women who love her, most memorably Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) who delivers the wrenchingly powerful line "You can fucking do anything!" to Shauna as she freaks out about the agony and fear of childbirth. For Brown it was a great representation of the power of their friendship. "Well, Taissa and Shauna's friendship is everything to me in this show," she shared.
"I think there's something so-- especially as a queer woman, as a queer girl, to have a straight best friend and there's no weirdness there. It's just like this, 'I've never been into you. You've never been into me. Let's not make it weird. We're just like two girls in this thing together.' It's really powerful and really strong - like all female friendship is - but that bond is really specific. And their bond has been made through this tragic circumstance."
She continued. "So Taissa, supporting Shauna through everything that's happened to her since being out in the woods, is kind of culminating in this moment. And seeing her friend who wants to give up and literally die just brings out this lioness protective thing inside of her. And she really believes what she's saying."
It's an emotionally resonant moment that rang particularly true for the actress. "It makes me cry too, because that's how I feel about my friends," Brown said. "They can fucking do anything and it makes me want to fight for them."
As Tai battles for Shauna and team Logic, Travis and Lottie enact a blood ritual to try and help the dangerous delivery end smoothly. And as Courtney Eaton explained, Lottie is in a complex place as the birth begins. "I think Lottie's approach to it is this mixed emotion. She has a lot riding on the pressure she has personally put onto Shauna with the baby and what it's going to bring for the group. So that's one way. And I think she's also hitting almost a breaking point. Later on in the season, you see how that kind of affects her and where that takes her mentally."
In one of the most powerful and heartbreaking choices in the episode before we learn the tragic truth, we see Misty hand Shauna her healthy, screaming, baby boy, making both us and Shauna believe that he survived. As the girls come to terms with his arrival, Shauna does her best to bond with her son who struggles to breastfeed and connect with his mother before the pair share an intimate breakthrough. "It's so interesting to see the process of her getting to really fall in love with this child that I don't think she wanted," Nélisse says. "She carries so much guilt around, and so much remorse. So I think just her falling in love with this baby and then having it ripped out of her is just, I think, the most traumatizing experience she'll ever undergo."
After Shauna finally bonds with her son, she has a horrific vision of the survivors eating her baby — echoing fears that many viewers had going into his birth — but that's nothing more than a vision. But when Shauna wakes up, she realizes that the rest of her experiences with her new son were just a dream too, as her tearful friends tell her that her baby didn't make it.
So, was there ever a version of Yellowjackets where Shauna's baby survived? "Well, we certainly kicked the tires on everything," Lisco said. "That's just the process. But I think the answer is not really." Lyle and Nickerson quickly agreed both definitively saying, "No."
Lyle is well aware of how rare it is to get to show something this visceral and painful on screen, especially when it comes to childbirth and infant mortality. "The greatest joys of being able to make this show and to make it on this network and with such a supportive team behind us, is that we have on occasion gotten to do things that I feel like I've never really seen before on television. And this felt like an opportunity to do that."
And as Nickerson shared, it was a chance to be honest. "I think the sort of high stakes, physical kind of ordeal, as you mentioned is terrifying now, but there was a time where the infant mortality rates were so high. This was a very difficult thing to do a couple of hundred years ago, which our characters don't even have the resources of a couple of hundred years ago. And so to really try to capture some of the truth of that was just a thing that we thought was cool."
Lisco expanded on Nickerson's thoughts. "I would like to add that aside from the sort of physical trauma of it all, think about the psychic trauma, and not just on Shauna, but also on our other characters, because here they are clinging in a way to something that is not only a distraction, the having of this baby, but also something hopeful. 'Oh, there'll be a new life in the cabin.'"
According to Lisco though, the seemingly better outcome of the baby surviving isn't that clean cut. "Let's unpack that for a second. What happens if the baby actually had survived? They'd have this new life and they're all starving to death and the baby probably would've starved to death and they can't obviously think three chess moves ahead, but that arguably could have been an even more tragic story. So neither scenario is really good, if you think about it."
So Where Does Yellowjackets Go From Here?
Ever since we found out that Shauna was pregnant in Season 1, the potential of her baby's birth and the impact it would have on the group have been a massive conversation point for viewers. Now that we know her baby died, it seems like things are only going to get harder for the survivors. There are some instant outcomes we can expect: Shauna's already fragile mental health is going to suffer greatly from this loss, Lottie's handle on the group will likely falter as she had been promising that the baby would be some kind of savior, and the survival of the crew will likely fall to the logical faction of Nat and Tai as the rest deal with the fallout of the birth. Then there's the question of how this relates to the apparently supernatural events we've seen in the last few episodes, could it drive the girls deeper into the occult? If so, who will be their leader?
In a bigger picture sense this also rules out multiple fan theories including that Lisa could be Shauna's wilderness baby, or that the grown up baby would play a part in the modern timeline. It's also clear that even after the group's cannibalism of Jackie this is the trauma that will truly bond them and is likely still haunting Shauna to this day. It'll be very interesting to see how she reacts to reuniting with Lottie and what we learn about the fallout of the birth as the girls reunite at Camp Green Pine. Perhaps Shauna blames Lottie and Misty for the death of her baby, after all the group did begin to do spooky blood rituals as Shauna labored?
Interestingly as we head into the final episodes of Season 2, we're left with many possibilities: the loss of Shauna's baby could be what sparks off the group delusion that leads to the murderous cannibalism we saw in the Season 1, Episode 1, or it could bring them all closer and some threat we've yet to even imagine could be the thing that sparks off their true desperation. Either way, as Nat so succinctly put it to Jackie's remains "Things out here are going to get a lot worse."
And, while this does kill a whole list of other theories, there is still a chance that they eat that baby…
Some quotes have been edited or condensed for clarity.
Rosie Knight is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything from anime to comic books to kaiju to kids movies to horror flicks. She has over half a decade of experience in entertainment journalism with bylines at Nerdist, Den of Geek, Polygon, and more.
