Returning to the chilly brutality of the wilderness for Season 2, Yellowjackets immediately reminds us that our misplaced protagonists are nonetheless, the truth is, youngsters, with one completely chosen track.
Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, the primary episode takes you proper again to the woods, with the season’s opening photographs hovering over the awful, wild panorama and creeping again into the cabin of Camp Yellowjackets. And with this return comes Sharon Van Etten’s regular, hovering, anthem for late teenhood and the discomfort of fast change, “Seventeen.”
‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Episode 1 kicks off with our first chew — and an equally massive clue
The observe, taken from Van Etten’s 2019 banger of an album, Remind Me Tomorrow, builds because the collection re-introduces the crew members one after the other, sleeping of their makeshift beds, nonetheless misplaced within the woods with no rescue on the horizon. They don’t seem to be all slumbering, nonetheless, as Travis and Natalie gear as much as hunt recreation and seek for a lacking Javi. No, these aren’t common actions for suburban teen soccer gamers.
Comfortable.
Credit score: Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME.
Subsequent, “Seventeen” follows the Yellowjackets out of the wilderness to scenes of their rescue, scoring Lottie’s expertise of being dedicated to a psychiatric establishment and electroconvulsive remedy by her mother and father. Within the first scenes of Yellowjackets Season 2, we’re firmly reminded of the characters’ youth, and the brutality of sudden change — or moderately, misplaced time.
Van Etten co-wrote “Seventeen” with songwriter Kate Davis about residing in New York, reflecting on the disillusionment that comes with revisiting a neighbourhood you spent cherished time in throughout your youth, and seeing not solely the way it’s modified however the way it’s populated by shiny new teenagers: “I was free/I was seventeen/Comply with my shadow/Round your nook/I was seventeen/Now you are identical to me.” Chatting with the track’s producer John Congleton, on podcast Tune Exploder(Opens in a brand new tab), Van Etten mirrored on the pivotal shift within the track when she screams, “I do know what you are gonna be.”
“In that explosive second, who had been you picturing you had been singing to?” asks Congleton.
“Me. Like younger me in New York that thought I knew every thing. However I additionally envision my mother simply singing that to me too, you realize. The extra that I lived with it and labored on it, it felt like a multi sort of generational track. I want that I had listened to her when she would give me recommendation or say that I might be open along with her. And I simply, I used to be so closed off and I didn’t settle for like her assist or steerage, and I believed I knew higher.
“For some motive, every time a dad or mum provides you recommendation or says that they know or they perceive, like as a child you simply do not imagine them, that they ever had been a human being, you realize. The older I get, and now particularly I’ve a son, I am increasingly like my mom than I ever realized. You already know, I believe as you grow old and you’ve got increasingly hindsight, hopefully, you’ll be able to forgive who you had been, you’ll be able to forgive your self. You’ll be able to have extra of an understanding of the place you had been coming from and likewise the place your mother and father had been coming from. It is positively a message to her, to myself. It is an apology, nevertheless it’s additionally forgiveness. You already know, I really feel prefer it’s giving me slightly little bit of closure on my previous and acknowledging the weaknesses but additionally embracing them.”
To me, the track’s strongest use in a TV collection lies in Netflix’s Intercourse Schooling, in probably the most transferring episode of the collection. Primarily based on author Laurie Nunn’s private expertise, Season 2, episode 7 centres on Aimee Gibbs’ (Aimée Lou Wooden) sexual assault. On the very finish of the episode, after Aimee has confided in her fellow feminine classmates that she’s unable to get again on the bus the place the assault occurred, there’s a wonderful second of solidarity once they share their very own experiences of assault and harassment. Later, in probably the most highly effective scenes I’ve watched on TV, Aimee’s mates flip up on the bus cease to help her, as Van Etten’s “Seventeen” builds.
Regardless of being particularly linked to her New York expertise and her frustrations at neighborhoods, venues, and locations from her youth changing into unfamiliar, Van Etten’s “Seventeen” has a broader thematic energy when deployed in TV representations of youth ladies. The track successfully encapsulates the discomfort of fast change for characters in each Yellowjackets and Intercourse Schooling, and the bizarre feeling of current nostalgia, of rising up quicker than you need to need to. An ideal music alternative.
Yellowjackets Season 2 premieres March 24 on Showtime’s web site and app, with new episodes launched weekly on Fridays(opens in a brand new tab). Episodes additionally air each Sunday on Showtime at 9 p.m. ET, beginning March 26.
