Yellowjackets Season 2 Solves The Mystery Of Jackie's Notebook
This piece contains spoilers for the second season of "Yellowjackets."
So, remember back in the first season of "Yellowjackets" where it seemed like queen bee Jackie (Ella Purnell) was going to survive the 19 months the soccer team spent in the woods? One of the seemingly-damning pieces of evidence was her diary, which her former bestie Shauna (Sophie Nélisse and Melanie Lynskey) reads during a visit to her house. As an adult, Shauna sees that the pages of Jackie's notebook are covered in writings about things that couldn't have happened when they were stranded in the Canadian wilderness, like referencing movies that had yet to come out. For a while, it was pretty plausible that Jackie did survive and avoided being eaten by her teammates, but as the final moments of the season finale rolled around, we realized that was far from the case.
However, despite Jackie becoming a sleeping popsicle, one question was likely on everyone's minds. If she is dead, then why was her notebook full of references to the then-future? Well, we don't have to wait long for that answer, because the season two premiere of "Yellowjackets" has got us covered. As it turns out, Shauna was writing in the notebook the entire time in a bizarre but strangely understandable coping mechanism.
Mansion, apartment, shack, house
As Smashing Pumpkins' "Drown" plays in the background, we see a sight nobody probably expected in the flashbacks: a clearly alive Jackie playing a game of MASH with Shauna. She gives her a startlingly-accurate reading of her former best friend's future, saying that she will live in a house married to the school's quarterback, Jeff (Jack DePew and Warren Kole). Shauna doesn't believe it at first, so she grabs the notebook from Jackie's hands, only to reveal that Jackie is a hallucination. It's been two months since she froze to death outside of the cabin the survivors are living in, and Shauna has kept her frozen body in the cabin's shack to keep conversation with. The rest of the team thinks it's weird, but at least she has a supporter in Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), who defends her by saying that these "meetings" bring her comfort in an otherwise horrific situation.
That doesn't make it any less weird, though, especially when hallucination-Jackie begins grilling Shauna on what happened between her and Jeff that eventually got her pregnant. When her inner monologue gets to be too much, Shauna pushes Jackie's body against the cabin wall, the force tearing off one of the corpse's ears. Take a wild guess what Shauna decides to do with that ear.
An effective and emotional twist
The "dead friend becomes the main character's conscience" trope can be a bit tiresome. Pardon the pun, but it's been done to death in several movies and television shows by this point. However, Jackie becoming the manifestation of Shauna's guilt makes all the sense in the world. The two were the closest of friends before the accident, growing more distrustful of each other until Shauna kicked Jackie out of the team's cabin out of anger. She knows that she is responsible for her friend's death, and as Ben tells the rest of the Yellowjackets, Shauna needs to pretend to make peace with Jackie lest she not lose her mind.
Her writing in Jackie's diary as she pretends to have conversations with her only solidifies this, especially the pages that reference the supposed "future." This coping mechanism of hers wouldn't just stop after their rescue in 1998. She likely continued this for a long time afterward, wanting to imagine a world where Jackie survived and came home with the rest of the survivors. In order to avoid the real situations she finds herself in, she wants to imagine a reality where she has total control. Even though she eventually stopped writing in the notebook, Shauna's desires to maintain that perfect fantasy manifest in other ways, such as overprotecting her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) and killing her side lover Adam (Peter Gadiot) at the first hint of betrayal. In both the flashbacks and the modern portions of the show, it's only a matter of time before she snaps for good.