Tawny Cypress Knows Why Tai Cut Van Out Of Her Life In Yellowjackets Season 2
This post contains spoilers through the fourth episode of "Yellowjackets" season 2.
In the first few episodes of "Yellowjackets" season 1, it seems like present-day Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is doing the best out of all the known survivors. She's a rich, well-regarded politician running for a New Jersey state senate seat, with a loving wife, Simone, and a cute son named Sammy. But by this point in season 2 of "Yellowjackets," we're starting to wonder if Taissa's actually the worst off. Her sleepwalking habits have now isolated her from her family and have put her wife in a coma, and at this rate it doesn't seem like she'll be able to hold onto that senate seat for much longer. Even Natalie, staying at Lottie's purple cult, has got a new friend. But Taissa lately has no one left in her life who can understand her. At least, no one except Van.
Adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) is revealed at the end of "Old Wounds" to be the person Taissa has traveled all this way to see. They don't say anything to each other before the credits roll, but when Van sees Taissa walk into the room, she makes a face that's filled with mixed emotions. There's a lot of history between these two characters, and not all of it is good.
With the confirmation of adult Van, "Yellowjackets" has now raised the question of why she and Taissa are no longer together. They're still on good terms in the teen storyline, so what sort of dark, crazy stuff happened that would make adult Tai go fourteen episodes without ever mentioning her? Well, Cypress has her own theory.
The queen of compartmentalization
"I think that [Taissa] has compartmentalized [Van]," Tawny Cypress told TV Line in a recent interview. "Put her away in a box when they ended their relationship. She says how many girls she f***ed in college and all this other stuff. It didn't even dawn on her to connect with Van again until the other Tai came out and told her to do so."
As fans can recall from adult Taissa's season 1 heart-to-heart with Shauna, young post-wilderness Taissa went out and did everything she'd originally planned to do, continuing along the plans she made for herself back in high school as if nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred. Throughout season 1, she clearly wants to think of those 19 months in the wilderness as some separate period of her life, one with no bearing on anything that happened to her before or after. If she has to get rid of Van in order to maintain that illusion, so be it.
"I think she is too much into making her life as perfect as possible and she's a narcissist so, she's not just thinking about old, past relationships," Cypress speculated. But as "Yellowjackets" has made abundantly clear by this point, you can never just ignore your past. Maybe that's why Bad Taissa is so much scarier and more violent than what we've seen from any of the other survivors so far. Taissa's tried the hardest to bury everything that happened, so when the past does come back to the surface, it returns with far more of a vengeance than she expected. It turns out that if you try to lock something away for 25 years, it's going to be angry at you when it finally gets out.
Where Van and Taissa go from here
But now that Taissa's seems to realize that compartmentalizing isn't a great long-term strategy for dealing with trauma, it looks like she might let Van back into her life after all. But does Van want Taissa back in her life? It's not clear yet. There's still nearly a year's worth of wilderness drama for the teen characters to deal with, so there's no telling what sort of other horrible stuff will happen that might keep adult Taissa and Van apart.
On the other hand, "Yellowjackets" is currently lacking in endgame couples to root for. Sure there's Jeff and Shauna, but those two are already together, so there's not a whole lot of dramatic tension there. Taissa and Van, meanwhile, still have a lot of obstacles to go through before they can ever get back to the bliss of their happy teenage relationship in the wilderness. Adult Taissa still has a family she cares about, even if that family increasingly wants nothing to do with her. We don't know what the deal is with Van exactly, but it certainly seems like she's already got a comfortable life for herself without Taissa around.
Whatever happens with these two, we can at least trust that next week's episode will finally give us the long-awaited proper introduction to adult Vanessa Palmer. What's she been up to these past 25 years? What questionable coping mechanism has she found for herself? Next week's episode promises us some answers on this front. Taissa may have tried to put Van away in a box, but the show itself has no intention of doing the same.