Yellowjackets Finally Revealed The Truth About Travis' Death, And It's Worse Than We Thought
This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets."
It's always been a tight race between Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress for the most emotionally searing performance from the adult cast of "Yellowjackets." Cypress' Taissa became the biggest success of the survivors after returning from the wilderness, creating a beautiful family with her loving wife, Simone (Rukiya Bernard), and winning a seat in the New Jersey state senate. But her dark side, which was awakened by those woods but did not disappear when she escaped them, has also caused her to fall the furthest. The near-feral state of unconscious savagery and self-division Taissa has descended to over the course of season two has broken up her family, jeopardized her career, and seriously threatened her sanity.
Nearly all of adult Taissa's scenes are hard to watch these days, which can't be said about adult Natalie's (Juliette Lewis). Sequestered at Lottie's cultish wellness compound Camp Green Pine, Natalie has become a constant and delightful source of caustic disruption, as in the most recent episode when she bursts into a silent group meditation session, screaming about documents she just stole from Lottie's office. But when Natalie does go to that tortured place, Lewis' anguished intensity can be almost too much to bear. And nothing has been worse for Natalie than the death of Travis (Andres Soto/Kevin Alves), the boy she fell in love with in the wilderness who became the dead body at the center of one of "Yellowjackets'" grimmest mysteries.
We learned more about Travis' death earlier this season from Lottie, who was actually there when it happened, but episode 5 has finally given us the answer to the question that's haunted Natalie the most: what is the meaning of Travis' final note, "tell Nat she was right?"
'Right' about what?
At the end of the season 1 episode "The Dollhouse," Natalie and Misty (Christina Ricci) discover Travis hanging from a crane in his lofty, rural farmhouse, surrounded by flickering candles and that pesky symbol that keeps cropping up everywhere. They're too late to save him, but they do find the cryptic note, which Misty takes to be a kind of suicide letter. Natalie insists that Travis would never kill himself, despite all the indicators pointing to the contrary. Now we know from Lottie that Natalie was right. Travis wanted to push himself as close to the border between life and death as possible to, per Lottie, "confront the darkness to see what it wants." He always meant for Lottie to lower him down before things got critical, but the button jammed — at least that's her story for now — and Travis ultimately succumbed to that darkness.
The desperate nature of Travis' end-of-life bid for freedom testifies to how extreme and unending the haunting must have been. To put your life at such high risk in so rash a manner in order to actually save your own life is an inconceivable calculation to most of us. But try seeing Travis' final act through Taissa's eyes. Constantly hunted by the horrifying man with no eyes, stripped completely of the grounding force of her support system, and psychically cleaved in two because of it. The extraordinary lengths Travis went to rid himself of his demons probably don't seem so extraordinary to Taissa at this point.
Which makes the million-dollar question all the more urgent: what exactly was Nat "right" about?
'We brought it back with us'
After Nat bad vibes everyone out of Lottie's group meditation session at the end of season 2 episode 5, something shifts in their dynamic. Nat looks genuinely rattled by her own instability, and Lottie gets angry with her for the first time. "Travis said you were right about something," she says, "and it was obviously important enough to leave you a message about it. Don't you want to know what that is? [...] I want to know what he was going through." Nat snaps back: "You know what he was going through. You started it."
This is the chicken/egg scenario that underlines the entire series: did the girls awaken something supernatural when they crash-landed in the woods, or did that supernatural something compel them into the woods in the first place? It's all very "Lost," and so is what happens next: some light EDMR therapy.
The episode closes on Lottie rapidly flashing a pen light into Nat's eyes and asking her probing questions about Travis. Lulled into a trance state, Nat dredges forth a volcanic eruption of repressed memories. "What do you see?" Lottie asks. Nat sees the crash site, but "none of us survived." She sees the Antler Queen, a deeply distorted vision of herself as a kind of glowering, black-eyed wraith, and in a memory of her final night with Travis, whispers: "I saw it, I felt it, we brought it back. We brought it back with us."
Natural or supernatural?
In the '90s timeline, Nat is one of the last holdouts who refuses to believe there's anything in those woods besides snow, trees, and bears ... even though she's been attacked by an otherworldly, snow-white moose, induced into a cannibalistic fervor, and witnessed hundreds of dead birds dropping out of the sky, among other increasingly commonplace happenings.
But in the present timeline, having escaped the woods, it seems that before Travis, before Taissa, and certainly before Shauna and Misty, who remain un-haunted by spectral visions of the past, Nat was the first to sense that they hadn't escaped completely. This is what Nat was "right" about. Moments before his death, Travis confided to Lottie that he felt "the wilderness has come back to haunt him." As ever, the creative team behind "Yellowjackets" have made discerning the source of those hauntings impossibly complex.
Take the image of Nat the black-eyed wraith. It's immediately preceded by a vision of the chainmail-veiled antler queen sweeping through the fuselage of the eviscerated plane, suggesting it could be Nat. But the image is of Juliette Lewis, not her younger counterpart Sophie Thatcher; how could '90s Nat take the form of a Nat that wouldn't develop for another 25 years? Is adult Nat imposing her very much real-world-derived grief on the past, or is she accessing a legitimate memory? Is the antler queen we saw from the pilot the manifestation of some dark-hearted supernatural menace, or simple hunger, exhaustion, and isolation driving a bunch of teenagers to acts of desperate violence?
Among an ensemble of incredible characters, Natalie has become the soul of "Yellowjackets." So if we're ever going to get answers to these questions, I'd keep my eyes on her.
New episodes of "Yellowjackets" stream on Showtime every Friday and air on television every Sunday.