Showtime’s Yellowjackets has been a huge hit this winter, and fans are already desperate for more. The good news is that the show has already been renewed for season 2; the bad news is that they still have to film it, so it might be a while before we get to see what else happened out in the woods.
In the meantime, this is all the info we’ve gathered about season 2 of Yellowjackets so far.
Will there be a season 2 of Yellowjackets?
Yes, Yellowjackets renewed for season 2 in December, and the show’s Instagram account posted a fun announcement with one of the mysterious postcards reading, “Season 2.”
They captioned it, “Those girls were special. They were champions. The #Yellowjackets will return for Season 2!”
“Yellowjackets has been an unadulterated sensation for Showtime,” Showtime entertainment president Gary Levine told The Hollywood Reporter. “We are overwhelmed by both the acclaim and the audience response to our series, including several ‘Best of 2021’ lists, a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and snowballing viewership. Clearly there is a hunger for originality and audacity, and our incredible showrunners Ashley, Bart and Jonathan, along with their pitch-perfect cast, have delivered that and so much more. I can’t wait to see the surprises they have in store for us in season two.”
Will there be more seasons after?
Yellowjackets creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickersonn also told THR in an interview for their TV Podcast that they have big plans for the series.
“We pitched it as a five-season idea,” Nickerson said. Then at the Vulture Festival panel for the series, star Melanie Lynskey mentioned that Nickerson and Lyle have already talked to her about a longer run, all the way to the end of five seasons. Long live Shauna!
In an interview with ELLE, Lyle said that the pair have been planning things out for the long-term.
“We absolutely have a plan and we have, I think, maybe most importantly, an endpoint,” said Lyle. “We know what we want to be building toward. As writers, we have to be flexible, especially now that we have this incredible writing staff and you have all these beautiful brains coming together to think about the paces that we can put these characters through. But we do have an endpoint, and we have tent poles along the way of things we know we want to happen. To some extent, the question is just, if we have an idea of how we get there, can we find a better idea?”
When will season 2 of Yellowjackets come out?
Production on the first season was delayed by COVID-19, but with fans hungry for more of Showtime’s big hit, it seems likely they’ll push through to release season 2 soon, but an exact premiere date hasn’t been confirmed yet.
Good news though: Filming on season 2 will commence in Vancouver in “mid-August,” stars Melanie Lynskey and Tawney Cypress told Entertainment Tonight.
What will season 2 of Yellowjackets be about?
Right now, the show is exploring the repercussions of the team’s 19 months stuck in the wilderness, the possible supernatural forces holding them there, and the interpersonal relationships that are keeping people hooked. That timeline starts in 1996, but it looks like we’ll be seeing more of the Yellowjackets survivors in modern times.
Especially our favs played by Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey, and Christina Ricci.
Fans are still trying to figure out the big mysteries, though they have some theories about them. But one of the biggest theories—that it’s Jackie who ends up falling to her death in the pit— has proven to be incorrect. Jackie died in the season 1 finale, freezing to death just a few feet from the warm cabin after a fight with her supposed BFF Shauna. Another reveal was that someone named “Lottie Matthews” is alive in the older women’s present reality, though whether it’s actually Lottie has yet to be revealed.
The finale also saw Taissa win her senate run on the same night her wife discovers a very disturbing altar featuring the family’s dog…or its head, anyway. Is Taissa aware of her dark magic or is she really sleep-walking, and is the supernatural element of the show being confirmed? Nothing like a sacrifice to forward your political career.
And finally, Nat’s been thrown into a van by a bunch of cult henchman bearing the creepy symbol found all around the cabin in the woods. That’s a lot of new threads to untangle.
But it might be a while until we get to the cannibalism.
“I know that there’s a certain amount of anticipation about the cannibalism amongst viewers,” said Lyle. “And we, first and foremost, want to make sure that—if we’re going to go there, and we’re going to go to such an extreme place—that we really earn it, and we earn our characters getting to that point and making that choice.”
Who is in the Yellowjackets season 2 cast?
We can expect to see most of the cast, both the younger and older counterparts, again. In addition to Lewis, Cypress, Lynskey, and Ricci, the gals playing them in the woods will have to stick around, which means Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Sophie Nelisse, and Jasmin Savoy Brown. It looks like Courtney Eaton will be furthering her reign as the Antler Queen, and Liv Hewson is becoming one of her followers, so we should see them, too. Though Ella Purnell’s character is frozen, she has appeared to Shauna in the future, so it’s possible we’ll see her again—perhaps in the strange purgatory we see in Jackie’s final moments?
As for new cast members, Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) is joining the cast as grown Van—which means Van lives!
Obi-Wan Kenobi star Simone Kessell has also been cast as grown-up Lottie, which confirms that our antler queen also survives into adulthood. (Though the finale also hinted at that.)
Have any Yellowjackets fan theories been confirmed?
Viewers have had a lot of fun conjecturing about what exactly would be happening from episode to episode, and there were plenty of unanswered questions after the season 1 finale. The show is allegedly going to be five seasons long, so we probably still won’t have all our answers in season 2, but actress Christina Ricci officially denied one of the most persistent fan theories: that the team ate Shauna’s baby out in the woods.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Ricci says that she asked the writers, “‘We don’t eat Shauna’s baby, do we?’ They said no.”
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Phew!
Unfortunately for fans of actress Ella Purnell, she denied that Jackie is actually alive despite viewers seeing she froze to death in the last episode. She also insisted that young Misty had nothing to do with the plane crash, even if she was largely responsible for how long it took the team to be found.
This story has been updated.
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.