It’s finally time to rescue the Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets’ fourth and final season comes to Paramount+ on November 20, and yesterday, a teaser dropped showing the survivors’ long-awaited homecoming. In the timeline of the show, it’s been 19 months since the plane crash in the 1990s, and the kids are not alright. Nor are their adult counterparts in the present-day half of the split timeline.

But in season four, it’s finally time for The Rescue, and to see how the survivors did, or did not, reintegrate into their lives, and what all set the stage for the explosion happening amongst their adult selves. The split timeline of the show, half taking place during the wilderness years in the Nineties and half in the present day, allowed for an innate mystery—how did we get from there to here?

Lots of trauma, obviously, but the fun of a show like Yellowjackets is The Reveal, when it all comes together and we can trace all the disparate pieces across the seasons and understand the full narrative. Widow’s Bay operates on a similar narrative frame, setting up the mystery of the island’s past—cursed? Demonic? Haunted?—amidst the unraveling of present circumstances. How is then affecting now?

The trick of such a show, of course, is sticking the landing. Lost famously couldn’t do it. I am reasonably confident, though, that Yellowjackets can get there. They set up so many mysteries at the beginning only to reveal the answers one by one in ways that always maintained logical sense within the world of the show. Going into season four, I feel confident this series won’t let us down, and I hope I didn’t just jinx it.

The season four teaser features Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” playing over scenes of the survivors returning home to New Jersey and being asked a bunch of questions about how they survived while they remember all the terrible and insane things they did in the wilderness. Meanwhile in the present, everything is falling apart for everyone. I really cannot wait to see how series co-creators and showrunners (and real-life married couple) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, er, land this plane. Hopefully, it goes better than the plane in the show.