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Finally: The girls soccer team comes together.
(spoilers, I guess!)
Since the pilot episode teased us with cannibalistic ritual, Yellowjackets has taken its time building up to this moment, and it happens almost accidentally. The team has survived months of frozen wilderness after their plane crash left them stranded. The food has run out, and winter has not abated, leaving no other sources of game. But in "Edible Complex" the girls receive an offering from a mysterious wind, a slab of snow, and a pyre, combining to leave Jackie's corpse well cooked.
Throughout Yellowjackets, we have seen the show's protagonists do awful things, but the narrative has stayed on their side. Their acts of violence tend to happen inadvertently or under duress; think of Tai's sleepwalking or Shauna stabbing her boyfriend. (When Shauna confronts Adam in the first season, her reality is overlaid with images of everything building up inside her: of the plane crash, of human meat, of carving game, of bloody, dripping hair; and, really, Adam mostly steps into the knife himself. When he is finally impaled, it is not adult Shauna but her teenage self who is holding the knife.)
So, when the girls receive their offering, the show brings us along gently, embedding us every step of the way. Shauna's hunger takes her outside first, and the camera lingers on her abdomen. The scent of food draws the other girls out. Lottie crouches beside Shauna. Travis and Taissa share a look.
The camera pans around a bush steering us into a make-believe world laid over reality. In togas and golden jewelry, the team are now ancient Greeks sitting for a Dionysian feast. They are, for once, spotless and clean. And this sensorial fantasy allows the team a respite from the deed, erecting a threshold beyond which transgression is not transgression.
A constellation of eye contact follows, a relay of nonverbal communication before the survivors do what they know they will do. The camera follows their eyelines, jumping from Misty and Travis to Shauna to Taissa to Shauna and Lottie to Nat to Lottie to Travis. The Yellowjackets convene over their team captain, and though Shawna is the spearhead, they are making the decision together.
More than 70 seconds pass before Shauna actually reaches toward food. In the fantasy scenario, it is a plump red strawberry at her fingertips. In reality, she is carving out a chunk of meat. Yellowjackets juxtaposes the two worlds back and forth, as if to say, these are different versions of the same thing — knife, strawberry, slice, grab, up, to her lips, strawberry, meat, juicy strawberry. It is sustenance; it is food and pleasure.
When the bacchanalia unravels, we are right there in the midst. Everything intensifies throughout the scene. They eat tentatively at first and grow more ravenous. Soon, they are eating with their entire bodies, juices spilling in their frenzy. They lose themselves. Fruit gives way to flesh. The editing accelerates, tentative looks are replaced by chomping and crunching and chewing that all bleeds together.
This is what it looks like at its peak: five seconds of action made up 16 shots. Velocity flattens the make-believe feast into the real one. More than a dozen mouths tearing and gnashing and chewing becoming nearly indistinguishable from each other.
When the camera rises up above them, we are expulsed from the feast. Yellowjackets returns to coach Ben, the only survivor who never entered the fray, back on the other side of the threshold. The show closes on this outside perspective, a remainder of civilized society that can only look on as the Yellowjackets dine. From the doorway, Ben gets one last look at the team, and they look like what they really are: starved, desperate creatures hunched over their old teammate.