Catch Up on Yellowjackets Seasons 1–3 Before Season 4

SPOILER WARNING: This article covers major deaths, twists and endings from all three seasons of Yellowjackets.

Shauna ends the third season of Yellowjackets alone, writing about how powerful she once felt in the wilderness. Her husband and daughter have left. Her friends have had enough. And her response is to remember how much she liked being queen.

That should tell you where things stand heading into the final season. With Season 4 arriving on November 20, 2026, here is a refresher on the betrayals, deaths and unfinished business that matter most.

Sophie Thatcher as Natalie and Sophie Nélisse as Shauna in Season 3. Photo: Colin Bentley/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME. Image source

The short version

• Jackie dies in Season 1. Eating her body in Season 2 starts the group’s descent into ritual hunting and cannibalism.
• Natalie survives the first card-draw hunt because Javi dies instead. Adult Natalie later dies protecting Lisa from Misty.
• Season 3 reveals Mari as Pit Girl and Shauna as the Antler Queen seen in the pilot’s feast.
• Callie kills adult Lottie. Melissa kills adult Van. Neither death happens in the wilderness timeline.
• Teen Natalie makes contact with someone outside the wilderness, but the rescue has not yet played out.

Season 1: The crash changes who has power

In 1996, a New Jersey girls’ soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness while traveling to nationals. The survivors eventually spend 19 months stranded. The show follows both that ordeal and the lives they build roughly 25 years later.

Jackie arrives with the authority of a team captain, but popularity turns out to be a poor survival skill. Misty, previously an outsider, suddenly becomes useful. She saves assistant coach Ben Scott by amputating his injured leg, then secretly destroys the plane’s emergency device after hearing how much the others appreciate her.

That need to be needed explains an awful lot about Misty.

Meanwhile, Lottie’s visions attract followers, Taissa’s disturbing sleepwalking emerges, and Laura Lee dies trying to fly an abandoned plane to safety. The mushroom-fueled Doomcoming party gives the group its first taste of hunting a person when several girls turn on Travis.

The season’s most painful betrayal starts before the crash. Shauna has been sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend, Jeff, and is pregnant with his child. Once Jackie learns the truth, their friendship collapses. After their argument, Jackie spends the night outside the cabin and freezes to death.

Jackie is not murdered in a ritual. Her death comes from an ordinary teenage fight that nobody fixes before the weather turns. That is part of what makes Shauna’s guilt so hard to shake.

In the adult timeline, Shauna is married to Jeff and having an affair with Adam Martin. She kills Adam because she suspects he is blackmailing the survivors. The actual blackmailer is Jeff, trying to solve his financial problems. Shauna brings the others into the cover-up, creating fresh reasons for them to protect one another’s secrets.

Natalie also learns that adult Travis is dead. His death becomes central to her search for answers about what followed them home.

For our take on the show’s opening season, revisit GVN’s Yellowjackets Season 1 Blu-ray review.

Season 2: Hunger becomes a reason to hunt

The first winter brings the moment the series has been threatening from the start. The survivors attempt to cremate Jackie’s body, but snow falls onto the pyre. The smell draws the starving group outside, and they eat her. Ben refuses to participate.

Shauna then loses her baby during childbirth. The scenes in which she nurses him and discovers the others eating him are hallucinations. The group does not eat Shauna’s baby. Her grief later erupts in a brutal attack on Lottie.

Misty loses Crystal, the friend she has trusted with her biggest secret. After Misty admits destroying the plane’s device, Crystal recoils. Misty threatens her, and Crystal backs off a cliff. Misty does not physically push her, a distinction Sammi Hanratty and the producers discussed with Entertainment Tonight.

As starvation worsens, the group introduces the card draw. Whoever pulls the queen of hearts becomes the sacrifice. Natalie draws it, but Travis gives her a chance to run. Javi tries to help her escape, falls through the ice and drowns while the others allow it to happen.

Natalie lives because they accept Javi as her replacement. They eat him, and Lottie declares Natalie their new leader. Natalie gets the authority Shauna wanted, with a death she cannot forget attached to it.

The season ends with the cabin burning down. Suspicion falls on Ben, although the series leaves his responsibility open to interpretation. The survivors escape, but their shelter is gone.

GVN’s Season 2 Blu-ray review takes a closer look at a season that made some particularly divisive choices.

Why adult Natalie’s death still matters

In the present, the women reunite at Lottie’s wellness compound. Lottie says Travis died during an attempt to approach death and connect with the wilderness. Her account includes a malfunctioning crane control and her own disturbing visions, so remember that this explanation comes from Lottie.

Taissa reconnects with Van, her teenage girlfriend, who now has terminal cancer. Their reunion gives Lottie’s belief in sacrifice an especially dangerous appeal.

The adults repeat the card ritual, with Shauna drawing the queen. Callie interrupts the hunt by shooting Lottie in the arm. When Lisa arrives with a gun, Misty moves to inject her with a lethal drug. Natalie steps in to protect Lisa and receives the injection instead.

The reversal hurts: teenage Natalie survives when somebody else dies for her; adult Natalie dies saving somebody else. Misty has killed the friend she was desperate to protect.

Elsewhere at the compound, Walter kills detective Kevyn Tan and coerces his partner into accepting a fabricated account that diverts the murder investigation away from the women. His devotion to Misty now comes with a body count.

Season 3: Shauna takes over, and rescue becomes a threat

Warmer weather improves the group’s immediate prospects, but it does very little for their relationships. Natalie’s leadership unravels as Shauna becomes more aggressive.

The survivors capture Ben and put him on trial over the cabin fire. After his imprisonment and mutilation, Natalie kills him at his request. Shauna exploits that decision to take control, and the group eats him.

Ben’s guilt remains a separate question. In Steven Krueger’s interview with TV Insider, the actor explains that the show leaves room for interpretation. His personal approach to playing Ben does not make the fire a solved mystery.

Then three outsiders arrive: frog researchers Hannah and Edwin, and their guide, Kodi. This should be the breakthrough the survivors have wanted. Instead, Lottie kills Edwin, and Hannah and Kodi become captives. They have witnessed too much.

Hannah later kills Kodi to survive Shauna’s wrath. Watching her learn how to appease the group is a reminder of how quickly their rules can swallow somebody new.

Pit Girl is Mari, and Shauna is the Antler Queen

The Season 3 finale finally returns to the nightmare that opened the series.

Akilah has killed the group’s livestock, helping create the conditions for another hunt. Taissa and Van try to manipulate the card draw so Hannah will be selected. Shauna disrupts the order, and Mari draws the queen of hearts.

Mari runs wearing Jackie’s heart necklace, eventually stripping down to the white nightgown viewers recognize from the pilot. She falls into the spike-lined pit and dies. At the feast, Shauna occupies the Antler Queen role.

The reveal also puts the supposed fairness of the ritual in perspective. These people are manipulating the outcome, protecting favorites and settling scores while speaking as if the wilderness makes the decisions.

 

While the hunt provides a distraction, Natalie pursues a way out. Van and Misty’s work repairing the satellite phone, using parts from the plane’s damaged device, makes the attempt possible. Natalie also discovers what Misty did after the crash.

Hannah disguises herself as Natalie, buying her time to reach higher ground. Natalie makes a distress call and hears a man’s reply.

Contact has been made. A rescue has not yet happened. We still do not know who answers, how help reaches them or what happens before they leave.

Melissa’s return tears apart the adult survivors

Season 3 reveals another survivor: Melissa, played as an adult by Hilary Swank. Shauna’s former wilderness girlfriend faked her death and built a new life as Kelly. Her wife, Alex, is Hannah’s daughter.

Melissa sends Shauna a recording from the wilderness. It includes evidence of Edwin’s killing and Hannah’s message to her daughter. Shauna treats its arrival as a threat and confronts Melissa, eventually biting a chunk from her arm.

Melanie Lynskey as Shauna and Hilary Swank as Melissa in Season 3. Image: Paramount+. Image source.

When the other women become involved, Melissa tries to kill them with carbon monoxide. Van saves her friends but then refuses to kill Melissa. Melissa stabs her instead.

Van’s cancer has shaped the season, but Melissa is the person who kills her. As Liv Hewson explained to Entertainment Weekly, Van’s final choice is to stop justifying another act of violence.

Taissa responds by taking Van’s body into the woods, eating her heart and burying her. Whatever distance Tai once tried to maintain from their old rituals has collapsed.

Callie killed Lottie, and Jeff finally leaves Shauna

Adult Lottie’s death initially looks like another threat targeting the survivors. The finale reveals that Callie pushed her down the stairs during a confrontation over the recording.

Lottie tells Callie about the hunting and cannibalism, then suggests that the force associated with the wilderness lives in both her and Shauna. Callie is frightened and angry. She does not intend the push to kill Lottie.

Misty pieces together what happened. Callie then confesses to Jeff, who takes his daughter away from the family home. After years of helping Shauna explain away her behavior, he decides Callie needs protection from it.

Shauna also finds Melissa’s missing letter, which supports Melissa’s explanation that sending the tape was an attempt to let go of the past. She destroys it. By the finale’s end, she is writing about how much she misses the power she had in the woods.

Where the living adult survivors stand

Travis, Natalie, Lottie and Van are dead in the adult timeline. Their younger selves remain part of the wilderness story. Walter, meanwhile, is watching Misty and Taissa as their alliance forms.

What Season 4 still needs to answer

The biggest remaining question is what happens between Natalie’s call and the rescue. Hannah is alive at the end of Season 3, and the show has yet to depict how her time with the group ends. There are also survivors whose eventual fates have not been established.

Just as pressing is what the girls agree to conceal when they get home. Eating the dead to survive would be difficult enough to discuss. Explaining the hunts, the outsiders and the people who resisted leaving is another matter.

The wilderness itself remains unresolved. Visions, symbols and Taissa’s other self keep the supernatural possibility alive, but the characters’ convictions are not proof. We have repeatedly watched them turn a convenient explanation into permission to hurt somebody.

If the show’s unsettling sound has helped keep you guessing, GVN’s interview with composers Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker examines how they gave the wilderness its voice.

For Shauna, the immediate problem is more personal. Jeff has taken Callie away, and Misty and Taissa are no longer willing to keep her safe just because they share a past. She remembers being queen. The people around her remember what that cost.

When does Yellowjackets Season 4 premiere?

Yellowjackets Season 4 premieres Friday, November 20, 2026, on Paramount+ for Paramount+ Premium subscribers in the U.S. It is the fourth and final season. According to Paramount+’s official guide, Seasons 1 and 2 are available across its plans, while Season 3 requires Premium.