‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses on Crowning [SPOILER] the Antler Queen and Ideas for a Possible Season 4

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “Yellowjackets,” titled “Full Circle,” streaming now on Paramount+ with Showtime.

It’s Mari!

The identity of Pit Girl was finally revealed in the Season 3 finale of “Yellowjackets,” when Mari (Alexa Barajas) accidentally plunged to her death into the stake-filled pit while being hunted by her soccer teammates. The episode also confirmed the true identity of the pilot episode’s Antler Queen: Turns out it was Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) all along.

In the 1990s timeline, the teen plane-crash survivors must endure another harsh winter in the Canadian wilderness, and after their primary source of meat — the farm animals — all die (due to poisoning by Akilah, played by Nia Sondaya), the group again participates in a sacrificial ritual to survive.

Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) can’t bear to lose another friend, so they rig the deck of cards to ensure that outsider Hannah (Ashley Sutton) will draw the Queen of Hearts. However, Shauna grows suspicious of them and decides to switch her position in the circle, declaring, “I trust whatever ‘It’ wills.” As a result, Mari ends up drawing the marked card instead, and the events from the first episode of “Yellowjackets” unfold.

In an interview with Variety, co-showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco discussed recreating the Pit Girl scene, what Shauna the Antler Queen might look like in modern-day New Jersey, and what’s ahead for a potential Season 4.

Bart, walk me through how you recreated the Pit Girl scene. Did you speak with Karyn Kusama, the director of the pilot, about her approach to that scene? 

Bart Nickerson: I had talked to Karyn extensively during the shooting of the pilot. She’s also a friend, so she’s always been very generous about allowing us to pick her brain about directing in general — and about “Yellowjackets” specifically. 

In terms of the process, it’s both simple and complicated. It’s pouring over every frame of footage that we have and just trying to painstakingly recreate it. And then where we can’t exactly recreate it — get it as close as we can, and use lens and angle to hide any places that the match can’t be completely perfect. Just a painstaking, very detailed approach. 

What was the most challenging aspect of directing this episode in particular? There were so many questions answered in this finale. 

Nickerson: It was definitely the scope of it and the ambition in terms of having a return to the beginning, both aesthetically and narratively. To catch up to where the pilot began and to have that feel both satisfying but also kind of a new beginning. It was challenging — I think throughout the breaking stage, the script stage, the shooting stage, and then the cutting stage. It’s a big season, a big episode, and we’re really proud of how it came out.

Ashley Lyle: I would also like to take the opportunity to give a shoutout to Ameni Rozsa, who wrote the finale script. We all worked in tandem with each other all season. It really is a team effort, but Ameni absolutely killed this script. She brought so many pieces together; she really brought it home.

Throughout Season 3, teen Shauna keeps losing allies and, by the end, she really has no one on her side. So why don’t the other girls band together and stand up to Shauna early on? Why do they allow her to get away with so many things that she’s done this season? 

Nickerson: I think this is, in part, one of the mysteries to group dynamics that the show is kind of obsessed with. Bullies are sometimes able to dominate a larger group; tyrants are left in power. There is some sort of interpersonal — a kind of alchemy — that seems to transcend the raw, iconological force-on-force equation of, “Well, there’s a lot of us and only one of them.” But somehow, still, the majority of us will find ourselves afraid and cowed by the decisiveness of a powerful leader. 

I would point to almost any ’80s or ’90s teen movie, you know, in theory, that the nerds and the losers could always band together and take down the bullies. But that’s not really the way, I think, social interactions work — or politics.

Lyle: For them to band together to sort of hurt Shauna — to kill Shauna — I don’t know that, for a lot of them, they really crossed that line emotionally, even though that would make a lot of sense. They’re still thinking like teenage girls. These are their friends and teammates. One of them is being a bit of a tyrant, but the idea of actually taking her down — until Melissa [Jenna Burgess], during the hunt, goes after her — I don’t know that, up until that point, they’ve completely thought about it. I would also argue that, with the idea of the hunt, Akilah really set the stage by poisoning the animals to force a hunt.

We finally learn that Shauna is the Antler Queen from the pilot. Was she always intended to be that mysterious character we see at the beginning?

Lyle: I think that it’s been really interesting for us as these last few episodes have dropped, because we’re getting a lot of questions about Shauna as a villain, and how shocking it is — particularly with Melanie Lynskey being adult Shauna and the inherent niceness that Melanie is so good at portraying. We like to think that, if you look back over the first three seasons, there are a lot of clues dropped that Shauna is maybe not as nice and kind and benevolent as maybe you would at first think. So, to our minds, this has been a very long, slow build towards Shauna as everything the Antler Queen represents, which is the most feral, the most animalistic, the most excited by that power that comes with being the leader and being out in the wilderness.

Shauna has really tapped back into that feral side in the adult timeline. Does that mean she wants to be the Antler Queen again? And what would the Antler Queen in modern-day New Jersey even look like?

Lisco: That’s exactly what’s great about a Season 4, actually, and we would love to explore that. It’s interesting, to me at least, that some of the audience is saying, “Wow, Shauna has gone so dark.” And, as Ashley said, the seeds were definitely sowed when she was doing all sorts of things, like killing a rabbit with a shovel — et cetera, et cetera — in the early stages. I feel like the word we used for it the other day was self-imprisonment. She was imprisoning herself in this domestic situation, and she was trying to quash all these impulses for many years, and now they have been unleashed.

But not only unleashed — she now has a self-perception that has changed, and she’s able to embrace some of these as an intrinsic part of her character in a way that was not able to do before. So, to answer your question — super exciting, I think, is the answer.

Before Callie [Sarah Desjardins] pushes Lottie [Simone Kessell] down the stairs to her death, Lottie tells her that she is “Its” child. What does this mean for Callie, and will she have some supernatural connection — or even supernatural powers?

Lyle: I think that the question of It — what It is, does It really exist — is still very much at play. I think that the ramifications of what Callie has done are going to definitely reverberate outside of even the question of the supernatural. What does it mean to be Shauna’s daughter? What does it mean to have killed somebody? What does that mean about her, and what does it mean about her relationship to her family and the other survivors who were out there? So I think that will very much come into play and be something that is top of mind for Callie moving forward.

There has been a lot of online discourse surrounding the “Bury Your Gays” trope after Van’s [Lauren Ambrose] death, especially because Van and Taissa [Tawny Cypress] were the most prominent gay couple among the group, and many fans didn’t think they had enough time together as adults. What’s your response to those who felt that the show fell into that trope?

Lyle: It’s one that we talked about extensively in our writers’ room. I think our writers’ room is majority queer, so it’s something that we’re very aware of and wanted to be very careful about. But, I think, at the same time, when you have a show with quite a few queer characters, and a show where a lot of people are going to die, that becomes something that you’re going to have to deal with. And it’s actually sort of bittersweet and heartwarming that people think they didn’t have enough time together. They did have 25-plus years together, and there’s still the time that they have together in the wilderness and once they get back. So obviously that love that they have for each other is something that we will continue to explore. We won’t be able to do it in the present-day timeline, moving forward. But at the same time, I think that the death of Van is something that will be a primary motivator for Taissa. She’s gone, but certainly not forgotten.

And we certainly never want people to feel as though we are creating queer characters to kill them or to mine other characters for their pain. This is just the world that these characters exist in, and there are going to be consequences for a lot of actions.

Lisco: People sometimes ask, “What is it like to work with a largely female cast?” And obviously there are things that are important to keep in mind when doing so, but we also look at all of our characters as multi-dimensional people, regardless of their gender. Similarly, we look at all of our characters that way, regardless of their sexual orientation. And I think, in some ways, it undercuts the argument to say that, when we’re feeling it narratively, we shouldn’t do it because of this trope. Do you know what I mean? I think the trope can work both ways, and all we can say is that we’re extremely cognizant of it and attempt to be very sensitive to it in the writers’ room.

Now that Natalie [Sophie Thatcher] has made contact with the outside world, are you planning on kicking off next season — if renewed — with a rescue and post-wilderness timeline? 

Lyle: We do have plans to pivot at some point, but I think everyone’s going to have to watch and see when that might happen.

There was also supposed to be a bonus episode that aired between Season 2 and Season 3. Will fans ever get to see that episode?

Lyle: We are hopeful.

Anything you can tease about what’s to come?

Lyle: Melissa [Hilary Swank] is in the wind; the gloves are off; Misty [Christina Ricci] is on a mission. I think that there’s a lot of fun to be had moving forward.

This interview has been edited and condensed.