This story contains spoilers from the season 2 finale of Showtime yellow jacket,
According to fans who studied, when she was just a member of the championship high-school soccer team known as the Yellowjackets, Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher) was a wide midfielder. Few Scenes Of The Girls In Action, Status comes with a little glory. Wide midfielders do not usually score goals themselves; They are tasked with attacking and providing support from the wings. They’re quietly powerful, in other words – often overlooked, yet integral to a squad’s success.
off the pitch and throughout the showtime drama yellow jacketRun, Natalie plays a similarly underappreciated role. In 1996, after the team’s plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness, she becomes a hunter, only to disappoint her friends when the brutal winter leaves her empty-handed day after day. As an adult, Natalie (played by Juliette Lewis) attempts to expose a blackmailer who threatens her and her fellow survivors, only to be kidnapped by Lottie (Simone Kessel), another former Yellowjacket. Is. Time and time again, Natalie has been an important catalyst: in the past, she has made it clear to her teammates how hard it must be to endure the cold, and in the present, her disappearance has rekindled the other women. However, in the second season finale, yellow jacket killed him. During a dramatically staged, near-comic scene, Misty (Christina Ricci) accidentally injects Natalie with a syringe filled with poison when Natalie tries to stop her from hurting Lisa (Nicole Maines), A woman with whom Natalie bonded on the premises of Lottie’s cult. As a way of covering up the circumstances of her passing, Natalie’s death is presumed to be an “accidental overdose” – a brutal punch line, given Natalie’s history of drug abuse.
yellow jacket Thrives on twisty plotting and twisted action, but losing Natalie feels deeply misguided. She was the wild card, an unexpected character who could connect to all sides of the show’s ongoing debate — whether the girls’ vandalism was driven by natural instincts or supernatural forces, and whether women could ever heal from their trauma. As a teenager, she ate human flesh to survive, but she also pushed back against the influence of Lottie (played as a teenager by Courtney Eaton) on the other Yellowjackets. As an adult, she confronts her demons – instead of suppressing them, as other women do – while following the clues to the murder of her ex and fellow survivor Travis (Andres Soto). Natalie may not have always been easy to root for, but she was in many ways the conscience of the ensemble, someone willing to do things others wouldn’t, someone asking questions others were afraid to. Even before the accident, she was referred to as a “burnout” by her teammates. As long as the forest took them, he had nothing to lose. Seeing her in both timelines meant someone discovering who they could be: not just a burnout or a junkie, but a true teammate, trying to protect her squad as best she could and getting something in return. Wasn’t asking
The show isn’t completely done with her; Lottie crowns young Natalie as the new leader of the group in the finale, claiming that Jungle spared her life and took her coach’s young son, Javi, instead. The development, however, feels rushed. Natalie begins to mourn the death of Javi (Luciano Leroux), and the show highlights her complicated romance with her brother Travis (played by Kevin Alves in the previous timeline). Worse, these events feel divorced from the show’s nuanced examination of teen dynamics. The death of Jackie (Ella Purnell) last season resulted in the end of a good friendship, a common experience for many high-school girls; Meanwhile, Javi’s death is revealed to be fictitious, an accident that has nothing to do with the girls’ current relationship. Teenage Natalie’s new role — and the adoration she subsequently receives — as a result, feels like a twist made for a twist.
Twistier ’90s Vol. yellow jacket Done, as boring as today’s plot seemed. Although this was true for many of the characters in Season 2, Natalie’s storyline suffered the most. Adult Natalie’s misadventures at Lottie’s “wellness retreat” pale in comparison to teen Natalie’s trials in the wild, which include faking Javi’s death to protect Travis, trying to find food for the entire starving group, Being hunted by your own peers. I found myself losing interest whenever the show returned to Natalie in the present day, even though, in theory, Natalie’s final moments redeemed her. She puts herself in danger to save Lisa, instead of being separated when Javi falls through the ice. But the situations are nowhere near the same – Lisa was bullying the women while Javi was helpless – and Natalie has only burdened Misty (CHRISTINA RICCI) with new guilt. Misty had already accidentally caused the death of one of her best friends; Now she must contend with the knowledge that she was fatal to another.
By the last half of season 2, the show—so interesting and inventive in the arcs it created for characters like Misty—seemed to have no idea what to do with Natalie. She wandered the compound week after week, befriending people dressed in lavender, passively moving from room to room. But passive was never Natalie’s MO. She was the kind of character who understood that the stakes were high only after the girls ran away from the woods. As an adult, she was still trying to answer the same questions she had as a teenager: Who could she trust? What could she do to understand better? yellow jacket Could interrogate Natalie’s jagged path to healing after her time in the woods, looking at how a man explores his beliefs and learns to live a fulfilling life. Instead, it squandered his potential and did the worst thing anyone could do to an essential teammate: It forgot about him.
