Move over Lord of the Flies! How TV’s Yellowjackets has taken survival horror to new heights

This tale of teen cannibalism is utterly thrilling, wonderfully acted and is increasingly becoming bone-chillingly bleak. It’s like the show’s creators are trying to one-up William Golding

Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that hell is other people. Season two of Yellowjackets shows that being trapped with other people doesn’t just put you in hell – but plunges you ever deeper into its bowels.

The first season tortured its characters with blackly comic aplomb, but in its follow-up, things have become so spectacularly dire for our ensemble that it is hard to believe this ever felt like a playful respite from the frequently dour realm of prestige TV. And that is no criticism of the show. The conclusion has been utterly thrilling. It remains brilliantly written, wonderfully acted and continually surprising, but it has evolved. It no longer relies on a litany of juicy little mysteries and soapy twists, but takes its power from making the audience sit with the characters they’ve come to love and truly absorb what it is to lose all hope.

Yellowjackets premiered to modest fanfare and became something of a sleeper hit. Great word of mouth and strong reviews saw the audience grow, and by the end of the first season, it had been described by the Guardian as “the most fun TV show in for ever”. Half of the show was set in the Canadian wilderness in the 1990s, where a group of teen girls in the Yellowjackets soccer team survive a plane crash, destined, as we soon learn, to be trapped there for 19 months. In the opening scene, we are shown they are on the path to damnation, resulting in teammates being skewered and eaten with dark, ritualistic fervour.

In the present day, we follow four of the survivors: unfulfilled housewife Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), self-destructive addict Nat (Juliette Lewis), rising star politician (who occasionally finds herself up a tree chewing on her own hand) Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and delightfully sociopathic amateur detective Misty (Christina Ricci). All are finding life in the real world almost as messed up as it was watching their friends die in the wilderness. This drama was always dark; in season one the sweetest member of the team literally exploded while looking at her teddy bear, a girl watched her lover’s face being ripped apart by wolves and we saw a family pet meet the worst possible end. But it was raucous fun to watch the withering putdowns of the teen girls picking on each other’s insecurities, the mystery of who or what was the “antler queen”, Shauna’s steamy affair with a hot artist, and her husband’s hilarious horror at discovering that she hadn’t just been going to a very demanding book club.

A clear inspiration for the show is Lord of the Flies, the classic novel about a group of children going feral on a remote desert island, imagining a monster called “the beast” and eventually killing two of their party. Where season one depicted a similar coming-of-age into brutality, watching season two, it feels like the creators looked at William Golding’s portrayal of savagery and asked him to hold their beer.

The last three episodes saw the girls breeze past feral into demonic. What they agonised over, or did under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms in season one, has become the status quo. Van, previously comic relief, is now a cold, unfeeling shell, plainly expressing that they feel not one ounce of guilt about their actions. But the characters are still worth rooting for, and having sat with their pain for two seasons, we can see their humanity even when they cannot.

The ending of the first season, where Jackie’s body was discovered by her best friend, Shauna, after she had inadvertently condemned her to freeze to death, was dark. But season two’s final moments make them look like the good old days. Karyn Kusama, the director of blood-soaked vampire movie Jennifer’s Body (and of the Yellowjackets pilot), directed a nihilistic finale, capping off a final three episodes of the season that have slowly evolved into some of the most bone-chillingly bleak programming in recent memory, yet remained so inventive that it was no chore to take in its horrors. It’s hard to imagine any other show able to languish in such existential dread but punctuate it with musical numbers and the sweet budding romance between two quirky sociopaths, played with unhinged charm by Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci.

As winter is ending on the show and fresh hope is theoretically blossoming from the gaps in the thawing snow, Yellowjackets offers no respite for its audience, and there are still plenty of reasons to be glued to the sofa. Our characters have little reason to feel optimistic in the past or present, and in its final act, a return to fun may seem imminent, but Yellowjackets retains its power to shock. It’s hard to imagine what could give this tragic ensemble the strength to go on in season three (the creators say they have mapped out five series), given how much season two ups the stakes. Winter may have been long and arduous, but the prospect of the long wait to find out what could possibly happen next for the characters – probably made longer by the present writer’s strike – feels nearly as cruel. As the season concludes, you may think you are in hell, but things might just be getting warmed up.