‘Yellowjackets’ showrunners discuss the season 3 finale, Antler Queen

This article contains spoilers from the season 3 finale of Yellowjackets, “Full Circle.”

The call is coming from inside the wilderness.

In the final moments of Yellowjackets‘ third season, teen Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) did it: She got the satellite phone to work and she called for help. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s safe. The episode also delivered the long-awaited answers about the series’ opening scene. For seasons, fans have debated the identity of both Pit Girl and the Antler Queen, and now, we know that Mari (Alexa Barajas) was Pit Girl, whereas Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) donned the very special (and very creepy) pair of antlers.

And that’s not all: While the teens might be about ready to leave the wilderness — or for some of them, might be forced to — the adults have found themselves once again embracing their old way of life. In the finale, just as adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) reminisces on what it was like to be queen, Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Misty (Christina Ricci) decide it’s time to put a stop to Shauna. Oh, and we should mention that Calie (Sarah Desjardins) killed Lottie (Simone Kessell).

So will a potential season 4 — the show has not yet been renewed — feature a hunt for adult Shauna? And will the teens finally put the wilderness in their rearview? Entertainment Weekly spoke with co-showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and Jonathan Lisco about the game-changing finale.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Shauna is the Antler Queen! It both makes total sense and in some ways, I didn’t see it coming. Has it always been Shauna for you all?

ASHLEY LYLE: We like to think that we dropped the clues early on. The first things we see when we meet Shauna in the very first episode of the show are her cheating on her best friend with her best friend’s boyfriend and killing a rabbit in her garden and feeding it to her family. We knew in season 1 that Lottie would come to the forefront as a candidate because she is the priestess, the guru. She is at the forefront of creating this belief system. And then season 2, and to some extent season 1, are also setting up Natalie as a natural leader. So there’s the guru, there’s the leader, and ultimately there is, and this is very much an overgeneralization, but the villain.

We always loved the idea of taking Melanie Lynskey and Shauna Shipman and essentially pulling a bit of a Walter White. She’s the one who found a very different, but I think very central, part of herself out there. And from the beginning, the question wasn’t so much, “What would this experience turn these girls into?” but, “What would this experience open up for them?” We always talked about it showing your truest colors, and so to our minds, Shauna is the antler queen. She is everything that the wilderness represents, which is strength and finding your own power, but also this dark, feral quality, the absolute liberation from everything that society tells us to be. She is the ultimate expression of that. And so to get her into those antlers was very fun for us.

JONATHAN LISCO: When my mom she sees it, I know exactly what she’s going to say. She’s going to say, “What did you do to Shauna? Shauna was the one that I was rooting for the whole time.” And I would just say, “Did we not give you hints along the way?” Because she was the one suppressing all of this, perhaps the most. I guess that’s arguable, but she was in this domestic life.

LYLE: Also, I love that people are now looking back to the scene in the chop shop when she talks about skinning a person in really gruesome detail and that her hands aren’t shaking because she’s afraid, they’re shaking because of how badly she wants to do it. It’s always been there.

Bart, I know you directed the finale. What went into the recreation of that opening scene?

BART NICKERSON: A lot of careful work with some great department heads and crew. It was a lot of going through pictures and trying to line things up. It was a very long, detailed-oriented process. The whole show came together and was just firing on all cylinders.

LISCO: I think Bart’s being overly humble. It took a lot to put that together and make it match the pilot without people seeing the gears moving and the seams of that. As an example, one of our editors saw that the cut on Mari’s foot was on the wrong side to make the blood on the side of the footprint that it was supposed to be on. It’s that kind of thing. When you’re directing and juggling all the things that you do as a director, to also have your eye on which side the blood smear is going to be on in the footprint is a high bar.

NICKERSON: Yeah, you need everyone to be working really hard toward the same goal. And I think we’ve been pretty clear that we’re really trying to make something great. And so it really is incredible how much help you can get if you’re trying to make something great and leaving space for people to shine.

LYLE: What I find satisfying about that entire sequence, both the pit girl and the feast, is that it is a mix of footage from both the pilot and new footage, and they did work together quite well. It’s always a little bit of a frightening challenge when you’re trying to recreate something that you shot years ago, but it came together and it is meant to be both a recreation and the final manifestation of that scene. And it’s also about memory. It needs to be a new perspective on it.

I literally knew it was coming and I still found myself hoping Mari might somehow survive it.

LYLE: We knew it was Mari and then you always have that moment when you just fall in love with the character and the actor. And Alexa is wonderful. She is the sweetest person, such an incredible talent. She really rose to the occasion this season. So you get to a point where you’re like, “Well, does it have to be Mari?” And you’re like, “We can’t let our emotions get in the way of the story that we’re telling.”

I also love that you all named your red herring Hannah.

LYLE: [Laughs] That may have been on purpose. Yeah.

With that ending, do you feel like it’s a fair statement to say the wilderness is shifting from the teens to the adults?

LYLE: Absolutely. We always saw the stories as crossing paths around this point. So it is very much a shift where in the past, they are going to be reentering society, whereas in the present, they are starting to leave their societal lives behind in a pretty significant way.

LISCO: To be clear, at least in my opinion, it’s not to say that once they reenter society, when they do, should they do that, it’s all going to be wine and roses for them. So I think that the wilderness certainly is invading our adult characters lives maybe even more dramatically, but it’s a difficult thing to leave behind for our teen characters as well.

NICKERSON: Yeah. I will also say, there’s still some story to be told in the literal wilderness, but just as a macro musing, I do think that shows need to be prepared to a certain extent to reinvent themselves in this modern landscape. With the number of media options, even going through Instagram and TikTok, you’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re horrified, you’re hungry, you are intrigued all in 15 seconds just as you swipe through. I think that people’s ability to handle a variety of contradictory emotions and feelings, it’s just expanding. And I think that narrative television has to evolve with that.

Looking ahead, is there something in particular that you guys are really looking forward to hopefully getting to dig into in a potential season 4?

LYLE: As we said, they’re not out of the woods yet, both literally and proverbially, but as a child of the ’90s, we have not actually gotten to explore the ’90s in a real way. And I think that putting them back home at some point in a ’90s timeline and getting to fully immerse ourselves in that time period is something I’m really looking forward to.

NICKERSON: Yeah, I think the show has so many arenas. It’s not new, but just continuing to explore the different pairings and the dynamics, because that’s something that we find so endlessly fascinating. So yeah, just getting to do that more and more is always exciting.

LISCO: If and when we get them back to civilization, you could say, “Oh, okay, there’s no wilderness storyline,” but there’s still so much real estate between how these young people will find themselves dealing and coping to where they get to in the adult storyline. And so to me, that’s endlessly fascinating. Although the literal wilderness will have evaporated potentially, I think that the wilderness will still be very much with us and it’ll be a different kind of wilderness.

LYLE: The wilderness is a state of mind.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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