How ‘Yellowjackets’ Is Teaching Gen Z What Being a ‘Lost’ Fan Was Like

At the risk of horrifically dating myself, I was two months shy of my sixth birthday when the Lost pilot premiered in 2004. Everything I know about that cherished tropical clusterfuck could fit neatly on the back of a “Wish You Were Here!” postcard, sent from somewhere deep in the Canadian Rockies. Which, conveniently, is the stretch of wilderness where roughly half of the new series Yellowjackets takes place.

The new Showtime series follows the Yellowjackets, an undefeated high school girls’ soccer team in New Jersey. The pack is headed to the 1996 Nationals when the plane they’re traveling in crashes. With little hope of rescue, Something Awful happens out there in the woods, and the girls—the ones who survive, anyway—are hounded by it well into disaffected adulthood.

As adults, the Yellowjackets cling to an increasingly brittle cover story, recited faithfully by Shauna (#6 jersey, played as an adult by Melanie Lynskey) to a nosey “reporter” in the pilot episode: “The plane crashed, and a bunch of my friends died. And the rest of us starved, and scavenged, and prayed for 19 months, till they finally found us.” But viewers have been allowed glimpses of the full truth, which includes murder, cannibalism, and barbaric rituals. You know—just girly things.

Yellowjackets, as its co-creator Ashley Lyle has explained, was conceived in reaction to skepticism that teenage girls could descend into the same kind of darkness that afflicted the English schoolboys of Lord of the Flies. With Yellowjackets, Lyle and her partner Bart Nickerson set out to prove that girls, too, could “go batshit crazy,” as actor Sophie Thatcher (teenaged Natalie, #7) recently put it in an interview.

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Besides the William Golding novel, the show carries in its DNA strains of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, the Donner Party saga, and the Off-Broadway play The Wolves. Above all, though, it’s being hailed as “the next Lost,” castaway premise and all.

Lost, as I understand it, not only transfigured television, but the way fans talk about television. On Wednesdays, every street corner came alive with people attempting to decode the twists and turns of that night’s episode. Fans brought physical notes into schools and offices to discuss with their friends. A handful of valiant souls, as a symptom of their Lost fever, forged into the then-brave new world of podcasting. And then, of course, there was the unprecedented avalanche of forums, fan sites, and IRC channels, in which an episode could be discussed in real time as it aired.

Like critic Alan Sepinwall wrote in his book The Revolution Was Televised, though Lost may not have invented the art of discussing TV on the internet, it may have perfected it. And Yellowjackets, though its nine-week-old fan culture is still taking its first tottering steps, may reinvent it. The show feels like it’s teetering on the edge of an explosion into mainstream popularity, and with it, the next epoch in the evolution of fandom.

Every Sunday, thousands of Yellowjackets fans gather on Twitter and Reddit to do exactly what Losties were doing in the mid-aughts: talk about that group of plane crash survivors in the remote wilds who are haunted by menacing, possibly supernatural occurrences. They aren’t officially called ‘the Hive’ yet, but they’re already swarming in patterns not only reminiscent of Lost-lovers, but also the avid viewers of other mystery-driven cultural phenomena. “I haven’t been this bonkers about a show since Twin Peaks came back,” one Reddit user wrote this week.

Ahead of Yellowjackets’ season finale on Jan. 16, fans are freaking out about who the Antler Queen is; whether or not Jackie is alive in the present day; and if Adam is adult Javi. One Reddit user has plotted a floor plan of the cabin the girls find in the forest. Someone on Twitter has painstakingly catalogued the number of times decorative bunnies have appeared in the background of the show. Somebody else has posted wondering about the significance of the Liz Phair lyric about glitter that plays over the introductory shot of a character in the pilot.

Yellowjackets’ episode model (weekly) and network (Showtime) have ensured a balance of promisingly exponential word-of-mouth momentum with the community feel of a still tight-knit club. And then there are the show’s mysteries, to which even the Yellowjackets themselves don’t have all the answers.

Samantha Hanratty, who plays the teenage version of Misty Quigley, the Yellowjackets’ student manager and resident mousy sociopath, has said that she was the only actor of the main cast present when they filmed the pilot’s flash-forward sequences. The identities of the girls who eventually go cannibal were concealed by animal skins and ripped cloth. “They just had a bunch of stunt coordinators as the other characters” on set in Mammoth, she said in an interview last month. “So we don’t even know who which one of us is.”

So even the cast, Hanratty explained, has “a group chat… where we try to come up with theories ourselves of what’s going on and who we think is who. But every time we think it’s something or somebody, they just hit us with a different thing.”

Maybe because of this, the Yellowjackets have been known to watch the fans who watch them. Jane Widdop and Ella Purnell, who play the younger versions of Laura Lee (#2) and Jackie (#9) respectively, have both reposted art from the show’s subreddit on their Instagram stories. Liv Hewson (Van, #1) has confirmed they read—and laugh at—fan tweets. Lynskey said last week she’s “read your Adam theories, and just so you all know, there’s one that basically no one has mentioned yet.”

Call it honest engagement or good old-fashioned baiting, but the way the cast’s relationship with its fandom has taken shape, especially so early in the show’s infancy, feels refreshingly warm. Maybe this is how Lost fans felt, logging onto the show’s official message board back in 2004 and seeing a new reply from one of the show’s script supervisors or actors known to frequent the fan forums. Maybe not. All I know is that it’s nice to be embedded in the culture of a show that isn’t openly contemptuous of its fans, like Sherlock was, or contorting itself in an effort to outsmart those who correctly guess where their shows are headed, à la Westworld.

From what I’ve absorbed, Lost was neither of those things. But, infamously, when it came time to finally land the plane, the show—many fans screamed—flubbed it. And you don’t have to stumble too far down the rabbit hole of Yellowjackets editorials to find a once-burned Lost fan already deathly afraid they’re about to be fooled twice.

That’s where there’s a thrill in knowing that Lyle and Nickerson pitched their idea with explanations to their show’s mysteries and an ultimate five-season arc in mind. “I personally get very irritated with shows that drag everything on forever and don’t give you any answers,” Lyle recently told E! with what I can only imagine was a very pointed waggle of her eyebrows.

To be sure, there’s still plenty of time for Yellowjackets to lose its sting. A critic for Vox has already predicted that its similarities to Lost have doomed it, and that the show will “irreparably fall apart somewhere along the line.” That prophecy may or may not come true. Only one thing is for sure about Yellowjackets right now: its fans are in for one hell of a ride.

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