8 Questions 'Yellowjackets' Season 2 Needs to Answer

This piece was originally published in 2023. We are republishing it now that Yellowjackets Season 1 is streaming on Netflix.

Following in the wake of acclaimed television forebears like Lost and Game of Thrones, Yellowjackets has become the latest show to incite a massive amount of fan theories about the mysteries at the heart of its plot.

The hit Showtime series, which splits its time between the aftermath of a 1996 plane crash that leaves a high school girls’ soccer team stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 months and the lives of the survivors 25 years later, became a near-instant pop culture phenomenon when its first season debuted in November 2021. Now, with the season 2 premiere set to stream on March 24 before airing live on March 26, fans are abuzz wondering what’s in store for the Yellowjackets next.

Yellowjackets has already been renewed for a third season and co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have said their plan is for the show to run for five seasons. “There are shows that can go forever, but I think that when you’re telling such a deeply serialized story and it’s about these characters’ lives, you want to reach a satisfying conclusion and not just drag things out forever,” Lyle told Entertainment Weekly. “This isn’t really one of those setup shows where it can go anywhere. So far, we’ve been really on track. Season 2 is largely what we always planned, but you do make a lot of discoveries along the way and so it’s always a little bit surprising.”

That means season 2 likely won’t solve all of the mysteries that fans have been theorizing about since Yellowjackets began. But we can still hope for answers to at least some of the biggest questions that left us reeling after season 1.

Read more: What the Yellowjackets Season 1 Finale Reveals About the Show’s Wild Teen Matriarchy

What happened to Shauna’s baby?

One of the most obvious plot points the show will eventually have to address is the fate of the baby that teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is carrying in the wilderness. In season 1, Shauna discovered that she was pregnant with Jeff’s (Jack DePew) child after the Yellowjackets’ plane had already crashed. In the present timeline, adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff (Warren Kole) have a daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), but she’s only 16, indicating she’s not the baby from 25 years ago.

Given the hints the show has dropped that at least some of the girls will eventually turn to cannibalism to survive, some fan theories say the death of Shauna’s baby will be the event that irrevocably fractures the group. However, Tawny Cypress, who plays adult Taissa, has directly denied that Shauna’s baby will end up as anyone’s meal.

“They’re not going to eat the baby,” Cypress told Entertainment Weekly, nodding to her own characters’s shocking season 1 transgression: “But beheading dogs? Totally.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Shauna’s baby won’t end up meeting a different sort of terrible fate.

What’s going on with Taissa?

In the present-day timeline of the season 1 finale, Taissa’s partner Simone (Rukiya Bernard) discovered a ritualistic shrine comprised of the couple’s dead dog’s head, their son Sammy’s (Aiden Stoxx) broken doll, and what appeared to be a human heart hidden in the basement of their home. That same mysterious symbol that keeps popping up in the past timeline was also drawn on the wall behind the sacrificial altar.

Simone coming across the disturbing scene was juxtaposed with Taissa finding out that she had upset her opponent to win the election for New Jersey state senator, implying that something supernatural may have been responsible for Taissa’s unexpected victory. We learned earlier in the season that both teen (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and adult Taissa do things they don’t remember doing while sleepwalking. But whether the shrine is the work of conscious Taissa, unconscious Taissa, or someone else entirely is still up for debate.

Who was Adam, really?

Adult Shauna ultimately ended up killing the young artist supposedly named Adam (Peter Gadiot), with whom she was having an affair, after finding out he was lying about his past and becoming convinced he was the one blackmailing Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), and Misty (Christina Ricci) by threatening to reveal “what really happened out there.” But it turned out Shauna’s husband Jeff was actually the blackmailer, leaving fans wondering about Adam’s true identity.

One popular theory posited that Adam was grown-up Javi (played in the past timeline by Luciano Leroux), the younger son of Coach Martinez (Carlos Sanz) and younger brother of Travis (played in the past by Kevin Alves and present by Andres Soto) who was stranded in the wilderness with the Yellowjackets. However, Yellowjackets‘ showrunners have said that while they originally considered having Adam turn out to be Javi, they ultimately decided not to go that route.

“We did entertain the notion that Adam was basically Javi coming back to torment Shauna in a way, or torment the Yellowjackets,” co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco told Variety. “We fairly early on dispensed with that idea. It did not feel organically right to us. It didn’t feel to deliver on the promise of what we actually wanted to dramatize with her affair and their marriage.”

Still, it’s difficult to believe Adam was just an innocent stranger with no other significance, considering the amount of screen time he got in the first season. Though he’s now dead, it seems possible we might find out there was more to Adam than he originally let on.

What happened to Javi?

Speaking of Javi, we last saw him in the past timeline hiding from the Yellowjackets as they experienced a collective psychosis brought on by magic mushroom-spiked stew on the night of the team’s “Doomcoming” party in the penultimate episode of season 1. The following day, Travis launched a search for his younger brother after discovering he was missing, but we’ve yet to learn if Javi survived his time in the wilderness.

It seems unlikely that the showrunners would let Javi die offscreen with no explanation—especially in light of their initial plan for Adam. Whether it’s in the past or present, we wouldn’t be surprised if Javi still has a role to play in the Yellowjackets’ story.

Did Travis actually commit suicide?

Despite Natalie and Travis’ pact to never take their own lives, when adult Nat and Misty found Travis’s dead body in the third episode of season 1, it definitely appeared as though he had committed suicide by hanging himself. But a number of suspicious details surrounding his death—including Misty realizing that candles had been placed on the floor under his body in a pattern forming that same ritualistic symbol from Taissa’s shrine and Lottie turning out to be the one who emptied Travis’s bank account the day after he died—seem to suggest Travis was actually murdered.

What was Natalie ‘right’ about?

When adult Nat and Misty searched Travis’s house before discovering he was dead, Misty was able to deduce that the last thing Travis had written before he died was a note reading, “Tell Nat she was right.”

Natalie told Misty that she didn’t know what Travis’s message meant. But fans have a lot of theories about what he was referring to, ranging from Javi still being alive to Lottie leading a cult.

What’s the deal with adult Lottie’s cult?

The closing moments of the season 1 finale saw a group of strangers wearing necklaces depicting the ever-present symbol from the wilderness break into Natalie’s hotel room and kidnap her just as she was seemingly planning to kill herself. At the same time, Nat’s former sponsor Suzie (Colleen Wheeler) was leaving her a panicked voicemail revealing that it was Lottie who had drained Travis’s bank account, insinuating that the group had been sent to retrieve Nat by Lottie herself.

This confirmed that Lottie was not only still alive, but also apparently still dabbling in the supernatural forces she believes she discovered in the wilderness. “There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that what started in the wilderness is still alive 25 years later, but has just been sort of on a slow boil,” Lisco told TV Insider. “And now for reasons that we will explore in season 2, it’s going to explode.”

Who was killed in the pilot?

It’s the question that has been on every Yellowjackets‘ fan’s mind since the opening scene of the series’ premiere: Which girl were the Antler Queen and her masked followers seemingly hunting and eating?

Some fans were convinced throughout the first season that it was Jackie (Ella Purnell) who would turn out to be the victim, but we know now that she froze to death before the team ever turned to cannibalism. Yellowjackets‘ showrunners have also hinted that eating each other might not even be the worst of what happens in the wilderness, suggesting that the cold open could be a red herring for some yet unknown evil.

“If we do our jobs right, the eating of a person will not be the most transgressive thing that these young women do in the wilderness,” Lisco told EW. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.