Yellowjackets Season 2 Showrunner Jonathan Lisco Breaks Down Episode 2’s Backyard BBQ

[Spoilers below for Season 2 Episode 2 (“Edible Complex”) of Yellowjackets.]

“Are they really gonna do it?” 

That’s been the million-dollar question percolating in viewer’s minds ever since the Yellowjackets pilot featured a young woman running for her life in the snow, then heavily implying she became a whole-ass meal for at least some of the survivors of the Yellowjackets 1996 championship girl’s soccer team. 

Cannibalism. Not a topic often portrayed in most mainstream storytelling, but Yellowjackets became a cult hit for Showtime because it has always purposefully pursued non-traditional storylines, especially those centered on the complexities women navigate. In just the first season it covered everything from mean girls cliques to abortion, remorseless infidelity, murder and familial apathy. And yes, dangled that most taboo of topics: how people eat other people to stay alive. 

Many expected series creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and showrunner Jonathan Lisco to dance around actually committing to overtly portrayed cannibalism, but nope! They confronted it head on with a definitive answer in the second episode of Season 2, “Edible Complex.” And it was unfurled in the most darkly absurd way that likely no one, outside of the writers, could have imagined. 

Intrigued with the creative decisions behind that series defining moment, Paste went right to Jonathan Lisco, the writer of  “Edible Complex,” to get his perspective on how they set up the storylines and the characters to eventually get to that gruesome episode ending. 

Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Paste Magazine: Jonathan, let’s start with some thematics for Yellowjackets. How would you define the arc of each season to date?

Jonathan Lisco: In Season 1, it was about our teen characters learning to adapt to their harsh surroundings and their adult selves trying to convince themselves that they could keep that trauma buried. In Season 1, our middle-aged women were running away from what happened in the woods and trying to desperately put it behind them. But in Season 2, they get caught and they’re forced to have a true reckoning. 

Paste: The post-crash young women in 1996 also seem to be struggling with their loyalties, too. Follow the pragmatic decisions, or sway towards the rituals and practices advocated by Lottie (Courtney Eaton)?  

Lisco: I love this idea that there’s a rhapsodic quality to certain types of suffering. I certainly wouldn’t say all, but the [girls] have already been going through the brutal hierarchies and rites of passage, with all the gender norms and nonsense of being a teenage girl in New Jersey in 1996. And so the question is whether or not they just substituted one savage cult for another is something that we came up with early on, and that has helped, in a lot of ways, shape the narrative.

Paste: Let’s talk about Lottie. With the introduction of her adult self (Simone Kessell) in Season 2, we’re getting a better sense of her inherent power over people. First in the woods and now with her own “intentional community.” Talk about framing her for Season 2.

Lisco: There were a couple of choices we had to make about Lottie in Season 1 that would lead into Season 2. Like should Lottie start to be the cult leader in the woods? Should Lottie be the guru, or the revered one in the woods? We started to feel like that’s a story quickly and easily told. We’ve seen that before, someone able to have some psychological, emotional power over others because they’re charismatic. Ashley and Bart knew Courtney before I did, but when I got to know her, I realized that she possessed quite a lot of other gifts in her arsenal of acting, which is the subtlety to play the quiet and mesmerize. We started to see that and we started to write to it.

And so in “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” she comes home and whatever transpired, she’s gone through stuff that makes her scream as she gets to the top of the stairs of the airplane. Then she winds up in a mental institution in Switzerland. By the time she gets out, she’s been convinced by all the interventions, the medicines, the doctors, that everything that happened and that she felt, wasn’t real. But what she has learned is that her charisma and her basic persona does have the ability to inspire people. When she gets out, she starts this collective of people who are seeking that kind of solace and that kind of succor. She’s doing good in a way. However, it is going to get much more complicated as those old impulses and those old emotions and feelings are going to creep back in. And as they start to creep back in, she’s going to have to ask the questions: Wait a minute, what’s real? What I experienced out there that they told me was fake, or is it what I’m experiencing now? And if what I’m experiencing now is real, what do I do with it? That’s gonna be a really interesting element of the show. We get to unpack what it means to have a transformative experience or a revelatory experience along the way. I think that’ll be really poignant for her.

Paste: In this episode, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is devolving. As she gets closer to her delivery, she’s speaking to dead Jackie’s body, starving and looking at her corpse like a snack tray. That’s some extreme storytelling that has an impact on how we look at adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey). 

Lisco: One of the things that, frankly, concerned me when I first started writing Shauna was whether or not we were gonna be able to protect the character. I co-wrote with Ashley Lyle & Bart Nickerson “F Sharp,” Episode 2 of Season 1. And I wrote Episode 2 of Season 2. She does some pretty awful things in both of those episodes. As the grown up [in “F Sharp,”], she hacks a bunny to death on a cutting board! Everybody was like, “John, are we going to be able to pull this off?” But there is an affect there, or perhaps it’s a lack of affect which tells you how much pain she’s in. It tells you how the suffering has injured her to the pain of the bunny, and in many ways her own pain. It works and draws you in. This is a woman that is not so unlike you, were you to have gone through everything she has gone though. We ask you to please understand, we’re not trying to demonize this person. 

In Episode 2 of this season, I wrote the episode but it came from a lot of discussion in the [writers’] room and contributions from my co-writers. But yes, I am the one who knocked my head against the wall for that episode. And one thing that I did in that dark night of the soul is say to myself as I was writing it, “We have to feel moved.” We have to be moved by what young Shauna is going through in this episode, and her desire to consume her best friend. Of course, I’m not a woman, but I wanted to get at what I’ve observed with many of my best friends who are women, or my wife or my daughters, that there’s a certain kind of thing about female friendship where you can adore this person. But you also sometimes want to destroy them. You live in their shadow, but you also love them dearly. 

Now Shauna’s got a little life inside her growing and she can use the pretext of hunger to play all this out on an emotional, and ultimately, a physical level. She can try and figure out what she really wants to do to the body of her best friend. It’s really, really important—and I hope that we succeeded, that people feel moved. 

Paste: Were you all moved watching it come together?

Lisco: There are moments in the cut when we were working on it where I just felt like, “Okay, did it.” And it really is kudos to Sophie in that scene when they say, “We have to burn her,” you reverse and you see Sophie welling up with tears because she loves her friend and she wants to honor her friend. But at the same time, she wants to keep her friend around. It’s just moving. And then we learn that she’s actually been taking little bites out of her. 

Paste: Explain how you get to that ending, of slow-roasting Jackie and then intercutting them feasting with this imaginary Roman bacchanalia.

Lisco: Obviously, I set [Shauna] up in the teaser, that she really wants to eat [Jackie]. And then at the end, there’s something larger than life going on in terms of the wilderness and the darkness. With Lottie being the harbinger of Jackie cooking on the pyre and all of that. And then the decision to eat her, sparked by Shauna’s initial cut, and then all of their need to self-protect themselves from what’s actually happening by going into this Roman fantasy at the end.

Paste: When you ultimately decided to portray that, was there a lot of self-questioning about going there?

Lisco: In truth, there’s always a bunch of anxiety. Anybody who’s any good is always feeling like, “God, are we doing this?” Because you don’t want to have too hard a touch, right? You want to have a light touch and you don’t want to spoon feed the audience and tell them what to think. You want to move them and often that has to do with the acting, the writing, but also the structure of the story. How you tell the story: what comes first, what comes last and all those things. I’m hoping how we actually deliver on the… should I call it a promise of cannibalism or the horror of cannibalism? We decided to do it early and it’s not just a gimmick. We’re not in the sensationalism business. We heard some people say, “God, the show’s really gruesome. ” It’s not, I hope, gratuitously gruesome. We only show you that stuff when we want the objective reality of what’s been harrowing, to land on you.

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and the newly released The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen.

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