Creators Explain Pit Girl; Van, Lottie Deaths

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season three finale of Yellowjackets, “Full Circle.”]

The Yellowjackets co-creators had promised answers by the end of the season. They delivered on that with a revelatory season three finale, “Full Circle.”

The Showtime series catapulted itself into the zeitgeist when it launched in 2021 with a captivating pilot about a team of high school soccer players whose plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. The pilot weaved together two timelines with that 1996 crash and the present-day survivors, played by a beloved cast, and there was a killer flash-forward opening of an unidentified girl running for her life, barefoot through snow, who is then impaled and eaten by her friends. This girl became known as “Pit Girl” — her identity speculated about and debated on fan threads for years. Who is this poor girl and how did those teenagers arrive at a place where they hunted their friends for ritual cannibalistic feasts?

“Full Circle,” which was written by Ameni Rozsa and directed by co-creator Bart Nickerson, builds on three seasons of wilderness story and answers all of that. Pit Girl is Mari, the teenager played by Alexa Barajas who actually fell in this pit before, when she came upon the trap set by the now-departed Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) earlier in the season. This time, when she draws the fateful Queen of Hearts card that kicks off what these survivors call their “hunt,” Mari isn’t lucky enough to escape the pit twice.

The hunt for Mari plays out with scenes mixed in from the pilot, which Nickerson, co-creator Ashley Lyle and co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco explain to The Hollywood Reporter was meant to show the audience the difference between what the adult women remember about that fateful day, and how brutally it actually went down. Though Nickerson points out that “we’re not seeing anything that is necessarily entirely objective, even in the present-day storyline.”

This reframing of the events also reveals the context for Misty’s (Samantha Hanratty) mysterious smile seen back in the pilot, which we now understand is about her inner glee that she and Nat (Sophie Thatcher) pulled off their secret plan to initiate their rescue. The episode ends with Nat communicating via radio with a voice that will bring about the end to this wilderness journey, which we know totals 19 months in the remote Canadian forests.

The present-day storyline also brings about a massive shift when, after the tragic death of Van (Lauren Ambrose), the remaining survivors, along with the audience, discover who killed Lottie (Simone Kessell) earlier in the season. Misty (Christina Ricci) pieces it together, breaking the news to Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) that her daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), killed Lottie by pushing her down a flight of stairs in New York City.

With Callie scared over what she’s done and what her mother is capable of, she and her dad (Warren Kole) leave and, though it may be temporary, Shauna is now unburdened by her “boring life” and finds her way back to the powerful Antler Queen she once was. The season ends with Shauna journaling about reclaiming her “fucking Queen” title, as a grieving Taissa (Tawny Cypress) pitches to Misty that they team up to finally take Shauna down.

Below in their conversation with THR, Nickerson, Lyle and Lisco unpack all of these major developments of the season three finale, including how long they’ve known Mari was Pit Girl, whether or not Callie snapped or made a decision in killing Lottie, where they plan to take the show next as they await a season four renewal, why Lottie and Van had to die, and the pain of having to call so many castmembers to tell them that their time was up on the survival saga: “We all walk around feeling queasy about it before we make that call.”

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Bart, when we spoke at the beginning of the season, you told me something made you gasp in the edit. Ashley said that was rare. Now I want to know what that was.

BART NICKERSON Oh man, I don’t remember!

JOHNATHAN LISCO Bart, was it when Shauna [Sophie Nélisse] gets hit with the stick by Melissa [Jenna Burgess] in the finale?

ASHLEY LYLE I think I know what it was. We all found it really affecting as we’re kind of matching the finale with the pilot [for the Pit Girl scene], but with this new perspective. So we’re adding details, and at least it made me gasp when we see Mari [Alexa Barajas] being dragged through the snow. We had only previously shown the hair, the bloody hair. So to see Mari, to see Alexa, in that moment was so deeply affecting for me, and I think I gasped!

NICKERSON I do remember seeing that in the first cut, and that might have been the moment that I gasped because she did such a good job of being not alive, too. It was just like, “Whoa.” It was messed up.

Let’s talk about this massive Pit Girl reveal… it’s Mari! Did you know when you shot the pilot that it was going to be Mari, or is this something that shifted along the way?

LYLE We knew, and yet still, over the course of three seasons, you kick around other ideas occasionally. Strangely, it was in season three when we were doing the work that we always knew we needed to do to build her character up to that point, we almost fell pity to ourselves because we’re like, “But we love Alexa, and we love Mari now.” You start to go, “Is there any way we could not have it be Mari?” But the fact that we didn’t want it to be Mari is what let us know that was exactly the right decision, and that we had at least for ourselves, done the job well. There was no looking back at a certain point. Alexa did an incredible job this season. I think she has a really big career ahead of her. It’s hard to say goodbye. It really is. Especially when you not only start to love the character, but you love the actor as much as we do.

The episode includes scenes from the pilot along with the new Pit Girl hunt to remind us what we thought we knew. Now, we understand Misty’s (Samantha Hanratty) smile from the pilot — she’s not smiling because she just ate her friend, she’s smiling because she helped Nat (Sophie Thatcher) get them (eventually) rescued. Samantha told me that device was meant to compare how the survivors remembered what happened with how it really happened. Can you talk about playing with that?

LYLE Bart can speak to this as well, having directed it, but we knew going in that we wanted it to be a fresh perspective. If we simply retold the exact same story, it wouldn’t have had the same impact. Of course, we are telling the same story in terms of the plot points of what happens, but we wanted to create an experience for the viewers where they go, “Oh, I understand now.” And, “That’s not exactly the way I thought that it was playing out.” That was very fun for us, but it’s really a tricky puzzle to put together to make sure that you’re hitting the right beats and you’re being true to the story you originally told. But you’re also adding information in a way that feels really satisfying.

NICKERSON Just in terms of the vernacular of it, the way we’ve always talked about the wilderness and the present-day storyline is that, if they were written in prose, they would both be written in the present tense. We’ve never really viewed the wilderness storyline as a “flashback.” It does come first. But the idea is that these are both happening now, which is in part a metaphor for trauma, that it’s still alive and visceral.

So really, the only major flashbacks that the show has had — in a sense they almost felt like flash forwards — were those little vignettes in the pilot [to the Pit Girl scene] that were just these flashes forwards that we felt were the major subjective viewpoint. So it was about having our characters move into them and to give them meaning, but also maintain the subjective potency of those flash-pops. Because we’re not seeing anything that is necessarily entirely objective, even in the present-day storyline. Everything is rendered through subjective point of view, to a certain extent. So it was about having them feel different, but without robbing what was powerful about them in the first place.

There’s been so much speculation about the identity of Pit Girl since the show began. You threw off even the most devoted Mari predictions when you introduced frog scientist Hanna (Ashley Sutton) this season. Even knowing that Pit Girl’s death was coming, it was brutal to see what they do to Mari. Jonathan, you spoke with me about the neuroscience behind their trauma earlier this season with their visions. What will the trauma from here on out and do to them? This is such a pivotal moment for the show in understanding who these women become.

LISCO I’m not sure I can go much deeper on the neuroscience! But I can say a couple things. It’s funny when you read a lot of fan reactions. We all loved Mari and I 100-percent agree that Alexa is amazing. She got so wonderful this season. It was very difficult to do what we did with her. Of course, as Ash says, that’s the reason we did it. But let’s not forget: This is also someone who didn’t always hear the angels calling her. Coach Scott set her free and the first thing Mari did was kick out his one leg so that he almost got his brain bashed in. And then when she came back to the group, she had every opportunity not to tell the girls anything about what happened or that he was involved, but she chose to [which led to his death].

I’m not saying this is divine retribution for what she did, but I do think it complicates her. I think the wilderness being something that gives and takes is very much dramatized in that in that moment, as if the wilderness may see all and may decide at some point per their ritual, per their religion, how things go down. So to me, it was sort of inevitable that we had to kill off Mari and that Hanna was a wonderful red herring of it all. But now that that’s happened, to answer your question as best I can, all of these people know that they’re complicit in the death of a friend. I don’t think that’s something you shake off lightly, pretty much for your whole life. That’s going to haunt them forever and that’s something to mine for seasons moving forward.

All of you have spoken to me about the hardship of having to kill off characters, and wanting to avoid certain decisions as long as you can. You had to make difficult decisions this season because so many characters died. It’s death season of Yellowjackets! I understand that everyone who died got a phone call from you, and I spoke to many of them about that. How hard were those calls and these decisions?

LYLE It is quite literally my least favorite part of this job. It is never easy. I would say the only one that was a little bit easier was Stephen Krueger because he knew. And part of that is that we’ve known each other for so long. We go all the way back to The Originals, so season one we would go out to dinner and he would be like, “How long am I going to stay alive?” And I was like, “Well, not forever!” (Laughs) We would joke about it very early on, so that was a much easier version of this.

The standard operating procedure with this across the board for showrunners, at least on every other show we’ve worked on, is to really leave it to the last minute because it is not only difficult, but also people have very emotional reactions. It’s not easy on any side, and that’s completely understandable. In our case, we knew we wanted to give people more of the heads up, from a very practical standpoint. People have lives to plan. So we tried to give everyone as much notice as we could. And that sometimes is hard. It’s hard.

LISCO It’s really hard. We try our darndest to operate with a lot of transparency and authenticity with our whole crew, not just our cast, but everyone who works on this production. I remember the three of us got together and we were in possession of this conclusion that we were going to do this. And now, do we call the actors? Of course we do, because that’s the honest thing to do. That’s the straightforward thing to do. Equally, it may allow certain members of our cast to prepare dramatically for how to play things, as opposed to pulling the rug out from under them at the end. So it was a fairly straightforward decision for us, but we all walk around feeling queasy about it before we make that call because we know it’s going to land on people differently. And some people are going to have a really different process by which they metabolize that information.

We could interpret this as you all getting back to your core characters, since Simone Kessell and Lauren Ambrose, who came on as series regulars in season two as Lottie and Van, respectively, are now gone. From a storytelling perspective, why was it Lottie’s time to go? And why was it Van’s? Why did Van’s borrowed time have to be up?

LYLE I’ve seen some speculations that it was about coming back to the core cast, and that genuinely wasn’t part of the thought process. It really was character-specific for us.

Lottie and Van serve very different purposes in the world of our characters. Lottie wields a lot of influence. She is the genesis of this belief system. She is representative of the wilderness. She’s the most in touch with it. She’s the one who introduces the concept [of sacrificing someone to save yourself]. So to take away someone who they see as having a connection to or a relationship and conversation with this presence that they believe in, to some extent or another, and obviously that varies amongst the characters, we wanted to take away the concreteness of that. When it comes to belief, and I don’t mean to get completely high-handed with this, but there’s this sort of Kierkegaardian concept that faith with any kind of proof is no longer faith. We wanted to explore that with the characters.

And then Van, in a completely different way, the premise of this show is: what are you willing to do to survive? What lengths are you willing to go to? How much will you let it change you? I think you can make a case with Shauna that it’s not changing her, it’s opening something up within her. And for Van, her arc this season was very much asking that question in a more literal way: what is she willing to do to survive? And to have a character who is not willing to cross a certain rubicon felt very important for us, because it presents a much more clear question for the rest of our characters. Van is unique amongst the women in having a limit. I think that needed to be said. It needed to be shown, and it allows for the characters who are willing to cross a rubicon to begin to cross it.

No one’s left now who won’t cross it!

LISCO I think you could contrast that with what Shauna says, where the only way to be perfectly safe is to be the last person standing. That’s obviously not Van’s perspective.

I spoke with director Ben Semanoff about the penultimate episode and about the Van flair that her plane got compared to Nat’s plane [when Juliette Lewis’ character died in season two]. I just want to know, what does Van see when her eyes go wide at the end of that scene?

LYLE Oh, [quoting young Van] now where would be the fun in that? (Laughs)

NICKERSON If you’re asking what happens on the other end of the river from Greek mythology or whatever, we might not be able to get there for you. But, I think we’re all going to find out! Just maybe not between the credits of Yellowjackets. (Laughs)

LYLE We’ll tell you through the Ouija board!

The silver lining to these characters dying is that we get to see the adult cast interact with their younger counterparts. We see Adult Lottie guided by teen Lottie (Courtney Eaton) into her death scene, and we see this tense faceoff of her beliefs with Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins). We see Callie make this decision to kill Lottie. What does this murder say about the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of this show and who both Callie and Shauna are becoming at the end of this season?

LYLE It’s interesting to me that you interpreted it as a decision, or a choice. It is certainly a decision. I feel as though to call it a choice is maybe too reductive. We play a lot with the idea of instinct on this show, and it is certainly a decision born of instinct. I think that it is a decision that Callie will really have to reckon with moving forward. One of the central questions is: who are we when everything is stripped away? When the niceties of society are stripped away and when the rules are stripped away? Callie is starting to find out who she is in a way that our women have had to reckon with for many, many years.

LISCO I agree. I think it’s about instinct in Callie’s case and then you have to see whether or not she winds up embracing that as a philosophy, that’s a whole different deal. Back to the neuroscience of it all, as you had mentioned, we’ll see how Callie continues to remember that moment. Because her dad has already given her justifiable reason: “You were scared, you didn’t mean to do it,” all of that. And then when she looks back, she’ll only remember that time of remembering it. As they say, you only remember remembering it the last time. So the data in your brain gets warped. It’ll be interesting to see where Callie winds up in terms of how she has a perspective on that moment.

NICKERSON My own cobbled together neuroscience theory is that I think a lot of what we call “choice” is subjective experiences of our own choices. Kind of like a retroactive process of trying to understand the things we’re doing. Where choice in the psyche emanates from is unclear. So I think there are different levels of choice and different amounts of times to make choice. While she certainly made a choice — it’s not like she didn’t know what she was doing or was hallucinating — at what level of her architecture that choice came from and what it means for her greater psyche is not entirely clear to her, or to us because that’s a feature of humanity. That’s one of the things we’re excited about playing with in this show in general, is the ways that people act. A character doesn’t fit neatly, and all things don’t emanate from this consistency of character in the way, I think, a lot of people hope they do.

This final journaling scene with Shauna (Melanie Lynksey) says so much about her and this show and where you guys are headed. I interpreted this moment as her being without the burden of being a mother and a wife, at least for now, and her finding the Shauna she once was; she leans in as those feelings come flooding back. As she opens these floodgates, will self-awareness and self-reflection come with memory?

NICKERSON Well, what do you mean by self-reflection?

Her ability to look back and realize she did some terrible things. She seems to be the least haunted of everyone about the people she seems most responsible for killing, except for Jackie (Ella Purnell).

NICKERSON The self-reflection algorithm: how much of that is actually about justifying your behavior to your social peers? There’s a thought that our frontal lobe is functionally just a PR team for the things that we do. And that the way that we talk about things or reflect on them is actually just practice or justifying to the people who are going to take us to task about these things. I’m sure she will continue to be a strategic person. But, what is guilt? That’s not something that there’s an easy answer to. As a mechanism to change your behavior so you don’t get in trouble, and an internalized version of that, sure, that makes sense. We certainly want there to be a sort of a moral origin of it. And I’m an optimist, deep down. I do think there is something that’s there, but I can’t say for sure it is.

LYLE I think my definition self-reflection is reckoning with who you are, but that is always processed through an agenda. I would argue that Shauna is allowing herself to confront her true nature. But I’m not sure that self-reflection is coming with a lot of guilt or shame, which I think is what makes her very interesting.

LISCO Even in our own lives, don’t we run into so many people whose self-reflection actually is essentially a form of self-justification? That’s at least in my experience.

NICKERSON And Jonathan, can you even say for certainty that’s not all of our self-reflection? We might be those people that we’re running into! It’s just so many levels of self-delusion that have us thinking, “Oh no, I’m different. I’m a good person.”

Similarly you have Tai (Tawny Cypress) shedding her alter ego and making this decision to remember it all — she even absorbs Van’s heart! Misty, it seems, has already reached self-actualization, and it’s like she’s been waiting for the others to catch up. What does unleashing a self-actualized Tai who is headed Shauna’s way look like for next season? This core relationship between Tai and Shauna is for the first time at odds.

LYLE I think that memory is an incredibly powerful tool for the human psyche, both in its ability to take things and learn for them, but also to push things away. We really tried to lay breadcrumbs for three seasons now that the past 25 years, what we’re seeing in the past is not necessarily how they remember it. They’ve got a really strong wall that they’ve built in various ways, whether it’s Tai and her ambition and looking forward, and Shauna and her stasis and just laying very low and repressing everything. We really wanted to get to a point where we were breaking down all of those layers and breaking down all of those walls.

They’ve said many times over the course of the three seasons, like, “Oh, I forgot that” or “I didn’t remember that.” We wanted to bring them to a place where they’re starting to truly remember everything, and that’s not just about what happened, but it’s about who they are. I think it will be very exciting moving forward to see their truest selves start to interact with each other and, again, it’s about survival.

It’s not just about survival in the wilderness up against hunger and the cold and the elements. It’s protecting yourself, protecting your family, protecting your secrets, and survival is very much still a problem for them in the present day. And I think that will be an increasing problem for them in the present day as we move forward, which is very fun for us as storytellers.

NICKERSON There was a certain amount of careful design as we’re reaching the pilot in the past of wanting to have that loop and that return getting closed in on the present-day storyline as well. You have Shauna reading the journals in the pilot, you have her returning to writing here. You have that scene between Shauna and Taissa in the diner [in the pilot]. We shot that in L.A. [for the pilot], but scoured Vancouver to find something that could be reminiscent of it, including the little jukebox on the table.

Shauna and Taissa has been such a core relationship. There has been such an understanding between those two characters. Even when they’re at odds, their conflict has felt different than it has for everybody else, and we’re signaling that we actually don’t fully understand the depths of that relationship as an audience. Because ultimately a relationship is not a static thing. It is always evolving, it’s always changing. The things in the past and in the present are always shifting their meaning.

You end on the season with this very fist-in-the-air moment, tuned to Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge.” Sophie Thatcher’s Nat becomes our hero. Bart, since you directed that scene, what was it like to end on this big win?

NICKERSON It was a great feeling. We actually were at the top of a mountain. We took a helicopter with Sophie and I, and a very skeleton crew, to a high altitude where we got to experience what’s known as a heat inversion. We took off and it was very cold and so had all these layers, and then got up there and it was like 90 degrees. It was not necessarily a fist pump moment while you’re shooting it, because you’re in this extreme isolation. But it definitely helped Sophie to have a visceral connection to the isolation.

And then the decision to use that song was one that we arrived at together in post. Jonathan’s also a huge Aerosmith fan and it was particularly special for Ashley and I because that was meant to be a pilot song. That was one of the introductions to the world in the original written pilot, and it was too expensive for us then. Either the value of Aerosmith has depreciated — which I doubt! — or we’re able to afford it now. (Laughs) So to finish on a big, high-production-value bombastic song just could not have been more fun for the three of us.

There’s so much to now tell in the rescue timeline and with their reassimilation into society. We’re waiting to hear about your official season four renewal. At one point you said you had five seasons in mind. How long you want to keep going and what stories you’d like to tell from here?

LYLE Any time that you say, “We’re going to do five or six seasons,” that’s a shot in the dark and incredibly wishful thinking, just from a practical standpoint. It’s rare to even be here, having had the opportunity to tell three full seasons of this story. We feel extremely grateful and extremely lucky and fortunate. We feel that there is more story to tell and we’re really excited to dive into it. As you said, to be able to tell the story of the reassimilation into society, to see what horrors are in store for them even without the horrors of the wilderness is very exciting. But you can never truly predict and we just will be very grateful that we keep getting to tell the story.

You told me that the storylines that emanated from the cassette tape were all in your original Yellowjackets pitch. That led to the frog scientists with Hanna (Ashley Sutton) and guide Joel McHale, and then to Hilary Swank as Adult Melissa, who is still alive. Was there anything else from your original pitch that you got to do this season?

LYLE The herpetologist (Nelson Franklin), that was really fun. We always knew that we were going to get back to Pit Girl and that original scene in the pilot, so that was very exciting to get to carry through on. Those were the big, big tentpole moments. I will say, Melissa is in the wind and I think that is a terrifying prospect for the rest of our Yellowjackets.

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Yellowjackets season three is now streaming on Paramount+ With Showtime, with a linear airing Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. Follow along with all of THR‘s season three coverage and finale interviews.