AriWilder

It’s worth remembering that the very first act of brutality in the wilderness was Jackie’s doing, setting a precedent for what was to come. She left Van, someone she considered a friend, to burn alive at the possibility that helping her might risk Shauna’s life in some way; that’s an incredibly revealing insight into Jackie’s character. It shows us what – or who – will cause her to override all other principles. We see this hold true throughout the season, where she acts in petty, vindictive, and manipulative ways with Shauna as the catalyst (e.g. picking a fight with Nat, publicly exposing Shauna’s pregnancy, sleeping with Travis). Yellowjackets goes out of its way to highlight how anyone, no matter how squeamish or good-hearted, is capable of terrible things and becoming a base version of themselves in extreme circumstances, and Jackie is no exception.

There’s a lot made of her not pulling her weight around the camp, but Jackie does make a genuine effort after Shauna points out that people are noticing her lack of pitching in. She organises the seance to boost morale (even if it backfired), she checks the snares and fishing nets, she’s part of the rescue party for Tai and Van, and she helps prepare for Laura Lee’s fight. Hell, even before the pep talk, she helps with the foraging and finds the abandoned plane. She’s certainly bratty about it at points, and the resentment from the others isn’t totally unwarranted, but it’s less that Jackie doesn’t want to contribute and more that she doesn’t know how; her entire frame of reference has been upended.

I feel there’s sometimes a false conflation between maladjustment and incompetence or laziness when it comes to how we interpret her behaviour in the wilderness. It’s the lack of feeling that she has anything of value to offer in these new circumstances that leads her to give up so easily, because for Jackie, perceived inadequacy is a source of paralysing shame. If she believes she’s needed, then she’s able to find the resolve within herself. There’s reason to believe that Jackie could ultimately have adapted with the right motivation, but between losing the respect of her teammates, being kept at arm’s length by Shauna, and discovering just how little her best friend apparently thinks of her, she loses that and succumbs to her apathy.

Something I also don’t see accounted for enough in this discussion is that Jackie undergoes a significant character arc in the first season. It’s a self-destructive spiral, but it also sees the breakdown of the pretences and values she previously devoted all her energy to upholding. By the time we get to Doomcoming, she’s ’a fiercer, more honest, more nihilistic’ version of herself. Although her fight with Shauna was an inevitable breaking point, if Jackie had survived and found something to live for (i.e. recognising that Shauna still needed her) I think we could have seen a major shift in the dynamics and her character because, as messy as it was, they would have finally aired their long-festering grievances towards each other and taken a step towards emotional honesty (I’ll caveat this by saying that the words of the argument itself weren’t necessarily honest, but the catharsis was). Of course, Jackie isn’t there when she dies, and it’s holding onto those vestiges of self-denial that seals her fate, but this is a recurring theme in Yellowjackets – characters are killed off just as they’re on the cusp of actualising, due to a combination of collective complicity and their own fatal flaw.

Like many characters in Yellowjackets, Jackie is often regarded in a reductive way by the audience, much like how she is by her peers. She’s characterised as a vapid mean girl when she’s a very deliberate subversion of that archetype. She’s compared to an animal associated with innocence and prey when the text of the show makes it clear that this doesn’t truly represent Jackie as a person, but the warped idea of her filtered through outside perspectives.

Though really, who can blame them when Jackie’s own sense of self is so fractured? She’s introduced to us faking pleasure for her boyfriend while the lyrics “I’ll burn my eyes out before I get out… I wanted more than life could ever grant me, bored by the chore of saving face” blare in the background. The whole song is about how things can’t get any worse because you already feel like a suicidal shell of a person trapped inside your life. None of this is subtle, yet it’s still so easy to overlook. In a lesser show, our first impression of Jackie could have been of a self-assured girl living in total contentment to juxtapose her fall from grace in the wilderness, but instead it chooses to present us with something much more complex: a girl who’s miserable when nobody else is looking.

Because the Jackie who thrived in New Jersey was the Jackie who excelled at performance. Many of the hallmarks of success for which she’s lauded are hollow, a pretty veneer. To paraphrase Ella Purnell, in reality, she’s deeply lonely; she has no real intimacy or connection with anyone that isn’t Shauna, who she clings to with every fibre of her being to the point of suffocation. Yet the act is so convincing that Jackie is forever remembered for the facade she constructed, and as what others made of her in turn, when the truth is she didn’t even know herself.

Jackie was depressed and unfulfilled long before the plane crashed; the wilderness just stripped away the only things that gave her a true sense of worth and purpose – or rather, it exposed how fragile those things were in the first place. Shauna was already chafing against her; her team was already doubting and undermining her; she was already feeling lost within herself. Jackie was sheltered and prissy and didn't take well to their new lifestyle, but it wasn’t any of those things that ultimately did her in: it was high school drama and clique culture; it was a codependent homoerotic friendship; it was the remnants of civilisation’s social dynamics placed in a life-or-death context; it was the years of societal conditioning, emotional isolation, and repression that kept Jackie in a gilded cage her entire life.

While thematically her death was necessary and represents the collapse of the old order, I don’t believe the tragedy of Jackie’s death is that she was a lost cause, always destined to die because of some innate deficiency of character; it’s that it was avoidable and could have been prevented by the characters not caving to their insecurities. Jackie’s pride born of shame; Shauna’s refusal to self-reflect or accept her feelings; their respective issues with communication; Misty’s fear of ostracism and desire to feel included even if it meant throwing people under the bus; Tai’s faltering confidence in her own control and authority; Ben’s abdication of responsibility; Lottie clinging to faith for a sense of meaning; Mari aligning herself with whoever holds power in the social hierarchy; the collective disgrace over their actions that Jackie called out. Just as the Yellowjackets brought the Wilderness back with them, they brought the wounds of civilisation to the wilderness, and it was that, not the cold, that doomed Jackie.

Jackie herself represents civilisation in the same way rabbits represent her: while there’s a connection, it’s not a simple or clear-cut one. I’d argue that if she can be boiled down to any one theme, Jackie more accurately represents how society suppresses young women (especially queer women, because Jackie’s comphet/closeting is essential to understanding her) through expectations and presumptions, how it dictates their identity and strips away their personhood and agency. This theme is baked into the premise of the show and permeates all of its main cast, much like Jackie literally and figuratively does. There’s a reason she’s the very first character we’re formally introduced to, and in such a specific way. Jackie is so frequently misunderstood because she’s designed to be misunderstood. But we’re provided all of the tools to see the broken person at the heart of it all.

I think it does the show a disservice to sanctify Jackie, just as it does to demonise Shauna (and visa versa). The former is as multifaceted and flawed as anyone else in the cast, and the latter didn’t start out as a bad person — in fact, she was one of the most caring characters in the show before her experiences in the wilderness hardened her. They were both capable of great selflessness and empathy and selfishness and jealousy. They both hurt each other, those around them, and themselves. They both relied on maladaptive coping mechanisms; Jackie’s controlling anxious attachment and Shauna’s avoidant attachment that manifested as resentment. Their relationship only reached the explosive conclusion it did because they were both crazy about each other in similar yet conflicting ways and didn’t know how to express the intensity of their love.

It's been said that Jackie’s only crime was being a normal teenage girl while the rest of the Yellowjackets were feral by comparison, but you could make the case that they were all normal teenage girls, each with their own struggles. I believe it’s a misconception that Jackie was somehow uniquely immune to the Wilderness. ‘It’ represents ‘one’s truest, most authentic self’, in Lottie’s words. Jackie very much possessed that self, but locked it away and buried it. The Wilderness can be read as an allegory for what society stifles: mental health issues, queerness, sexuality, trauma, uncomfortable emotions. It is the destructive, liberating product of unleashed repression. Jackie’s character embodies that repression, a repression that runs so deep it destroys her. Not because she didn’t feel ‘It’, but because she felt it so strongly she had to smother it inside herself until she was convinced there was nothing left but an empty shell.

Jackie is a character revealed through contrast and contradiction, through what’s left unspoken. Despite everything, she possessed to capacity to change, to self-actualise, to accept herself, and that’s what makes her role in the narrative so poignant. There’s a bleeding hole of a person carved out among all those lies, but that person was always real.

“Right now, there is a version of you that knows exactly who you really are and what you really want. A primal, elemental self. And there is nothing more painful than hiding that self.

“We want to blame the world for our pain... the parent who didn't support us, the lover who didn't love us back... but the truth is, we are the ones making ourselves sick.

“And the rest of it... doesn't matter.”