I don’t think Van’s death was pointless or random or stupid, though people are certainly entitled to those opinions. To me, it’s actually a really good story move toward the show’s central message of supernatural ambiguity. Just like Lottie & Shauna’s “you know there was no It, right?” / “does it matter?” feeds into the idea that supernatural or not, the wilderness lives primarily within the girls, Van’s death tackled this same concept. The entire season, people had been theorizing that someone would be sacrificed for Van, and it would either work or not work—either way, if Van’s cancer went away or if she died anyway, that would be a major indicator for or against the wilderness being canonically supernatural. Van craves this answer just as the viewers do—she’s desperate to know whether what they did in the wilderness was justified, but she’s afraid of the answer. We see Van switch drastically from being one of the wilderness’s biggest believers into being one of the adult survivors who is most reluctant to go back to their old ways. I think just as much as Van wanted to be away from the killing, she was also terrified that if she let Taissa make a sacrifice to save her and it didn’t work, she would have to finally face the fact that Lottie was never a prophet, and that their actions in the woods were their own choices.
So, with this all in mind, Van ultimately being denied an answer makes perfect sense. It also makes perfect sense that she was killed by another survivor. Her story has been so focused this season on supernatural vs. rational, but in the end, there can be no answer, just like there was no answer in the wilderness. It doesn’t matter if some greater force wanted them to kill each other or not—they did it anyway. The show has been telling us all along—it doesn’t matter. Van’s death at the hands of a fellow survivor brings the show back to the psychological element of the wilderness—Van won’t ever know whether she did the “right” thing, whether “it chose” or it wanted her to choose for it. She dies with the uncertainty that has always haunted her, and within that lies her answer. They killed each other because they believed they had to. Van was never going to find out the truth, which I think is why her teen self tells her, “what would be the fun in that?” It’s not yet time to discover that truth, and the show wants the viewer to understand that the real horror lies within the girls belief itself, not the truth of it.
To add onto this: Van’s death (as much as I’m upset by it) was a logical move to further the plot. The show is prepping us for a division between the Yellowjackets team; one that has Shauna, our main character, serve as an antagonistic force to the rest of the girls.
Taissa, who has always served as one of our secondary main characters, has always been more loyal to Shauna than the other girls. We see them forge a friendship in season one and Jackie’s death likely causes Taissa to feel even more connected to Shauna through their shared queerness. After all, the show straight up let’s us know that Van and Taissa suspected Shauna had a thing for Jackie.
The show often syncs what’s happening in the adult timeline to what is happening in the teen timeline. This makes narrative sense as the women begin to remember just how things actually were out there in the wilderness. Taissa is becoming aware again of just how messed up Shauna and what she’s done is. Still, between her loyalty to Shauna and the fact that Taissa let’s slip that the survivors literally made a pact to protect one another once they returned, the only thing that could have served to kill Taissa’s loyalty was to kill Van. We, the audience, know the fault isn’t completely on Melissa (they broke into her house and assaulted her). The blame is partly shared by Shauna. Taissa’s grief amplifies the blame she assigns to Shauna.
A lot of times I don’t like when shows or books kill off a character to further another character’s arc, but I really do feel like killing Van was NEEDED for Taissa’s arc. Not even to sever the connection between Shauna and Taissa, but to have Taissa grapple with her inner morals through out season three entirely as she tries to find a way to save Van from her cancer.
