‘Yellowjackets’ Ending With Season 4 Makes Perfect Sense, Even If That Wasn’t the Creators’ Original Plan

It’s always tough to say goodbye to a popular TV show, but, it’s also incredibly important for a creative team to know when it’s the right time to end. Yellowjackets creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson recently announced that the series will be ending with Season 4. When giving the reason why, their statement simply said, “We’ve always known there would come a point when the story would tell us it wants to end, and it’s our belief that our job — our responsibility — is to listen.”

However, Lyle said in a 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly that the plan was for Yellowjackets to conclude with five seasons, so it is a surprise to learn that the show will be ending a season early. After the heated response from many fans to some narrative choices in Season 3, especially the deaths of Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) in the adult timeline, it makes sense that the show will be wrapping up after one more season. Ultimately, though, this seems to be the creators’ choice, and it is a smart one — here’s why.

‘Yellowjackets’ Is Reaching a Natural Stopping Point After Those Season 3 Deaths

While ending the show one season early is straying from the original plan for Yellowjackets, it makes sense after the show’s jam-packed third season. Season 3 saw some major shake-ups in both the teen and adult timelines of Yellowjackets, and it answered questions that had lingered over the entire series. This included the reveal of Mari (Alexa Barajas) as Pit Girl, and the gruesome details of what happened to Ben (Steven Krueger). In the adult timeline, Callie (Sarah Desjardins) impulsively killed Lottie, and the rest of the Yellowjackets’ lives continued to further unravel throughout the rest of the season. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) panicked when she received a tape from Melissa (Hilary Swank), and then, after Jeff (Warren Kole) and Callie left her, she fully embraced the wilderness once again. Now Van is dead, and Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Misty (Christina Ricci) are ready to take Shauna down, so there’s not much more story left for this timeline to tell.

After the deaths of Nat (Juliette Lewis), Lottie, and Van, the only way left to end the adult timeline is to pit Shauna and the wilderness against the remaining Yellowjackets (depending on which side Melissa chooses if Swank returns, which seems likely at this point). The story has always been building up to this, because the Yellowjackets were only able to have somewhat normal adult lives by letting go of the wilderness. Now that Shauna is becoming a version of her teenage self (Sophie Nélisse) again, there is only one way for this to end, and one season is plenty to tell this story. Any longer than that would be dragging it out, now that Misty, Tai, and Shauna have all made up their minds in the Season 3 finale. Before the deaths of Lottie and Van, the adult timeline could have been stretched out for longer. In spite of the negative fan response to these characters’ deaths, though, it’s ultimately a natural direction for the story to wrap up soon after these deaths.

‘Yellowjackets’ Teen Timeline Should End With the Team Being Rescued

Apart from the unexpected storylines in the adult timeline last season, the main reason why Yellowjackets should end with Season 4 is that the teen timeline has finally reached the part of the story that it’s been working up to from the very beginning. Yellowjackets‘ dual timeline has meant that the series’ main question was never whether the Yellowjackets would get rescued, but how they got rescued, and whether they’d ever be able to escape the horrors that they committed and witnessed out in the wilderness. While the adult timeline is busy answering the latter question, the teen timeline has finally made its way towards answering the former. In the Season 3 finale of Yellowjackets, a twist revealed that the card drawing that killed Mari was some of the other Yellowjackets’ plan to distract Shauna long enough for Nat (Sophie Thatcher) to try to contact civilization with the satellite phone.

We now know that Nat was successful, and that it was her call to the outside that got the Yellowjackets rescued. There are still so many unknowns about the period of time between Nat making contact and the Yellowjackets being rescued, though, and Season 4 will cover that time period. It has already been revealed that Hannah (Ashley Sutton) was killed during that time, but it’s still unclear what happened to Akilah (Nia Sondaya) and Gen (Vanessa Prasad), and whether they died before the Yellowjackets were rescued.

A fifth season likely would have shown what the early days were like for the Yellowjackets after being rescued, but most of this can be inferred based on what Yellowjackets has already revealed. The promise of Yellowjackets‘ teen timeline has always been the wilderness, so the series doesn’t need to show anything beyond them getting rescued, especially because it already has the adult timeline. It feels fitting, now that Nat has made contact with civilization in the teen timeline, that the show’s fourth and final season will fill in the blanks of everything else that happened before the Yellowjackets got rescued.

Yellowjackets Season 4 is set for a 2026 release.

Release Date

November 14, 2021

Network

Showtime, Paramount+ with Showtime

Showrunner

Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco

Directors

Benjamin Semanoff, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Deepa Mehta, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeffrey W. Byrd, Liz Garbus, Scott Winant, Eva Sørhaug, Jamie Travis

Writers

Liz Phang, Sarah L. Thompson, Ameni Rozsa