The tape is already rolling when Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) looks up, with a REC marker in one corner of the camcorder frame and a date stamp reading “JAN 3 1998” in the other. The first words on screen are a gentle “You can just start at the beginning.” Paramount+ released the official teaser for the fourth and final season of “Yellowjackets” on Wednesday, October 14th, and it spends just under two minutes on the moment the show has circled since its pilot, the survivors back home in Wiskayok, New Jersey, after 19 months in the wilderness. The season premieres Friday, November 20th, on Paramount+ with the Premium plan, and the teaser’s own description warns that “not every homecoming is a joyous one, and this one’s going to sting.” It is a homecoming cut like a deposition, and the more carefully the girls tell their story, the less anyone should believe it.
Season 3 left both timelines on a ledge. In the wilderness, Mari (Alexa Barajas) drew the queen of hearts, ran, and fell into the spiked pit, which made her the Pit Girl of the pilot. Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) was crowned Antler Queen, while Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) slipped away during the hunt with a repaired satellite phone, climbed a mountain and got a call out. In the present, Callie (Sarah Desjardins) turned out to have killed Lottie (Simone Kessell) by accident, and she and her father Jeff (Warren Kole) walked out on the adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey). The adult Taissa (Tawny Cypress) buried Van (Lauren Ambrose), and the finale left Taissa and Misty (Christina Ricci) teaming up against Shauna. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Yellowjackets” through the Season 3 finale and for everything shown in the Season 4 teaser.
It is a homecoming cut like a deposition, and the more carefully the girls tell their story, the less anyone should believe it.”
The opening run is a single sentence passed down a line of camcorder interviews, with each survivor handed a fragment of it. Taissa starts with “The plane”, and Natalie finishes it with “crashed.” before beginning “Our friends”. Shauna, sporting a black eye and cuts across her forehead, says “died.” and then starts “And the rest of us”. Melissa (Jenna Burgess) supplies “starved.”, Travis (Kevin Alves) adds “scavenged.”, and Misty (Samantha Hanratty), behind her big glasses, offers “And we prayed”. Van (Liv Hewson), the scar still on her face, closes it with a small smile: “they finally found us.” Mashable called it a “coordinated account” and GeekTyrant a “carefully rehearsed explanation,” and the edit seems to agree. It keeps slipping in the things nobody mentions to the camera, the burning wreck, a pale stag in the dark, a bonfire ringed with torches.
Then the question comes, and it lands on Lottie (Courtney Eaton). Over a long close-up of her with her eyes cast down, an unseen voice asks, “Is there anyone else out there we should be looking for?” The tape breaks into static before she says a word. It may be the most loaded beat in the teaser, given how many teammates the wilderness took and how few of those deaths the survivors would want to explain to an investigator. After a glitching Paramount+ logo, the light turns warm, with a sunlit country underpass and a sign reading “WELCOME TO WISKAYOK NEW JERSEY”. The teens sit around a room full of round tables and ketchup bottles while a voice says, “I can’t believe you’re really here.” A woman in a pink top wraps the bruised Shauna in a hug and adds, “I keep expecting this to be a dream,” and Shauna, staring past her shoulder, does not look like she shares the feeling.
The homecoming gets uglier the further it goes. Travis lies on his side staring up after a shot of an upside-down Sacred Heart painting, and a dark-haired survivor sits in a car while a woman in a fur coat and a gray-haired man peer in through a rain-streaked window. On a dark road, a girl squints into a pair of headlights as a voice tells her, “You girls are American heroes,” and the cut lands on a man in a red-lit plaid shirt and a cap, pointing at her. TheWrap reads that girl as Shauna and says she simply turns and walks away. In a hospital corridor a woman is down on her knees while Taissa watches, with Misty behind her. Then the teaser jumps back to the woods, a group sprinting through the trees with a girl in a long nightgown, in an image that recalls the Pit Girl hunt. In a lamp-lit living room, a blond boy in a hoodie, who looks a lot like Sam Braun, the guest star Paramount’s photos list as teen Jeff, asks, “So, what does it feel like to be home?” Shauna, a fresh cut on her cheek, answers, “It doesn’t.”
From there the teaser stops pretending this is a reunion special. Over a card reading “ON NOVEMBER 20”, antlered figures stand in the trees, and a chair in the school gym carries a sign that says “RESERVED FOR SURVIVORS”. “THE FINAL RECKONING” fills a gym hung with blue and yellow balloons, where Melissa, Taissa and Akilah (Nia Sondaya) sit side by side. Mashable caught that Akilah is missing from the interviews but present in the gym, which at least settles that she made it out of the woods, even if it says nothing about whether she made it to adulthood. After a card reading “ARRIVES” over the wrecked fuselage, the camera looks up from the ground at fur-clad figures, one of them screaming. A gun is aimed at someone in a blue and yellow jacket standing against a tree, and Elijah Wood, one of the season’s guest stars, grins at someone off screen.
A woman levels a shotgun in a living room beside a white birdcage, fire bursts around the fuselage, and someone snaps open a handheld cassette recorder. Van, crying, says, “Everything that we saw.” The next line, “Everything we did.”, plays over a girl in glasses beside a burning cross and a blonde girl sobbing in the woods. The sentence finishes across three more cuts, a figure running through snow, the fuselage and a bloody handprint on a birch log: “We weren’t supposed to leave.” That is the darkest idea in the teaser, the possibility that the wilderness was where they belonged, and it rhymes with how the adult Shauna ended last season, vowing, in Gold Derby’s words, to become the “warrior” she was out there. It could also be a feint, the kind of line a trailer cutter loves and an episode never quite says, which is the risk with any teaser this good at mood.
The last stretch is all nerves. Someone in a mask steps out of the orange front door of house number 1116 holding something red, a girl in a headband stares into the lens with dark, smudged eyes, and another girl screams in bed. Taissa, in a white nightgown, stands in a dim cabin room hung with antlers. An overhead shot finds figures in the snow beside a rectangular pit while a girl in furs looks down from the edge. Inside it, Shauna, her face battered and bloody, laughs hysterically beside a slumped, dark-haired girl and says, “We’re gonna be so totally,” before the title card cuts her off. People describes that hole as the pit that killed Mari, though Den of Geek’s recap of the finale has Shauna ordering that pit filled in, so the teaser may be showing a new grave rather than an old one.
Paramount+ puts the premiere on Friday, November 20th, for subscribers on the Premium plan. The Futon Critic’s listings have the season reaching Showtime’s linear channel two days later, on Sunday, November 22nd, and Gold Derby reports ten episodes, arriving weekly on Fridays after the premiere. The press release lists only the core cast. Lynskey, Ricci, Cypress and Hilary Swank, who plays the adult Melissa, lead one side, with Nélisse, Brown, Thatcher, Hanratty, Eaton, Hewson, Alves, Sondaya and Burgess as the teens, plus Kole and Desjardins.
Juliette Lewis, whose adult Natalie died in Season 2, is not on that list, and neither are Ambrose and Kessell after last season took the adult Van and Lottie. The guests are the fun part, with June Squibb, Wood, Molly Ringwald, Devon Sawa, Braun and Dulé Hill. Paramount’s photo captions name Ringwald’s character Vicky Palmer, Sawa’s Howard, Squibb’s Geraldine and Hill’s Detective Rollins. The teaser’s description adds the present-day plot the footage mostly hides, in which “two of the Yellowjackets prepare to kill one of their own” while an old flame comes back to town. Given the Taissa and Misty alliance, it is not hard to guess who the one might be, though this show has made a habit of punishing that kind of guess.
Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who created the series and run it, framed the ending as a choice, saying they were “bringing the story of Yellowjackets to its twisted conclusion in this fourth and final season.” Lyle told Entertainment Weekly that “five seasons would require dragging things out a little bit, and four seasons would require speeding things up,” and that she “would rather go out with a bang than overstay my welcome.” The marketing has leaned all the way into the nineties. On Tuesday, a new MTV News segment, filmed with anchor Serena Altschul and blended with archival footage, reported the rescue, and a reworked MTV Unplugged clip had Alanis Morissette call the team “such a symbol of hope” before playing “Ironic” for them. The teaser is set to “Ironic” as well, and The Hollywood Reporter learned that Morissette recorded original audio for it. Nélisse told Gold Derby after the Season 3 finale that she wanted to see “their rehabilitation into society,” and this footage suggests that rehabilitation is going to look a lot like a cover-up with a soundtrack.
What Do You Think? Who is Lottie thinking about when that last interview question lands, and is anyone actually still out there? Does “We weren’t supposed to leave” mean the wilderness wanted them, or only that home was never going to fit again? And with Taissa and Misty already lined up against Shauna, is the old flame roaring back to town going to help them or get in the way?
See you on the next binge!
