The trailer opens in the dark of a car, with one hand on the wheel, a green dashboard clock reading 2:25 and a radio display tuned to 105.7. Then a laminated photo of a girl in a number 6 jersey swings into focus from the mirror. Paramount+ put the cut on its official YouTube channel on Thursday, November 5th, as “Season 4 Official Trailer”, a title that sets it apart from October’s “Official Teaser”. At two minutes and two seconds it runs seven seconds longer than that earlier footage. The fourth and final season of “Yellowjackets” premieres Friday, November 20th, on Paramount+ with the Premium plan, and this cut leans harder on what a small town does with the people it gets back.
This is not the season’s debut footage. An August 20th teaser announced the date, a mock MTV News report followed in the second week of October, and the October 14th “Official Teaser”, set to Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”, showed the survivors back in Wiskayok, New Jersey, giving their account to a camcorder. Set beside that teaser, this cut keeps very little: a handful of shots come back from October, the taped interviews are gone, and nearly every scene is new. It runs across three eras at once, the wilderness, the weeks after the rescue and the present day. The same song holds them together. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Yellowjackets” through the Season 3 finale and for everything shown in the Season 4 trailer.
Set beside that teaser, this cut keeps very little: a handful of shots come back from October, the taped interviews are gone, and nearly every scene is new.”
After the dashboard, the cut settles into a town trying to throw a party. A pizza shop’s sign reads “HNY ’98”, “WELCOME HOME YELLOWJACKETS” and “2-4-1 CHEESE SLICES”. Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), a yellow ribbon pinned to her cardigan, speaks into a microphone in a gym hung with blue and yellow balloons. “It’s surreal to be here”, she says, and “Feels like going back to a different life.” A TV crew films on the lawn outside Wiskayok High, and a voice says “You kids are heroes”. “Bigger than that” arrives over a woman in a white coat and a man in a suit at a desk, and “you’re survivors.” lands on four teens outside the school. A bronze winged girl in a team jersey, one arm raised, stands in front of a school wall strung with barbed wire. Then Misty (Samantha Hanratty), glasses on, sits in a tiled room scrawled with graffiti. “This history you have with each other” runs over adult Misty (Christina Ricci), Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) in a convenience store, adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) in front of a burned-out car and adult Taissa (Tawny Cypress). Alex (Jaylee Hamidi) finishes it with “it’s terrifying.”
The wilderness arrives on cards. “ON NOVEMBER 20” sits over the moss-streaked fuselage, then “THE FINAL SEASON ARRIVES” over a treeline with a helicopter hanging in the sky. An overhead shot finds a knot of figures in the snow as Taissa’s speech picks up: “When you wish for something for so long, and then it actually happens, you’re never really prepared.” Under the broken hull five survivors crane upward, and a crying girl is pulled into a hug by someone in a blue-striped blanket, before the gym shot closes the thought. The 1998 strand fills in with a cafeteria table under a wall of drawings, while classmates stare at a blurred blond girl in the foreground. Misty, in a library, begins “Don’t you see the way that everyone looks at us?” before “People think that we’re crazy.” lands over boots on a black-and-white checkered floor. In a restroom with that same floor, a girl with bangs and a choker, Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), stands beside a bearded man in a jacket. Paramount’s own photo caption gives that pairing as Thatcher and Steven Krueger, the actor who played Coach Ben before the character died in Season 3.
Then comes the interview. A camera monitor frames Melissa (Hilary Swank) in warm light while a voice asks “Is there anything you’re ready to share with us about what you all experienced?”, and the shot widens on Melissa and Alex side by side on a couch. The present day breaks in. Callie (Sarah Desjardins) tells her mother, “I need you to tell me the truth, Mom.”, and adult Taissa says “We might have a problem” to adult Misty, who stands at a staircase in heart-patterned scrubs with a name tag. A voice begins “I can feel that you have” over a lit window in a wallpapered house at night, and the man from the desk finishes “something to say that you want to say”. Lottie (Courtney Eaton) cries “No.” and then “No!” in front of a gray-haired man in a suit and a woman in a pearl necklace. A pistol is aimed from the shooter’s point of view at a figure in a Yellowjackets jacket, one of the shots that returns from October.
The back half turns to party lights. Teen Taissa grins through a teal feather boa under colored bulbs, Van (Liv Hewson) beams in face paint, and the two kiss. “For so long” begins a sentence that ends over Elijah Wood in a cowboy hat, holding a newspaper up in a backyard: “we forgot what It felt like.” Melissa answers on camera, “But It didn’t forget us.”, and the subtitles capitalize that “It” both times while every other “it” in the cut stays lowercase. That could be a nod to the force Lottie called It in Season 3, though the trailer never says so. Adult Misty peers around an open door, and adult Shauna levels a shotgun beside a white birdcage. The words “HOMECOMING”, “IS” and “SAVAGE” cut in between a party hall under pink balloons, a bloodied girl screaming in snow, a girl shouting “Let me out!”, a wrecked car in the ferns, Misty doubling over on the stoop of a flower-lined blue house and a hand closing around a blade. Taissa’s speech comes back to end it, “More than anything, we survived because of love.”, and a glitching title card for “THE FINAL SEASON” on November 20th gives way to a blue Paramount+ end card marked “PREMIUM PLAN ONLY”.
Set against October, the shape of the change is clear. What returns is small: the pistol aimed at a Yellowjackets jacket by a tree, a low shot up at fur-clad attackers and a screaming blonde girl, and Shauna’s shotgun beside the birdcage, now filmed from further back. What goes is the frame that organized the teaser, a row of camcorder interviews stamped “JAN 3 1998”, along with the Wiskayok welcome sign, the chair reserved for survivors, the upside-down Sacred Heart painting and the pit that ended it. In their place come a speech, a television interview, a party and a present-day strand that October barely touched, so the cut sells the season as a story about adults living with what the girls did.
The soundtrack is again Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”, and its refrain is sung over the end of the cut, “Isn’t it ironic” across the title card and “Don’t you think” after it. Deadline, TVLine and The Hollywood Reporter each name the song. Gold Derby reports ten episodes arriving weekly on Fridays after the premiere, and The Futon Critic’s listings agree, with a tenth episode on January 22nd, 2027 and each one reaching Showtime’s linear channel two days after its Paramount+ debut. Paramount’s cast list names Lynskey, Ricci, Cypress and Swank among the adults, with June Squibb, Elijah Wood, Molly Ringwald, Devon Sawa, Sam Braun and Dulé Hill as guests, and of those guests only Wood is an unmistakable face in this cut. Whether the three-way structure is a promise or a feint might not be clear until the premiere, because a trailer can be arranged to hint at an order the episodes never use.
What Do You Think? Is Taissa’s closing line about love a story the survivors agreed on before the gym assembly, or the last sincere thing anyone says in the cut? Does the capital “It” mean the wilderness has followed them home, or is it only how Melissa says the word? And with a man the show buried in Season 3 standing at Natalie’s shoulder, is the final season about to settle what the woods really were, or will it keep that question alive to the last episode?
See you on the next binge!
