Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of YellowjacketsTaissa is the hummingbird ofYellowjackets—well, that is, if hummingbirds were able to sacrifice dog heads and consume dirt on the regular. She’s all over the place, forcing us to jerk our heads left and right just to catch a tiny glimpse of where she’s headed. And where exactlyisshe headed, by the way? It’s tough to tell if it’s by mistake or if it’s the point of Taissa’s arc this season…that through every storyline being told in the series, the one real mainstay is that no oneactuallyknows what’s going on with her in either timeline.
Season 2 ofAshley LyleandBart Nickerson’sYellowjacketsis certainly living up to the standards of the last season, as the first episode of Season 2 actually became themost-streamed premiere of any Showtime seriesever, breaking records with just around 2 million people tuning into the season debut. But getting the already-loyal fans of the series to return for more delicious mayhem isn’t the problem. It’s that people are getting a justlittlebit tired of, and frankly very confused by the character of Taissa. And this goes for both iterations of the character in the past and present, played byJasmin Savoy BrownandTawny Cypressrespectively.
Related:This Is Actually the Worst Character in ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2
Sleepwalking, Sleeprunning, Sleep—What Is Taissa Even Doing?
Listen, at first it was cute when youngTaissa had to tie herself to Van (Liv Hewson)with a rope at night to not sleepwalk and almost throw herself off of a cliff, but at this point, we have reached a whole different level of “huh?” Sure, Van now allows Taissa to walk through the night (with her aid) in order to locate the various symbols on trees…but at what cost? Getting caught in a snowstorm or simply lost in the night is a serious risk in and of itself, and aswe saw in Episode 5 with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse)and Taissa, it’s incredibly risky stuff.
For a while now, we’ve gone through the same sort of motions with ’90s Taissa: she attempts to sleep at night, inevitably doesn’t, sleepwalks instead, is accompanied by Van on said sleepwalk, and the two eventually find a symbol on a tree outside. While it’s obviously intriguing that Taissa is able to locate this symbol almost every night, we’ve still yet to put together why this is happening and what the actual connection is that Taissa has to this symbol. And what even is this symbol, anyway? The main problem here? Wehaveto cut to the chase.Whereas most of the other characters' storylineshave progressed in Season 2, Taissa’s has remained fairly stagnant, trapping us in a constant loop of her paranoia, confusion, and overall screwed-up sleep-wake state.
Present-day Taissa Is Just as Confused as ’90s Taissa
Older, more mature Taissa (Tawny Cypress) inSeason 2 ofYellowjacketsis really just as unhinged as ’90s Taissa. Both can’t catch a break from what’s real and what’s not, and, to be quite frank, present-day Taissa might actually be worse off than her younger counterpart. The younger, in-the-wilderness Taissa can afford to potentially throw herself off a cliff in the midst of sleepwalking, but present-day Taissa is a New Jersey state senator with an estranged wife in the hospital, a son that she imagines is half-there and half-not, and a dog that sheprobablyshouldn’t have bought (you know, because of the whole sacrificing Biscuit thing). But anyway, the main point here is that Taissa has quite a bit more responsibility than she used to, so she can’t afford to be completely out of mental commission as she was back in her snowy, recently-crashed days.
At one point in Season 2, Taissa finds herself driving cross-country, blacking out, and then finally waking up with just enough time to run out of gas. While she manages to hitchhike her way back home, there’s still no explanation for the blackout or why she was driving to where she was in the first place. And to add to all of that, she exited the truck she had hitched a ride withpractically right in front of Van’s (Lauren Ambrose) video store, an indication that she had come out of the fog of her head enough to make a (somewhat) sound decision. The main point being: odd things keep happening to Taissa, but there’s never a solid reason as to why or how she’s able to swing herself back into reality.
WhyisTaissa able to locate those symbols on the trees back in the wilderness? And does that same internal instinct play into how she randomly wakes up in cars and sleepwalks in the present? There’s something very serious going on in Taissa’s head, though her arc in the series tends to shift to the results of her mental state instead of getting to the core of why it’s all actually happening. At least with Shauna, there was a reasonwhy she was imagining Jackie(Ella Purnell) being alive as opposed to the frozen corpse that her late best friend actually was.The same goes for Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), who keeps falling into memories of his boyfriend back home in New Jersey. For both characters, it was a way to escape and make sense of their current situation—to reflect on reality.
But now that Taissa has located andjoined forces with Van (Lauren Ambrose), it’d be nice to shift over from her plot of incessant confusion and move onto a more cognitively clearer future for her character. Given that Van has been able to pull Taissa out of her mind in the past, there’s a fair chance that she’ll be able to do just the same now that they’re older. And hopefully, for everyone’s sake, that’s the case. Two or three episodes of Taissa’s disorientation make sense, but having half of the season already dedicated to this arc with no real point or end in sight is a bit overkill. It’s a solid metaphor to have Taissa represent the state of sustained disorder in the series. However, it’s unlikely that it’s theentirepoint of that confusion, which makes moving her onto the conveyor belt of reason seem all the more pressing given that we’refive episodes so far into Season 2’s nine.
