Yellowjackets
One of the great things about the first season of Yellowjackets was just how incredibly creepy and mysterious everything was. (Spoiler warning).
The show just oozed creepiness and hinted at so many unsettling things, like the Man With No Eyes and what exactly was going on with Tai, or the creepy old dead guy in the attic of the cabin. Season 2 really dropped the ball when it came to maintaining that same level of tension and mystery and fear, especially during the modern timeline.
But I’m starting to walk a dangerous path in Season 3. For the first time in a long time, I have hope that the show’s creators are nudging the story back in the right direction. Hope is dangerous. It’s what leads to heartbreak. But the latest episode felt more like the first season than the second, and that makes me happy, even if I remain deeply skeptical.
There’s one very cool thing about this episode that you might not have noticed. At one point, adult Tai and Van are watching some VHS tapes when a commercial for Ozzie’s Homemade Ice Cream Parlor pops up. In it, we see the Man With No Eyes. It’s possibly the most unsettling commercial of all time. Very little can make me not want ice cream, but this sure does.
In any case, the ad includes a phone number for the fictional business: 1-732-858-5242. If you call it, you’ll hear a deeply disturbing message. I won’t try to transcribe this message because it’s pretty hard to make a lot of it out, but you can hop over to this reddit thread to read what people are gleaning from it or this thread to hear the audio. There’s a section of the message that is in Morse Code, and reddit sleuths have already run it through an analyzer. The result? “The screams are not what they seem.” This is a reference to the weird shrieking sounds we’ve been hearing this season.
It’s also not very helpful since the screams don’t seem to be anything at all or, rather, I have no idea what they’re supposed to be. Still, it’s pretty neat that they’re including this kind of ARG content in the new season. Yellowjackets is a “Lost-like” series, and that was a show notorious for ARG bread-crumbs and easter eggs. I hope we see more like this in Yellowjackets, and more episodes like this one that actually make me excited to see where all of this is going, and hopeful that they have a destination in mind.
