Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Christina Ricci as Misty, Lauren Ambrose as Van and Tawny Cypress as Taissa. Colin Bentley/SHOWTIME
Yellowjackets has had its fair share of death by cannibalism — but which character exit was the most brutal and gruesome?
The Showtime series, which premiered in 2021, follows a high school girls soccer team that ends up stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. The survivors don’t return home for 19 months during which time they are driven to eating each other in order to survive. Yellowjackets also features a present day timeline that reintroduces the survivors more than two decades later.
Despite the story line being heavily teased in the first season, Yellowjackets wasn’t in a rush to deliver. In fact, the show didn’t give the teenagers their first meal until season 2 when Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) body was literally cooked for them by the elements in the wilderness.
“For us, it’s never been about if [there will be] cannibalism,” creator Ashley Lyle told IndieWire in 2023. “It has always been why and how, and then what happens after that. It sounds like a weird thing to say, but you’ve got to earn cannibalism.”
Fellow showrunner Jonathan Lisco called the reveal a “muscular, bold move” that was meant to shock and surprise the audience.
“Once flesh has been tasted, it’s a slippery slope,” he noted at the time. “When they wake up with the Jackie hangover, the next episode, are they so filled with guilt and shame that they actually would do anything not to do it again?”
Lisco continued: “We’re going to make the choices that they make much more ambiguous and much more morally fraught than just the eating of a person to survive.”
Keep scrolling for a breakdown of each death by most gruesome to least:
Javi’s Untimely End
As the younger group got more hungry, they also got more motivated for their next meal. The second season put cannibalism on the table with Jackie’s death but Javi’s (Luciano Leroux) was much more emotionally gruesome after he accidentally drowned when trying to save Natalie (Sophie Thatcher).
The aftermath resulted in the group preparing to have him as their next meal. Javi’s brother Travis (Kevin Alves) ultimately gave his permission for the others to eat his sibling by biting off a piece of Javi’s heart.
Between the plot twist, the decision to play Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls,” and Travis’ heartbreak, Javi’s death was the most emotionally brutal by far.
Jackie Being Cooked to Perfection
Ella Purnell as Teen Jackie. Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME
After the wilderness group discovered that Shauna was dressing up Jackie’s corpse, they decided that they would cremate her to help Shauna move on. Shauna initially parted ways with Jackie until a mysterious gust of wind blew a ton of snow on top of Jackie’s body — just as it was perfectly cooked by the fire.
The girls — and Travis — realized that the smell was calling to them to feast on their friend. Yellowjackets subsequently introduced a sequence that shifted back and forth between the group’s brutal meal and a hallucination of the girls decked out in Renaissance attire enjoying fruit and wine.
Pit Girl’s Introduction
The series premiere introduced Us to the horror yet to come when a girl with black hair was chased out in the wilderness. She got caught in a trap and from there she became the group’s next meal. The lack of context kept the scene from feeling too grotesque but something tells Us there’s plenty more death by cannibalism to come.
