Ope Pardon, No. 28: Satisfaction of the Supernatural

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t not believe in ghosts.

One time I was sitting in a bar in Honduras, and — I cannot recall why — the folks at the table started swapping ghost stories. One woman had several from her time working in the Emily Dickinson house. She told these stories as undeniable fact, daring one of us to challenge her, and I am constitutionally opposed to taking such bait so I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to dispute her account.

But it wasn’t just an aversion to giving her the gratification of debating a disbeliever. Ambivalent acceptance is also how I feel about the veracity of the scary stories Jezebel rounds up for Halloween every year. Lots of people have had seemingly inexplicable, outright terrifying supernatural experiences and ghosts or spirits or aliens are the explanation they have landed on. I may not be believe in ghosts, but I believe in their belief. Also, they’re good stories and I respect a good story.

I do, however, sometimes wonder if I would be more inclined to question those accounts if I had taken more science classes in my life.

It stands to reason that, over the course of human history, some combination of earth sciences and the unconscious mind can explain most ghost stories. (And good old-fashioned psychopathy — sometimes the noise you hear in the attic is not a ghost, just a real human man there to kill you.)

One of the working theories for why so many people from the Victorian age (?) believed in ghosts is that the fumes (??) from whatever heated their homes (???) caused them to hallucinate. Makes sense to me!

Supernatural or science then: Only you can really decide which explanation — which story — is the most satisfying for you.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I was catching up on Yellowjackets, which finished its second season in the U.S. on Friday.

Narratively speaking, I think there is a strong, almost irrefutable historical argument to be made that time and again society and humanity chooses the higher power or the vengeful spirit to explain the inexplicable. For starters, we love to outsource accountability for our horrible actions and also what kind of mood can you create around a campfire or Honduran bar telling tall tales of leaky boilers.

However, the calculus changes a bit — it all gets a bit meta — when we are talking about a show like Yellowjackets and I am growing suspect of the satisfaction of the supernatural explanation in this context.

Before I go further, let me just say that I am going to speak very generally about Yellowjackets season 2, including the finale. Nothing I say I would consider a spoiler, but I will relay the premise of the show and allude to some general themes. I would thus advise the following:

• If you are watching the show and are all caught up except for the finale, don’t read until after you have watched — I would hate to accidentally ruin anything by priming you one way or the other with my reaction/interpretation.

• If you are not watching the show and plan to start or catch back up, I think you are fine to read. I can’t imagine any allusion I make will stick so firmly in your mind to detrimentally affect your viewing experience — at least not more so than a trailer or poster or talk show appearance would.

• If you are not watching the show and never plan to, please read! I think it is still an interesting question that is relatable to other shows and fictions you consume that use the supernatural as a plot tension.

Moving swiftly along.

If you are in group 3 (thank you for joining us) and know nothing about Yellowjackets, it is a Showtime series about a high school girl’s soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness. The show alternates between what happens in said wilderness as well as what happens in the present day 25 years later when circumstances bring the women back into each other’s lives.

It is additionally not a spoiler for a show that was described as Lost-like to say that an abiding question of this puzzle box show is whether the spooky shit that is happening is in fact Actually Supernatural or just, you know, the dark side of the teenage soul.

Ahead of the season 2 finale, that question remained very much unanswered. After spending a not insignificant amount of time on the Yellowjackets subreddit, where I went from convinced The Wilderness/”It” was real to being convinced it was not, I found myself spiraling over what would be a satisfying explanation to this particular puzzle.

Because believably explained and satisfyingly explained are not the same thing. The show is (was) treading a very fine line as it attempts to keep Schrodinger’s Wilderness in its box: simultaneously a supernatural entity controlling the girls and a simple but powerful coping mechanism facilitating their survival.

(I say “was” in parenthesis there because while technically the show could still reveal a supernatural power and there are still big things that need to be explained, the exchange between Shauna and Lottie in the finale in which the former asserts there was never any “it” in the wilderness — just them, and the latter asks if there is a difference, and then later directly says “how else do we explain what happened out there,” to me confirms that at minimum there will be no Smoke Monster making its season 3 debut.)

In any case, as I considered whether I would be happy with a supernatural explanation, I first felt strongly that that is a cheap choice. Waving it all away with “the power of trees compelled me” would feel deeply underwhelming.

That said, I was and remain open to it if The Wilderness had some kind of guiding logic or methodology to its influence. I need a meaningful “why” this is happening both on a macro (what is The Wilderness’ gripe with teenage girls?) and micro level (why does it change its mind about people’s fates and how does it decide whose time it is to die? If it is controlling everything, why is it giving one girl the Queen of Hearts card but then also “choosing” someone else to actually die? Is The Wilderness just a messy bitch that loves drama?).

Which is to say, if the mythology comes together in the grand satisfying tradition of humanity’s greatest ghost stories, then I will be on board.

The alternative — because I refuse to acknowledge any “it was all a hallucination” endgames — is “it’s all real,” which was firmly my camp, until I saw what the theorists were coming up with to justify it.

My friend told me that one of the prevailing theories about Yellowjackets on the Team Real side of Reddit is that all the spooky shit and weird behavior can be explained by — I am not kidding — minerals in the dirt.

I am sorry but: No. That is not good TV. That is not remotely satisfying. Declaring “dirt poisoning” is almost as silly as introducing a late-season smokey Sasquatch.

I appreciate that part of the thrill of Reddit sleuthing is finding out that there is a certain kind of mineral density that exists in the dirt in certain parts of the American wilderness that could theoretically explain the inexplicable behavior of the girls and ladies of Yellowjackets.

As someone who fucking loves riddles (shout out to the dead man strapped to a chair in the cabin, how did he dieee) and conspiracy theories, I do enjoy a deep thread on an out-there theory. That is fun. However, I am also someone who compulsively takes things (especially TV) too seriously, often to the detriment of my own enjoyment, so I can’t read a 10-tweet thread on how Walter is also a cannibal who has his own side-quest to eat Misty without thinking about what a bad choice that would be for the show as a piece of narrative fiction.

Because ultimately, this is not a 20-questions riddle — this is a TV show!

In my own personal opinion, real world explanations (and, honestly, supernatural ones too) are only satisfying when the viewer could theoretically have gotten there all along. It has to be something that, upon second viewing, blows your mind a little bit about how the clues were right in front of you the whole time (while also not requiring a degree in geology to have picked up on them). The explanation should function as part-and-parcel of the show.

If, for example, there had been some seemingly incongruous flashback to science class or Misty babbling away about the mind-altering powers of rocks, I would be receptive to this theory. But I am 87% sure there have not been dirt-related bread crumbs I missed that would lead to a satisfying mineral density revelation.

Plus, there is such a rich tradition of humans acting bananas to draw from in the “it’s all real” realm before you even need to get to dirt: feral children, Bacchus hunts, cannibalism in general, cults in general…

Even neurodivergence and mental illness, while maybe not an ideal choice to explain their actions from a causality perspective, is a more interesting narrative well to dig than dirt!

Luckily, the season 2 finale suggests — to my read — that the show is leaning toward the trifecta of starvation, mob mentality and shared trauma as its foundational explanation.

The supernatural will always be a part of the story, as all three of those things require Herculean levels of processing and the mere implication of the supernatural has been used as a coping mechanism and/or excuse for killing people since the dawn of time.

But the intricacies of how humans use the supernatural to understand, explain and excuse can be fascinating and deeply moving. That a supernatural entity is the only satisfying explanation these characters can find is a more satisfying choice for the viewers (or at least me) than making said supernatural entity real.

Season 2 of Yellowjackets was exciting but uneven. Full of weird and much-anticipated moments, it nonetheless felt heavy on side-quests and light on meaningful answers or narrative progress. There is some satisfaction, sure, in building momentum and heightening emotions through sheer shock and awe, but there is an art to compounding confusion amongst viewers of a puzzle box show and when your primary narrative engine is the question “what happened in the wilderness?” you do, at some point, need to begin to separate the ghosts from the gas fumes.

By alluding to the characters — especially Lottie’s — self-awareness, I think it’s beginning to do that, to satisfying effect.

More miscellaneous thoughts on Yellowjackets:

• Starting the finale with “Zombie”: The music supervision team does not miss.

• I think this show might be more entertaining than it is good but that is okay with me because I am very entertained.

• Extremely unclear to me how they are planning to get 5 seasons out of this story without diminishing returns but this Reddit “5 seasons/5 stages of grief” theory compels me.

• Jeff 5eva.

• In France, Yellowjackets is advertised with posters with the very rad tagline “Only the secrets survive” but also the less rad (but very funny) “The feminine rage to survive.” You know, just girlies eatin’ girlies.

• I had like another 500 words about how and why the supernatural works on The Leftovers (and the distinction between explanations offered by characters vs. offered by the show) but this was already quite long and I remembered the time someone DM’d me on Twitter to tell me to stop bringing up The Leftovers all the time so I thought I would spare you.