Samantha Hanratty still hasn’t seen any scripts for the third season of Yellowjackets, but she has some thoughts about where the group is headed in the series’ younger timeline.
In the 1996 wilderness, the cabin that had been sheltering the Yellowjackets team survivors went up in flames. What was Hanratty’s first thought when she saw that they were left in the dead of winter without a roof over their heads?
“I’m screwed,” she recalled when speaking to The Hollywood Reporter on the 2023 Emmys red carpet. “I’m screwed, because now I’m going to be so dirty. That’s all I keep thinking about, is how filthy we’re going to get. Because now we have no shelter at all. I’m going to be cold. I’m going to be dirty. And now we have nowhere to wash off our blood. So, we’re going to be gross. We’re going to be gross.”
Related Stories
Hanratty plays young Misty in the hit Showtime series. Her character is played by Christina Ricci in the present-day timeline. The second season left viewers off with cliffhangers in both the past and present.
While Hanratty says she hasn’t “seen a single” script for season three yet — she does have ideas about where things could go.
“The first year is this chaotic mess. The second year was almost this creepy stillness of winter. And now, it’s like the defrosting; the meltdown,” she says of where the team is headed for season three. “We might be entering into another season, I’m thinking possibly spring. The snow will melt and our messes will show. That’s what I’m thinking.”
Her hopes for younger Misty also include closure for the Crystal storyline (as Misty killed her best friend in season two), and more on fallout for Misty and Coach Ben’s (Steven Krueger) relationship. “Finding out that he did that [possibly burning down the cabin] after she saved him, I feel like she has something in store for him. It would be fun to see that,” she says.
And while she is sure that Crystal is indeed dead, she acknowledges, “Where is her body?! I don’t know! It disappeared.”
Nuha Jes Izman, the actress who played Crystal, meanwhile, was with Hanratty during Emmys night. “So much of this season was [our] season together. So it was really important to bring her to these things, because she should be celebrated just as much. All of our recurring cast, I wish they could all be here right now,” she said.
Yellowjackets is nominated for best drama series at the 2024 Emmys, with Melanie Lynskey nominated for best actress.
When discussing the ending to season two briefly in a Showtime featurette (the finale aired amid the writers strike and work stoppage), co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson said that the cabin burning down will play a huge part in season three, which has yet to get a premiere date after restarting their writers room following the delay from Hollywood’s strikes. “We’re big fans of clue climaxes and so decisions were made and what those decisions mean will be a big part of season three,” teased Nickerson.
The finale, meanwhile, brought about a tragic ending in the present-day storyline when a main castmember was killed, marking her exit from the series and a full-circle storyline that had been plotted since the finale. Will that actor ever return, perhaps via flashbacks? “What I’ve learned about Ashley and Bart and Jonathan [Lisco, co-showrunner] is that they are kind of a never-say-never group. I find they’re always super open to imagining things if it drives the story into an interesting place,” finale director Karyn Kusama told THR. Read that interview here.
