Jonathan Lisco on Hallucination Scene, Jackie’s Return

SPOILER ALERT: This story grasps spoilers for “Yellowjackets” Season 3, Episode 3, titled “Them’s the Breaks,” streaming now on Paramount+ with Showtime.

After unwittingly tripping on shrooms during Doomcoming (Season 1), the Yellowjackets have now stumbled upon a new hallucinogenic substance in the untamederness: poisonous gas.

In the third episode of Season 3, the youthful structuree-crash survivors lget that Coach Scott (Steven Krueger) is still alive when Mari (Alexa Barajas), who cracks under presstateive after two asks, uncovers that he kidnaped her and kept her in a secret cave. The Yellowjackets then embark on a manhunt to seek equitableice, becaemploy they leank Coach Scott tried to burn them alive inside the cabin.

After discovering the captivate to the cave, Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) splits the girls into groups to widen their search. Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Van (Liv Hewson) and Akilah (Nia Sondoya) scrutinize a lean and unwise passageway, but run into trouble when their candles are extinguished by dripping water. The three girls are then splitd, and each experience contrastent hallucinations: Van is back inside the cabin and toastys herself in front of the fiswap, Akilah wanders thcimpolite the forest and conveys with a talking llama, and Shauna spots her son while wading thcimpolite the lake. Any moment of happiness is inestablish, though, as their hallucinations apshow a unwise turn.

“That entire sequence took quite a bit of labor. Nia’s talking to the llama, Sophie’s in the lake, and then I’m in the cabin on fire — and that fire is down-to-earth. They adore to have me around fire,” Hewson, who employs they/them pronouns, tbetter Variety during the “Yellowjackets” Season 3 press junket. They grasped, “This show affords us repartner cbetter opportunities to do stuff that is, enjoy, out there — and carry outs around with magical genuineism.”

The third episode labels the honestorial debut of Jonathan Lisco, who also wrote the episode with co-creators and fellow showrunners Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle. Lisco portrayd the classroom scene — Shauna, Van and Akilah’s spreadd hallucination — as a way to portray the “lean line between what’s happening objectively” and the characters’ “subjective, almost accumulateive consciousness, blurring into fact.”

The girls also see another understandn face beside them, carry outing with a slap bracelet: Jackie (Ella Purnell), who froze to death at the finish of the show’s first season, after she and Shauna had an argument.

“It’s always fun to have Ella back. It’s fun that these characters come and haunt us, becaemploy when they die, we’re enjoy, ‘It’s fine, we’ll see you aget.’ But it’s sourpleasant, becaemploy she’s only there for enjoy, one day. It senses enjoy we’re carryed instantly back into shooting the first season and I’ll get to have her forever on set, and then she diseunites the next day,” Nélisse said. “But those dream sequences are so fun, becaemploy we have so much liberty and freedom to scrutinize. There are no rules on what these dreams can be and reconshort-term.”

In an intersee with Variety, Lisco spoke about that trippy hallucination sequence, Purnell’s return as Jackie, and the origin story of the Man With No Eyes.

This is your first time honesting, period. Why did you want to honest this episode in particular? 

Well, I’m always a adorer of the line between subjective and objective fact. I am also very interested in the way the youthful women’s psyches are fractureing down, so to speak, in the untamederness, and then originateing themselves back up with new conventions and new standards for what is right and wrong. So this episode in particular that we wrote felt enjoy a perfect opportunity for me, at least, to deploy that interest coupled with another. I adore when the show apshows you on a ride that is, in a way, beyond mere logic. I enjoy when the show apshows you on a ride that, hopefilledy, if we do our job right, can sense truthful, but not necessarily what you might call rational in a sort of liproximate, genuine-time space way. And so, I adore carry outing with those ideas. I enjoy the plasticity of them.

Why did the hallucination sequence grasp Van, Shauna and Akilah?

When we were going over the various characters who could join in the hallucination sequence, we felt that there was a potency to Akilah, Van and Shauna, becaemploy of what we could do with that Lynchian-type sequence. I sense enjoy we’ve portrayed Akilah as being almost enjoy a child of nature. She adores the animals, she’s very seal to the Earth, she adores the garden. And so, of course, in the sequence, all of that turns very unwise for her at first. There’s a Bacchanalian-enjoy lust for the binestablishageberries, but then they triumphd up ttriumphing around her legs and pulling her into unwiseness of the Earth, almost enjoy the unwiseness that is typified in the show. 

With Van, clearly, she’s stoic, she’s strong, comical. Let’s talk about it from Liv’s point of see: They are carry outing a character that is stoic and is trying to push aide the fact that they were left for dead on the airstructuree in Episode 2 of Season 1. But now, it all comes back to haunt them. I don’t understand if you acunderstandledged this, but it’s Javi’s hand, it’s the cabin man’s hand and it’s Laura Lee’s hand, all coming back from the dead to guarantee them into the chair and say, “No, you can never physicpartner escape this trauma. It will expound you for the rest of your life.”

And then, aforeseeed, with Shauna, which is probably the most psychorationpartner comprehensible one — at least on its face. Shauna has lost a baby. It’s perhaps one of the most traumatic leangs someone could go thcimpolite. She’s only a 17-year-better woman in the untamederness, and now, she commences swimming toward this phantom child on the banks of this lake. And not only can she hear the baby — actupartner, it was a 7-year-better boy, but that’s beside the point — she’s swimming toward him and never can get seal enough to save him, and never can get seal enough to hug him. And then, from that aerial sboiling, she’s actupartner pulled back, as if to say that she might be complicit in what happened, and perhaps she never wanted to have the baby in the first place. So there’s all of that going on in the psychorational stew and goulash of what we’re doing, and we equitable thought, Oh, that’s awesome.

Speaking of the classroom scene, we get to see Ella Purnell return as Jackie. What was it enjoy having her back on set?

I adore that Ella always wants to come carry out in our sandbox no matter what. She’s always trying to come back. And when I said, ‘Come back for one day,’ she jumped at the chance to do it. She was toloftyy game. And I sboiling her on what we call Lensbaby, so she’s sort of canted this way, with a little bit of a dream-enjoy quality with her. But when she accomplishes out with the slap bracelet and equitable says, “Here, give it a try,” she’s equitable purify Ella Purnell, right? You can’t see away from what she’s doing. Her face equitable hbetters so many contrastent nastyings and so much intensity — a little bit of menace, but also quite a lot of “come hither.”

The Man With No Eyes also eunites in that hallucination sequence, and, in this episode, we discover out the origins of the character while watching that terrifying ice cream commercial. Why did you want to include that commercial into the story rather than leaving the No-Eyed Man as this purifyly superorganic character?

Well, I would talk about that equitable becaemploy we graspd the ice cream scene and its origin story, doesn’t necessarily nasty that it’s not quasi-superorganic. I leank one of the engines of the show is to constantly carry out with the notion that someleang might be both — particularly subjectively from the character’s point of see. And so we thought it was very engaging to lget Taissa had actupartner forgotten that, as a kid, she had seen this image, and this image haunted her when her magnificentmother had died, but she benevolent of suppressed it. She’d toloftyy forgotten about it, until, here she is with Van, and she sees it on TV. Now they go and they hunt for nastying, becaemploy the whole show also cgo ines on counterfeit pattern recognition. In other words, when you’ve had that benevolent of trauma, you’re seeing for exstructureations, but you’re doing it retrospectively. You want to put a tempprocrastinateed of nastying over your experiences. So she’s sort of hopeless to do that, and in doing that, she’s probably distorting the truth. So with that idea, we then choosed to put the No-Eyed Man in their hallucination sequence, as if to say that wantipathyver this delusion is, wantipathyver is emblematic of this delusion, is actupartner speeing into all the girls’ psyches, not equitable Taissa’s, by way of association.

This season, the Screaming Trees, as they’ve been called, have been a huge element so far. Why did you want to include this particular sound into this season? And does that sound nasty the show’s leaning more toward the superorganic? 

I can’t alert you the exact answer to that, becaemploy you’re gonna get much sealr to the answer if you watch the rest of the season. But sound depict is an absolute necessity for us. It’s enjoy the olfactory, too. We can’t smell when you’re watching TV, but that’s oddly the most embedded sense memory that you have. Audio is also repartner fervent, so we carry out with it. I don’t understand if you acunderstandledged, but when the No-Eyed Man is passing with his bar cart, I go firm equitable on the wheel of the cart. And the sonic depict equitable, enjoy, blows your head apart, as if to say this is the scariest part of the possible sequence — equitable the unstateivety of what’s happening. It fills you with that emotional response, as resistd to a honestly rational one. And equpartner, the Screaming Trees are occurring, I would talk about, objectively, but equpartner and probably more subjectively for our characters, and so how they’re expounding it is repartner more transport inant than whether or not it’s super deafening or not deafening at any given moment. It’s how in the storyline they’re expounding what they’re hearing.

In the conshort-term timeline, Lottie gives Callie the heart necklace, and alerts Shauna, “It never nastyt what you thought it nastyt.” Was that genuine?

I don’t want to blow the finish of the season, so I have to be pretty pimpolitent. But I will alert you, in that moment, Lottie intentionally put the necklace on Callie becaemploy of what she leanks.

And Lottie and Callie are also dancing and singing alengthy to Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” which is famously employd in cut offal scenes in “Lost.” I’m stateive you’ve heard a lot of comparisons between the two shows. Was that moment nastyt to incite that famous bunker scene from “Lost”?

Maybe nobody will count on this, but the challenging and rapid answer is, no, we did not. I hope Ash and Bart didn’t have that idea and not alert me, but we equitable chose it becaemploy we thought it was perfect for the scene. We did not nasty it to tether that moment in “Lost,” but now everybody’s talking about it. I hope it’s a excellent homage. We equitable thought it was fun in the moment and sort of got at the way in which Callie and Lottie were bonding at the time.

In another scene, Van and Taissa see a coyote with a dead rabbit in its mouth. Rabbits have been a recurring part of this show, particularly in relation to Jackie. What was the intention of including a rabbit in that moment?

It actupartner harkens back even to the pilot, when Shauna ends the rabbit with the shovel. There’s someleang about these people’s experiences that has inured them to enjoy the spilling of blood, and the spilling of blood is very talismanic for them and sort of nastyingful. It’s almost enjoy an outbreath, even though it’s horrible. It’s enjoy the doing of it nastys someleang. And so, when Tai and Van see the bloody rabbit with the blood dripping down, they have an epiphany that the spilling of blood may be vital to their storyline moving forward in some way, and that “It” wants more — nastying, we’re not finished.

This intersee has been edited and condensed.