7 Yellowjackets Mysteries That Must Be Solved in Season 3

Yellowjackets Season 3 has some serious explaining to do. The series has teased out a lot of great mysteries, and after years of theorizing, fans are ready for some answers. The thriller employs a split timeline, depicting a high school girls soccer team stranded in a plane crash in 1996, and the adult survivors living their lives in 2021. This premise has gone a long way, and the writers reportedly hope the series will go for five seasons. If that’s still the plan, then this halfway mark should be the time the show stops setting up long-term mysteries and starts solving them instead.

Yellowjackets Season 3 will kick off with all of its characters in pretty dire straits. We don’t know how much winter is left for the survivors in the past, but their cabin has burned down and they will need shelter, warmth and supplies. Meanwhile, in the present timeline the survivors have several murders to cover up, not to mention their own psychological or supernatural issues to work out. Hopefully, facing these obstacles will provide answers to some stubborn questions for us. Here are 10 of the mysteries that must be solved this season.

Javi’s Friend

Javi Martinez survived in the Wilderness away from the cabin for at least two months in the harsh winter, and he never explained how. Coach Ben found a cave that seems to tell us where he found shelter, but there are still a lot of questions about Javi’s time away. Most importantly, we need to know more about the “friend” he mentioned. Javi said that his “friend” advised him to stay away from the girls in the cabin, which is why he never came back. Some theorize that it was Tai’s later-ego, Dark Tai, but if not, there are probably other people out there in the Wilderness. This could be a game changer for the new season.

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Crystal/Kristen

Season 3 will have to give us more on Misty’s friend Crystal, who turned out to really be named Kristen. In Season 2, Misty got so close with Kristen that she told her her darkest secret — that she had destroyed the black box for their plane on purpose. A horrified Kristen then fell off of a cliff, but when Misty returned later to retrieve her body, it was gone, with no signs of it being dragged away.

A popular theory is that Kristen was an imaginary friend for Misty, and the other girls only humored her by pretending she was real. Whether this is true or not, we should learn more in Season 3. It would provide a big shock and help illustrate the depth of their delusions setting in.

Tai’s Sleepwalking

Fans are dying to learn more about Tai’s sleepwalking, her alter ego, and her visions of the Man With No Eyes. Much like Lottie walking the line between mental illness and psychic gifts, this is one aspect of the story that could be left intentionally mysterious. However, it seems likely that we’ll get to examine the meaning of the Man With No Eyes more closely — either as a hallucination or a true haunting. We could also see the adult version of Tai confronting her sleepwalking in the hopes of restoring her family, which could give us some answers. Other than that, it’s up to Dark Tai to explain it to us or not.

Walter’s Backstory

There’s definitely more to Walter than we’ve heard so far, and with Elijah Wood promoted to a series regular this season, we should expect to learn more about him. Walter is clearly just as murderous as anyone else in the cast, and his stated motivation as “Moriarty looking for his Sherlock” might be all the rationalization we get for his actions. Still, there’s more to unravel here when it comes to his immense wealth, his fixation on Misty and his investigative skills.

Black Box

A mystery that could fundamentally change our perception of this entire saga is who knows about the black box. Misty can clearly be coaxed into sharing this secret, and we don’t know if she ever told anyone else between the burning of the cabin and 2021. Many fans assume she didn’t, or else she’d be dead, but she may simply have had lucky draws of the cards, or been too valuable to hunt. If no one but Misty knows about the black box, it will simply become a harmful secret in the future timeline rather than the past.

The Man in the Cabin

The character the fandom has jokingly nicknamed “Cabin Daddy” is a background mystery that could really use some explanation. The girls find his corpse in the cabin, they seem to commune with him in a seance, and Jackie sees him in a dream just before her death. If there is something supernatural going on, it will be interesting to see how the spirit of Cabin Daddy reacts to the destruction of his home. It would also be great to find out if he laid some kind of curse on the Wilderness, or if it was there before he arrived.

Survivor Count

We may have met all the characters who escaped the Wilderness after 19 months, but it’s still not absolutely clear. The open-endedness of the question alone is enough to make some fans believe there are more survivors out there, along with all the theorizing around the infamous pit girl scene. In case you forgot, there are eight people alive in the pit girl scene at the beginning of Season 1, and so far there are seven survivors in the 2021 timeline. There also seem to be eight people in the brief glimpses we get of the survivors arriving home in 1997.

For such a meticulous show, Yellowjackets actually plays it pretty fast and loose with details like keeping a count of survivors as we go along. In the 1996 timeline, we seem to have 15 survivors going into Season 3, counting Coach Ben. That includes three players whose names we don’t know, and who were recast between Seasons 1 and 2. That means we may have a lot of ritualistic hunting ahead of us, but we may have more survivors to meet in 2021 as well.

Exact Location

We know the Yellowjackets are stranded in Canada, and it’s pretty well-established at this point that they’re somewhere west of the Rocky Mountains. Beyond that, we don’t know where the Wilderness is, but they certainly do since they were extracted from it at some point. We could learn about this if the 1996 characters are finally rescued, or if the 2021 characters start confronting their trauma. This could even go hand-in-hand with the Cabin Daddy mystery, as records of his demise could be accessible in the future.

Making a Pact

At some point, the survivors all agreed never to tell anyone in the outside world about what happened in the Wilderness, and they all stuck to it for over two decades. In Season 3, we’ll probably start to see how and when this ironclad pact was made. It may also be bad news for the only remaining non-cannibal in the Wilderness, Coach Ben. If the girls are dead set on protecting their secrets, they made decide to tie up loose ends.

Supernatural or Delusion?

Finally, Season 3 has all kinds of opportunities to toy with the question of whether the Wilderness is a real supernatural entity or a shared delusion. The show has held this question over our heads so far, and many fans are getting frustrated — some even felt the supernatural elements were intentionally scaled back in Season 2, and they weren’t happy about it. Admittedly, this question may never be answered. Lottie herself said that it doesn’t even matter in the Season 2 finale. However, Season 3 will almost certainly drop some new hints that sway some fans in one direction and others the other way.

Yellowjackets Season 3 premieres on Friday, February 14th on Showtime and Paramount+. Previous seasons are streaming now on Showtime