Yellowjackets: Melanie Lynskey Explains the Impact of Shauna’s Wilderness Trauma

With just a few episodes remaining in the second season of Yellowjackets, the Showtime series finally addressed one of its biggest mysteries: what happened to Shauna’s baby in the wilderness. Since Season 1 of the series revealed that Shauna was pregnant when the plane crashed in the 1990s timeline, the fate of that unborn child has been one of the top questions fans have wanted answers to. Now, thanks to this week’s “Qui” we have that answer and series star Melanie Lynskey is opening up about how what happened has shaped adult Shauna. Warning: spoilers for this week’s episode of Yellowjackets, “Qui”, beyond this point.

In the episode, Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) goes into labor and has her son after a harrowing delivery. At first, for viewers, it seems like things might be alright as we glimpse Shauna with her newborn son and, despite early struggles breastfeeding, bonding with him and coming to accept that it’s the two of them against the world. However, the rug is pulled out from viewers and Shauna when it’s revealed that it is all a dream. In reality, Shauna’s difficult delivery nearly killed her — and her infant son didn’t survive.

It’s devastating by any metric, and according to Lynskey, who plays adult Shauna, it has a major impact on her as an adult.

“Having a baby in that environment, losing the baby, and then also being forced to be stuck in the wilderness for however many months after that — it’s not like you get to cry and take care of yourself, you’re still fighting for survival — it’s just the worst possible thing you can imagine,” Lynskey told RadioTimes.

She continued, “It’s really informed her. I think she’s been forced to ask herself a lot of questions this season about whether she’s a good mother. She didn’t want to have a child. She never, ever, ever wanted to put herself in that position again. And I don’t know if it was that she didn’t want to have to explain to Jeff what had happened, so she just ended up going along with it and having Callie, but it’s really tricky because not only was she ambivalent about motherhood, but the act of being pregnant and of giving birth would have been incredibly traumatic. So, how much of yourself do you shut off after that? And I think even love is difficult for her, trusting this little thing you just gave birth to is going to be okay. I think the whole thing has been incredibly complicated and so she’s been pushing everybody away for a long time.”

And according to series showrunner Ashley Lyle, it was always part of the plan for Shauna’s baby to die.

“The plan was always to have the baby die,” Lyle told Collider. “We really infused that death and that loss into Shauna’s relationship with Callie. And her disconnect and her estrangement from her daughter, in our minds, has always been a result of that loss.”

New episodes of Yellowjackets hit the Showtime app on Fridays and new episodes air on Showtime on Sundays.