Yellowjackets Reveals What Happened to Shauna's Baby
Of all of the questions fans have been waiting for answer for in Season 2 of Yellowjackets, the question of what happened to Shauna's baby may be the biggest. Near the end of Season 1 it was revealed that Shauna was pregnant — with the baby of her best friend's boyfriend, no less — and halfway through Season 2, Shauna's pregnancy is well-advanced. With the Yellowjackets still stranded in the wilderness and with extremely limited supplies Shauna's pregnancy hasn't exactly been the most ideal and there have been lingering questions about what happened to that child since there's been no mention of them in the present timeline. Now, this week's episode, "Qui", finally answers those questions — and it may give some major insight into Shauna as an adult.
Warning: Spoilers for this week's episode of Yellowjackets, "Qui", beyond this point.
At the end of last week's episode, viewers saw Shauna begin to go into labor, just as the weather turned into a nasty storm and that's generally where the past storyline picks up. Shauna is in active labor, but the girls don't really have a lot of information on what to do. We see in a flashback that they didn't exactly pay the best attention in health class when it came to childbirth. Misty paid the most attention, but as things get serious, Misty isn't able to deal with it, still traumatized from Crystal's death.
Shauna's labor and birth is traumatic. It's complicated and it's intense and there are complications, but for a while it looks like things will be fine. Shauna gives birth to a baby boy and after some prolonged struggles getting him to latch to breastfeed, viewers get an emotional moment where she connects with her infant son, telling him that while she didn't initially think she wanted to be a mother, she loves him deeply and it's them against the world. The baby begins to breastfeed and it seems like there may be hope in the wilderness after all. But things quickly take a horrific turn when Shauna wakes up, finds her baby missing and discovers the survivors eating him — fortunately that ends up being a nightmare, but Shauna's real-life nightmare is only beginning.
It's then that viewers — and Shauna — discover that her time with her son has been a dream itself. Shauna comes to in the same bed where she was giving birth to find everyone around her looking grim. Taissa tells her that she lost a lot of blood and they thought they lost her, too and that's when they reveal that Shauna's son didn't survive. It's not clear if he was born stillborn or if he died shortly after birth, but they hand him to her — and the episode ends with a distraught Shauna screaming that he was alive and she can still hear him crying.
It's a devastating revelation, but it's even more heartbreaking when juxtaposed with the present-day Shauna. While being questioned by the police, Shauna admits that she didn't want to be a mother and that she didn't want to have Callie, noting that she was essentially a band aid to hold together her marriage with Jeff. While Shauna does admit that she loves her daughter, this confession in light of Shauna's experiences with her son in the wilderness shed quite a bit of light on her relationship with Callie. The loss of a child — particularly the loss of a child during childbirth — as a very specific sort of trauma that can be difficult enough on its own, but for Shauna it's compounded by everything else she experienced in the wilderness. By episode's end, we're seeing present day Shauna very much spiraling out of control, so much so that Jeff convinces her to go to Lottie's wellness retreat for help —though how helpful that will be remains to be seen.
New episodes of Yellowjackets hit the Showtime app on Fridays and new episodes air on Showtime on Sundays.
