The Season 2 premiere of arrived on Friday with a very strange title that may have left some fans a little puzzled. The newest episode of the hit Showtime series is called “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” an odd title for a TV show about teenage girls lost in the wilderness who are haunted by their collective trauma more than 20 years later. However, once you get through the episode and watch the final scene, it all makes perfect, horrifying sense. It’s a perfect title that may make you a little queasy once you have more context. WARNING: This article contains Yellowjackets Season 2 spoilers! Continue at your own risk…
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For those who don’t know, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” is part of a famous line from Marc Antony’s speech in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. There’s more to the quote, though, and that’s where it ties into the Yellowjackets premiere. Antony starts off the iconic speech by saying, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.”
Thanks to Shauna in the new Yellowjackets episode, no one will ever be able to hear that phrase the same way ever again.
Throughout the premiere of Yellowjackets Season 2, we see Shauna talking to Jackie, her best friend who died at the end of the first season. Shauna sees Jackie moving and talking with her as if she were alive, but it’s only Jackie’s frozen corpse she’s been spending time with. After an argument with Jackie’s spirit, Shauna accidentally breaks an ear off of her friend’s body and decides to hide it in her pocket.
Food is running low in the wilderness, and Shauna is pregnant (with Jackie’s boyfriend’s baby), meaning she requires even more food than normal. In the final scene of the premiere, Shauna takes the ear out of her pocket and stares at it for a moment, before putting in her mouth and deciding to eat it.
We have known for a while that cannibalism would be a certainty in Yellowjackets, and Shauna broke the seal in this episode. She ate Jackie’s ear — without cooking it or anything. Of course, that’s where the title of the episode comes in. The unsaid “Lend me your ear” bit turned out to be quite literal for Shauna and Jackie, grossing out audiences in the process.
What did you think of the Season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets? Are you excited to see how the rest of the season plays out? Let us know in the comments!
