Kailey Schwerman/Showtime
While Yellowjackets took a break last week, I used the time off to catch up on Prime Video’s Dead Ringers. Watching that series turned out to be a twisted form of prep for this week’s episode, with its crash course in all of the potential health risks of fertility and conception, as well as some of the gnarlier horrors of new motherhood. I had figured that whenever Yellowjackets finally got around to showing Shauna give birth, the show would explore the baby’s delivery in one of three ways—more on those in a minute. But I certainly didn’t expect it to make space for each of those options within the runtime of a single episode.
But Teenage Shauna does spend a good portion of this episode actually in labor. All of her fellow Yellowjackets are trying their best to remember what they can from their high school health class. But in the chaos of the moment, no one can seem to remember why it’s important to time contractions, or “crowning” means. It certainly doesn’t help that Misty is having a crisis of conscience, as she’s trying to bring a new life into this world, just hours after she took one out of it in last week’s episode (RIP Crystal!).
We’ve been primed for the delivery of Shauna’s baby since the moment she decided that she was keeping the child in Season 1. This long-awaited episode, however, was largely filler. Even the birth itself seems like a means to an end, helping the show get over yet another hump in search of a more tightly focused narrative. Only six episodes of Yellowjackets Season 2 have aired thus far, and a good half of those have played out in similar ways.