Season two of Yellowjackets was steadily building up to the end of Shauna’s pregnancy with her belly getting bigger by the day. At one point, she has a nightmare about giving birth to a twitching rotisserie chicken and then gnawing into it, bringing to mind David Lynch’s grotesque and surreal Eraserhead. When she goes into labor (fairly prematurely), it’s a horrific situation for any woman to give birth in, let alone a teenage girl: unmedicated, inside a rustic cabin in the middle of the woods, and during the freezing winter. Her labor and delivery nurses are her frightened young classmates, with Misty leading the charge, but taking the Red Cross Babysitting Training course twice is the extent of her medical knowledge. Even though Coach Scott is the only adult in the room, he cannot cope with the intensity of the moment and leaves (although, granted, he is also missing a leg and has a lot to deal with physically).
Sophie Nélisse’s performance in the scenes that follow takes your heart and squeezes it tight, especially after we’ve been duped by golden, dreamlike images of Shauna cradling her bouncing baby boy. Instead of a warm, roly-poly son placed in her arms, she’s handed a blanket that, we cannot see, but know holds his small, lifeless body. Shauna’s ear-piercing screams and desperate pleas of “Can’t you hear him crying?” are absolutely gutting—especially because she believes so strongly that her vision was real. Thankfully, the most disturbing fan theory that the Yellowjackets would eat Shauna’s baby doesn’t come to fruition, but the scene of her birth is still harrowing, especially for women who have experienced infant loss. Shauna’s grief ignites the rage that puts her on the path to Antler Queen.
