"Yellowjackets" is at its best when its characters are doing their worst

I was happy when Jackie froze to death. And let out a guttural, "Hell yeah" when, kneeling in the snow to present a dripping bear heart to the wilderness, Lottie ended the first season of "Yellowjackets" with a sentence that encapsulated the entire show in terms of what viewers signed up for by watching, where it would be heading in further seasons, and what could be expected in the eventual outcome in the series finale: "Versez le sang, mes beaux amis." Compared to the first season of "Yellowjackets," which has a 100% on the Tomatometer and, in my own opinion, is one of the best first seasons of a show to ever be made in terms of the full package of writing, casting, acting, the look of it, the pacing, right down to the soundtrack; Season 2 saw a decline in just about all of it that even doubling up on Tori Amos songs couldn't help because the bulk of the season revolved heavily around both the teen and adult timelines trying to fix things. Ranking 94% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 44% with fans, Season 2 did still have some banger moments like teen Shauna biting a chunk out of dead a** Jackie's ear to the tune of "Cornflake Girl" and adult Shauna quivering with excitement while brandishing a gun to reclaim her stolen minivan, but the exciting savagery of the teen timeline in the wilderness — even reluctantly, or purely for survival — up against the sorrowful, regretful, half-hearted and misguided attempts at grappling with the trauma of that savagery in the adult timeline tipped the scales too heavily in a way that I, and I would guess many other viewers, prayed for additional scenes of the adult cast flipping out that either didn't come or didn't come enough. Steven Krueger as Ben Scott in "Yellowjackets" But then, something truly puzzling happened in the lengthy span of time between the end of Season 2 in 2023 and the start of Season 3 in 2025, viewers must have forgotten what originally drew them to this show, or perhaps what they wanted to get from it, because the first half of the season drew complaints of "this is boring," and now, midway through when things are finally getting super dark and stabby stabby again, many viewers are angry or in tears that additional fan-favorite characters have been killed off.