‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3 ending explained: We finally know who Pit Girl is

Yellowjackets fans and citizen detectives, you can finally put your yarn walls and elaborate theories away. After three seasons and several fake-outs, we finally know the identity of Pit Girl, the Yellowjacket whose death by literal pitfall ominously kicks off the entire show.

As revealed in the Season 3 finale, “Full Circle,” our poor, unfortunate Pit Girl is none other than Mari (Alexa Barajas). The truth isn’t that surprising. The writing’s been on the wall for Mari since Season 1, given that her hair and build match that of Pit Girl. But Yellowjackets took its Mari foreshadowing to new heights in Season 3, which opened with Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) hunting Mari through the woods in a very intense game of Capture the Flag. Later, Mari fell in the pit Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) uncovered — the very same pit that would one day lead to her doom.

Just as the finale’s title emphasizes, Mari’s death brings us full circle, not just to the beginning of Season 1 but to all the breadcrumbs planted at the start of Season 3. Plus, Shauna gets to enact the ultimate revenge fantasy as retribution for Mari’s teen bitchiness towards her at the start of the season. (I’d say eating your bully is still way harsh.)

But the near-inevitable march to Mari’s death isn’t without its surprises. The same goes for the rest of “Full Circle,” which exposes Lottie’s (Simone Kessell) killer and takes a major leap forward towards the Yellowjackets’ rescue. Let’s break it down.

Mari is Yellowjackets‘ Pit Girl, but the hunt for her is more complicated than you might think.

The Season 1 opening saw Mari running from the frenzied hoots and howls of her teammates, suggesting an all-encompassing fervor within the Yellowjackets. Yet “Full Circle” reveals that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Instead, the team has splintered into factions. Shauna and Lottie (Courtney Eaton) embrace the hunt and the idea of sacrificing someone to the wilderness. Van (Liv Hewson) and Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are reluctant yet ready to participate as long as their heads aren’t on the chopping block.

Tai even convinces Van to rig the sacrificial card draw for researcher and outsider Hannah (Ashley Sutton), but Shauna shuts that down, seeing as Hannah seems to be one of her strongest allies. At least, Yellowjackets tells us she is, but we get so little time with Hannah post-joining the Yellowjackets that she may as well be a background character in the vein of Gen (Vanessa Prasad). Why introduce a full-grown adult (who’s also a mother) into the mix if you’re not going to explore her dynamic with the younger, more feral Yellowjackets? Opportunity, squandered.

Elsewhere on the hunt, other splinter factions undertake tricky maneuvers of their own. Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) takes the chaos of the hunt as an opportunity to abscond with the satellite phone, which Van has been working to fix. She switches clothes with Hannah (who, again, is basically a non-entity) to hide her absence from Shauna. Meanwhile, Akilah (Nia Sondaya), Melissa (Jenna Burgess), and Gen attempt to distract the hunters from going after Mari, even going so far as to attack them. Melissa tries to take down Shauna but doesn’t follow through. (How boring of her!) Akilah follows Lottie to the hallucination cave and seems prepared to brain her with a rock. Yellowjackets doesn’t show the outcome of that particular showdown, but Lottie does pop back up unscathed, whereas Akilah doesn’t appear to be present in the later feasting scenes. Did Lottie just murder her offscreen, or will we get more answers in a later season?

The Akilah and Lottie discussion does lead to a pretty big revelation: Akilah wanted a hunt, and so did Gen, Mari, and Melissa. She poisoned their animals to plant the idea in Lottie’s mind, but the reasoning is flimsy. They wouldn’t have wanted a hunt for meat purposes, as there was plenty of livestock left in the pen. But then why endanger each other’s lives? To create a distraction to take down Shauna? Was she was meant to fall in the pit trap instead of Mari? This may just be another set of questions the show will address farther down the line, but the entire hunting sequence feels off — and not in a particularly interesting way.

Yellowjackets reveals that Callie killed Lottie.

“Full Circle” resolves another big Yellowjackets mystery. Who killed adult Lottie?

Initially, Misty (Christina Ricci) thought Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) was responsible due to DNA evidence. However, it turns out that said genetic material actually belonged to Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins), since mothers and daughters share mitochondrial DNA.

When Misty confronts Callie, the truth spills out. She’d gone to visit Lottie in the city because Lottie had stolen the tape with Hannah’s recording on it from Callie’s drawer. But instead of giving Callie the tape back, Lottie invites her to the building’s candle-filled basement. (Sidebar: How’d she set that up without getting caught?) There, she delivers a speech about the wilderness and how she sees it in Callie.

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“You are the child of that place,” Lottie says. “It took our baby and gave us you.”

That wildness certainly comes through when Callie straight-up shoves Lottie down the stairs to her death. While she seems remorseful afterwards, there’s no denying the darkness in her eyes, just like the darkness she describes in Shauna’s own gaze. Maybe she’s even more like her mother than she thought.

(Another sidebar, but why does adult Lottie’s post-death conversation with her younger self take place in a morgue instead of a plane like Natalie and Van’s? Was the death plane overbooked? Is it just for people who were marked for death in the wilderness?)

So, who was messing with Shauna all season long?

Now we know who killed Lottie, but another Season 3 mystery remains standing: Who was screwing with Shauna all season long?

Yellowjackets offers explanations for the brakes incident (they were just old) and the fridge lock-in (that was Misty messing with her). It even tries to justify the phone playing “Queen of Hearts” in the bathroom by saying people lose their phones all the time. This particular phone just so happened to be playing a song tied to the Yellowjackets’ trauma.

None of these explanations feel particularly satisfying — especially not the phone one! Yes, they establish Shauna’s paranoia, which we also saw at play during the hunt, but the result is a letdown. Maybe Shauna and Yellowjackets‘ feverishly theorizing fans are in the same boat, drawing connections that aren’t there. I just wish the actual explanation was more interesting than “coincidences happen sometimes.”

With this focus on coincidence, Yellowjackets has moved any suspicion off adult Melissa (a criminally underused Hilary Swank). Shauna even finds the conciliatory note that Melissa claimed came with the tape. (She then shoves it down the garbage disposal, of course.) That’s all well and good, apart from one big thing: Melissa murdered Van, so there’s way more going on with her. Too bad Yellowjackets isn’t interested in showing it. Adult Melissa ends the season the way she started: a non-entity whose backward baseball cap is her sole character trait.

Yellowjackets plays with memory in its Season 3 finale.

Yellowjackets Season 3 closes out with some big developments. Natalie uses the satellite phone to make contact with the outside world, meaning rescue is on its way. In the present, it’s everyone against Shauna. Jeff (Warren Kole) and Callie leave her, and Misty and Tai ally themselves so she won’t be the last Yellowjacket standing. As Tai points out, and as we’ve seen this entire season, Shauna fully gave into the wilderness and thrived on it during some of the Yellowjackets’ darkest times. She also led the ridiculous effort not to escape the woods (although Tai wasn’t blameless there either).

Shauna, though, has a different view of what happened in the woods. In the season’s final scene, she re-enters journal mode and muses on whether she and the other survivors repressed memories of the wilderness because they were traumatizing, or because they hid a darker secret about who the Yellowjackets truly were.

“I think we can’t, or won’t, remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun. That’s the terrible truth we left out there buried, along with the people we called our friends,” Shauna writes. “Except it’s all coming back to me now. The danger. The thrill. The person I was back then. Not a wife, or a mother. I was a warrior. I was a fucking queen. I let all of it slip away from me. It’s time to start taking it back.”

Looks like adult Shauna will be embracing the Antler Queen status she enjoyed so much during the feast of Mari. But not everyone in the past seems to be having as much fun as Shauna says. The feast sequence brings back the images of furious chomping from Yellowjackets‘ very first episode, but mixes it in with more complicated images, like a tearful Gen tucking into her good friend. In the light of the next day, some Yellowjackets look unhappy and resigned beneath their homemade masks. What is the “true” memory of the wilderness, then? The rose-colored idea that they were all having fun, or the brutal struggle for survival? Or is it some warped combination of both?

Yellowjackets Season 3 leaves us with one last callback to the Pit Girl sequence from Season 1, episode 1. That series of foreboding flashbacks ended with Misty removing her furry mask, putting her glasses on, and smiling directly into camera, a sign that she’d given herself totally over to the thrill of the feast. But Season 3 puts that moment in a different context. After Shauna discovers Natalie is missing, Misty pulls off her mask, puts her glasses on, and smiles that same smile into camera. This time, it’s a sign that her satellite phone plot with Van and Natalie has worked.

Which of these smiles is the “true” smile, then? Or did Misty just pull the same enigmatic smile move twice in one day? (With her flair for the dramatic, I wouldn’t put it past her.) Still, the re-use of the same smile (against different backdrops) represents the two different goals for the remaining Yellowjackets. Misty’s Season 1 smile signals a love of the wilderness and the hunt. Her Season 3 smile gestures to hope for escape, as well as the thrill of one-upping Shauna. These polar opposite ideas signify the two Yellowjackets factions remaining at the end of Season 3. And while we know rescue is coming, how will Natalie’s move shake things up with Shauna in Season 4?

Yellowjackets Season 3 is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

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