Definitely some very nice moments, and a couple of great performances, but honestly thought it felt like eight episodes stretched into ten in a lot of spots. Contains a number of instances of my biggest pet peeve in shows like this: shows where everyone conveniently forgets or doesn't discuss a hugely important thing, because if they did, then they wouldn't be able to fill the episode allocation. I felt like it happened in a number of the plot lines. After nearly every episode, my wife and I were almost always running down a list of "but why didn't they talk about X?" or "did they just forget about Y?"

Like, the biggest example of this: I was blown away at how quickly none of them thought "but wait, who killed Travis?" in the last couple episodes. The evidence that someone burned candles and then took them away-- in the FORM OF THE FUCKING SHAPE-- is incontrovertible, right? They saw that symbol in the woods, they saw it under Travis in the form of candles... seems like they should have no reason to doubt that a murder happened there. But then, when Jeff spills his guts about the blackmail, Shauna never says, "but hey, did you kill Travis?" And when they're chopping up Adam, and Shauna and Tai are insinuating that Travis just killed himself... Misty knows at this point that Travis's bank was closed after his death, and Natalie knows from Misty as well. Why doesn't anyone bring this up? And it's *baffling* to me that Natalie would just accept "oh, they're right, he just killed himself." BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CANDLES THO?? Like, the only reason to not have anyone address that ever is to save the reveal for the very last scene of the season. I felt like this sort of thing happened a number of times.

Also, I know this isn't fair to Yellowjackets... but for a show borrowing pretty heavily from Lost in a lot of ways, it's just... not Lost. Like, I rewatched Lost a year or two ago, and holy fuck, it's exceptional television. So while watching most of this, with the episode structure, and the "will this wilderness let us leave?" angle, and the people seeing things, and the ending with the Others surrogate... it just ended up with so many shadows of Lost without being better than Lost that the seams just felt a little more apparent to me.

Maybe I'll keep at it to see how the second season starts. The flashbacks are pretty increasingly disinteresting to me, as we know for the most part where all of that is headed and have for some time, but there's still some interesting mystery around the present-day stuff. And it's a good show to have a week between episodes to build conversation-- so even if I'm not as over the moon as others, I like that this style of show is coming back into fashion.

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