The creators of 'Yellowjackets': "We did not plan for the series to be so nineties, but a part of us stayed there forever"

The year is 1998, and the girls are finally coming home.

They have spent 19 months in the mountains, isolated, doing all kinds of things, predictably horrible things, that we still know little about.

A small crowd of flashes greets them upon arrival, and we are unable, at first glance, to distinguish the survivors.

The second season of

(Movistar Plus+), the nineties phenomenon —in female savage— created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, thus inaugurates, in one of its first scenes, a third timeline to add to the future adult crime dramedy

entanglement , and to the past of macabre adventure and very strange

and expands on a minefield-like story—the suspense stems from what is still hidden—in an unexpected and downright masterful way.

Was everything planned from the beginning?

How was I going to be?

“Writing a television series is the closest thing to a war.

My feeling is that I am on a battlefield.

The one who speaks is Jonathan Lisco, writer of this second season.

He is in Los Angeles, sitting in what looks like a director's chair, against a black background.

Next to him are Lyle and Nickerson.

They nod, amused.

“Let's say we had a kind of road map, where we only saw the destination.

Everything we were going to find along the way was a mystery, ”adds Lyle.

“We work from the tone, and the tone makes the rest possible.

We are open to anything that could happen,” says Nickerson.

And here is the reason for the fascination of this second installment.

That it does not start from the exact moment in which it left off—that is, a closed universe—but, from that moment on, it creates a completely new universe.

Let's recap.

On the way to national competitions, a girls' soccer team suffers a plane crash and the survivors try not to kill each other—in more ways than one—by living together in the icy mountains.

In the future, four of them get in touch again after receiving a strange letter that alerts them that someone else knows what happened there.

Little or nothing is known about what the girls did in the mountains during those 19 months.

But it was not good.

The end of the first season made it more than clear.

And in this, the wound will only grow.

But in another sense.

If in the first season the referents were

,

, by William Golding

, and

, by Stephen King, here, from the beginning, there are more David Lynch,

, and

.

Lauren Ambrose in the second season of 'Yellowjackets'.Movistar Plus+

The addition of Elijah Wood as Walter, a repellent and extremely clever citizen detective, points in that direction.

And the renewed marriage tandem formed by Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff (Warren Kole) as well.

One tries to investigate what happened to the busybody Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot), and the others to hide it.

And there is a nod to the movie

—something related to an ear—, which reactivates the feeling that the series pays tribute to everything that can be honored, as long as it has to do with the nineties.

"Oh!

Of course!

It wasn't conscious at all, but it's definitely there," says Nickerson.

“There is a lot of

—a real case of survival in the mountains of the Californian Sierra Nevada—, and also classic psychological terror from the seventies.

We wanted to explore what happens when you lose your mind due to isolation,” says Lyle.

The adult character of the esoteric Lottie (Simone Kessell) delves, from the future, into the idea of ​​mental health, but not in a self-congratulatory or accommodating sense.

Nothing in

is.

“We wanted to say loud and clear that all this stuff about the wellness industry, or

It's just that, a roll.

Deep down, we are as unhappy as ever.

Only now we also feel guilty for being so," says Lyle, who says that there is a lot of "cabin syndrome" in the girls this season, hence the loss of sanity in the face of isolation.

Although in the future, Misty (Christina Ricci in an already mythical character in her career, and she is not the only one, for Juliette Lewis, Nat is also), also loses her mind, and precisely because of what she longed for.

When Walter appears, she begins to be seen, which is what she has wanted since she was a child.

“And that destabilizes her.

It makes me lose control and it's a lot of fun,” adds Lyle.

)

joins the cast .

“We dreamed of her as an adult Van, but we never thought that when we called her, she would tell us off for not calling her before she did,” says Nickerson.

It is something that has happened to them in all cases.

The musical selection is a good example.

If Hole and PJ Harvey sounded in the first season, Sharon Van Etten sounds here —the opening with

grunge

spectacle

— and repeats in more than one chapter Tori Amos.

The rage for the nineties —and the rescue of all those women who began their careers at a time when what was popular and visible was essentially masculine— is still there, faithful to its status as the helm of the series.

“We were teenagers in the nineties, and what we saw and heard is so tied to us that it couldn't not be there,” Nickerson confesses.

Ashley Lyle tells an anecdote of when she went to a Sleater-Kinney concert at the age of 16.

“In my class nobody understood anything.

Everyone was supposed to like Britney Spears.

But I was a real 'riot girrrl', and I came out talking about the 'riot girrrls' in an MTV news connection at the gates of the concert, in high school they freaked out!” she recalls.

“We didn't plan for the show to be so '90s, but I guess that's what we are.

A part of us stayed forever at that time," says Nickerson.

that the

Growing up, as an artist, at that same time, and embodying everything they loved, and at the same time, knowing so well what fiction consisted of then, helps in many ways.

“In fact, they are sometimes the ones that give us the best ideas,” admits Jonathan Lisco, referring to ideas from that script where they know where it's going but find out how it plans to get there along the way.

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