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“Women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,” Lord of the Flies author William Golding once opined. “They are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can’t do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, of society.” How well this assessment holds up, nearly six decades after Golding published his classic novel about preteen boys who survive a plane crash only to find themselves stranded on a desert island, is open to debate. At the very least, Yellowjackets—a superb Showtime thriller that riffs on Flies without repeating it—suggests the author’s benevolent gender essentialism might have been a mistake.
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Created by Narcos alums Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, the show swaps out the schoolboys in favor of a women’s varsity soccer team on its way to nationals. It’s 1996, alt rock rules the radio, and the girls are traveling in style because (get ready to suspend your disbelief) a rich dad has lent them his private plane. When it falls out of the sky and into the wilderness, the traumatized players wait for a rescue that never happens. They’ll ultimately spend 19 months fending for themselves out there, so you know things are bound to get weird.
This isn’t just a teen survival drama, though. Yellowjackets’ main plot unfolds 25 years after the crash, as a reporter starts sniffing around. Each scarred in her own way by what they endured, the survivors have taken remarkably different paths in life. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) married young and lives in a suburban stupor with a teenage daughter who finds her pathetic and a husband who’s always “working late.” Juliette Lewis is…
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Source : time
