Note: This article contains spoilers for the entire first season of Yellowjackets.
The first season of Yellowjackets has come to an end and it was one hell of a ride. And one question sapphics had on their mind from day one reached a definitive answer by the time the finale came to a close — Will Shauna and Jackie ever get together in the wilderness? (Spoiler: unless things get sci-fi or supernatural levels of weird…no.)
Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) was giving off major vibes from the very start of the series, from the way she looked at her BFF (played by Ella Purnell) to the choices she made to get in between her and her boyfriend, who wound up being Adult Shauna’s husband.
From the way events played out in the future timeline, we were able to guess that Jackie never made it off the island, but her death came far sooner and more definitively than one might have expected, and in such a devastating manner that Shauna’s trauma and guilt after being rescued is given new depth.
But her death also seemed to close to the door on all the questions we had about Shauna’s feelings for her, something Sophie herself had some thoughts about.
“I think Shauna’s relationship with Jackie is platonic but…I do think Shauna could swing both ways,” she told Teen Vogue during an Instagram Live recently.
The comments are bittersweet. At the moment, there’s one queer couple in the past and one queer couple in the future, with one character (played by Jasmin Savoy Brown) straddling both pairings. Having more LGBTQ+ representation in a story is always exciting (and authentic), but leaving the complex co-dependent friendship Shauna and Jackie shared unexplored in that manner, even though Jackie’s death is both narratively compelling and anticipated, stings just a bit.
And Ella seems to agree, noting that apparently whatever energy was going on between her and Sophie in front of and behind the camera was bold enough that even her friends thought they were dating — in real life.
“I don’t know why me and Sophie give off such gay energy, I love it,” she said, as Sammi Hanratty, who plays teen Misty, pointedly nodded along. “I wish that Shauna and Jackie were actually in love.”
Regardless of the nature of the relationships between any of the girls, or the women who made it out of the wilderness alive and are struggling in the future, Yellowjackets is ultimately presenting a wide variety of complex female characters with complicated dynamics between them. Whether Shauna ends up canonically bisexual or not (or whether Jackie somehow pulls a resurrection), that’s reason enough to celebrate.
