Yellowjackets Showrunner Debunks Theory That Jackie Is A Time Traveler
Spoilers for season 1 of "Yellowjackets" ahead.
There's a ton of fan theories buzzing around out there about Showtime's hit drama "Yellowjackets," but apparently, one is definitely not true.
During the first season of "Yellowjackets," a girls' soccer team crash-lands in the woods on their way to Nationals and end up stuck there for eighteen months — a timeframe which cannibalism may or may not end up taking place (but almost definitely does). In a separate timeline, some (but not all!) of those Yellowjackets are all grown up and still grappling with their trauma, and one of their number is conspicuously missing.
We find out the fate of Ella Purnell's Jackie at the end of season 1, and even though it seems pretty definitive to most, that didn't stop fans from wildly speculating about Jackie's potential future. According to the showrunners, though, fans can cool it; the outlandish theory that Jackie is actually a time traveler doesn't even hold a single drop of water.
Jackie is really most sincerely dead — and not a time traveler
According to showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Jackie does not have access to a TARDIS or a Time-Turner or even a particularly DeLorean — she's just dead. In the season 1 finale, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" (which translates to "thus passes the glory of the world" in Latin), after fighting with her former best friend Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Jackie storms out of the Yellowjackets' cabin and away from the fire... and ultimately freezes to death when the temperature plummets and it snows overnight. To that end, no adult version of Jackie is seen during the other timeline, and this scene explains why.
So why exactly do people think Jackie survived and traveled through time? The theory can be traced to a diary Shauna finds in Jackie's room that's riddled with anachronisms, listing movies that came out after the team's plane crashes in 1996. Lyle and Nickerson officially debunked this in an interview with Insider, though. "We can definitely say that Jackie is not a time traveler and Jackie is very dead at the end of the season," Lyle confirmed.
Is there any way for Jackie to return on Yellowjackets?
So will Jackie ever return to the "Yellowjackets" narrative, and if so, what role will she play? According to Lyle, the answer is probably yes, despite that Jackie is extremely deceased. In the same interview, Lyle said of Jackie's future in the series, "I guess what we can say is that Jackie, not only as a person, but as a figure and a symbol, looms large for all of these women, particularly Shauna, and I don't think that that's going to change moving forward. In fact, it's going to deepen. I think that this isn't necessarily the last that we've seen of Jackie, I'll put it that way."
It makes sense that losing Jackie after a fraught night in the cabin would affect all of her friends on the team, but it does affect Shauna most of all; shortly before the two fight, Jackie confronts Shauna, who is pregnant with Jackie's boyfriend's baby. We know from the future timeline that Shauna is married to said boyfriend, Jeff (played in adulthood by Warren Kole), but the fate of that baby is unknown — Shauna and Jeff have a daughter, but that timeline doesn't match up.
Shauna and Jeff both clearly shoulder a lot of guilt about Jackie, even going so far as to have brunch with her parents on Jackie's birthday each year, so it makes sense that she'd still play a big part in their respective arcs. While we might see more of Ella Purnell, though, she won't get an "adult" counterpart; Jackie is still in the story, but never got the chance to grow up with the rest of her friends.