The Only Recap You Need Before The Final Season Of Yellowjackets

"Yellowjackets," the Showtime series created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson that straddles two equally and delightfully demented timelines, is preparing for its fourth and final season ... so what do you need to remember about everything that's happened so far?

First, let's go over the basics. "Yellowjackets" takes place, again, in two timelines that do not converge; one in 1996 and one in 2021. (To make things a little easier to digest here, we're separating the teen and adult timelines fully; we'll go over the events of the former before we get into the latter.) In 1996, a team of teenaged soccer players, the titular Yellowjackets, crash in the Canadian wilderness trying to get to a championship game, and as they try to survive, the girls turn on each other with horrifying results. In 2021, the surviving Yellowjackets are all grown up ... but their past returns to haunt them in a variety of ways. Here's everything you need to know about the first three seasons of "Yellowjackets," which split their focus between these two decades — and obviously, full series spoilers ahead!

Before the plane crashes in the 1996 timeline of "Yellowjackets," we're "treated" to a cold open where a young dark-haired woman sprints through the snow as someone gives chase before falling into a pit trap; she's then killed by people wearing masks and team jackets. After this pretty clear indication of how bad things are going to get before long, we watch the girls crash alongside their coach (who dies almost immediately), the coach's son Travis Martinez (Kevin Alves), his younger brother Javi (Luciano Leroux), and assistant coach Ben Scott (Stephen Krueger). As the odd equipment manager Misty Quigley (Sammy Hanratty) shows off some surprising survival skills, the rest of the team grapples with their new reality, and old dynamics remain (like Shauna Shipman's friendship and quiet rivalry with captain Jackie Taylor, who are played by Sophie Nélisse and Ella Purnell).

Shauna attempts to hide her pregnancy — the result of an affair with Jackie's boyfriend — from everyone as the girls discover a cabin that provides shelter and also happens to be stocked with plenty of firearms. Unfortunately for quite literally everybody, though, Misty finds the plane's black box and destroys it, realizing she's more popular in the woods helping the team survive than she ever was back in New Jersey, making their rescue chances nigh impossible ... and Charlotte "Lottie" Matthews, played by Courtney Eaton, runs out of medication to treat her schizophrenia and grows increasingly unstable.

The most fascinating aspect of the 1996 timeline is that teenage girls are vicious — whether you ever were one or ever spent time with one, you know this to be true — which means that the interpersonal strife between the Yellowjackets ends up becoming just as big of a problem as the fact that they're stranded in the freezing-cold Canadian woods with no civilzation in sight. Shauna finally tells Jackie she's pregnant — some of the other team members, like Taissa "Tai" turner (Jasmin Savoy Brown), have already figured it out — but lies about the dad's identity, so Jackie simply reads Shauna's diary to ascertain the truth. Natalie "Nat" Scatorccio (Sophie Thatcher) strikes up a relationship with Travis, but also proves to be a solid hunter and gatherer. Outside of the personal drama, the girls try to adjust to the wilderness, whether that's Tai shooting a wolf with a flare gun to protect Vanessa "Van" Palmer (Liv Hewson), who ends up heavily scarred after the encounter, or the religious and devout Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) finding an abandoned plane and deciding she'll try to fly it to safety. (The plane almost immediately explodes, killing her.)

This all culminates in two devastating situations. First, there's a night the girls dub "Doomcoming," where, unbeknownst to almost everyone, Misty spikes the soup with hallucinogenic mushrooms ... leading the girls to start hunting Travis as they lose their minds. Then, in the aftermath, Javi goes missing and Shauna and Jackie have an explosive argument that ends with Jackie banished by the rest of the girls; when they wake in the morning and discover the first snow of the season, they also find Jackie's frozen body.

As the girls grapple with Jackie's tragic and ugly death in Season 2, nobody takes it harder than Shauna, whose grief manifests in ... strange ways (in that she keeps Jackie's body upright, talks to it, and even snacks on her best friend's ear). Van desperately tries to stop Tai, now her girlfriend, from sleepwalking by tying their wrists together; as for Lottie, she's become something of a spiritual icon at the camp thanks to her apparent understanding of and connection with the mysterious wilderness. Without knowing about any of Shauna's Jackie-related antics, Tai insists that they should respectfully cremate Jackie, but when they try to burn her body, snow ends up turning the flame into, basically, a slow roast — and Jackie's body is consumed by the girls in a sort of famished fugue state as Coach Ben watches in abject horror.

There is one small victory, albeit a temporary one — using symbols that Tai seems to fixate on in her sleep, Van creates a makeshift map and is able to find the missing Javi, who's silent and traumatized. While this is happening, Misty ends up betraying her new friend and ally Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) when Misty admits she destroyed the black box; Crystal is understandably upset, so Misty accidentally backs the girl off of a steep cliff. Also, Shauna has been pregnant this whole time ... and about halfway through Season 2, she goes into labor in the cabin with only Misty on hand to help.

In one of the most heartbreaking sequences in all of "Yellowjackets," which is really saying something, Shauna experiences a deeply traumatic birth at the cabin with Misty and her teammates, only for her son to be stillborn. Deep in denial, Shauna holds his body and insists that she can hear him crying, but shortly thereafter, she buries his body and mourns the staggering loss of both her child and her best friend Jackie. As some of the girls feebly attempt to find the missing Crystal — and Misty goes to the spot where she fell only to discover that her body is gone — Shauna fixates on a dream she had about the team eating her baby's body, leading her to attack Lottie and beat her nearly to death as the other girls attempt to intervene.

Ultimately, the girls start drawing cards to pick sacrifices; not only do they believe the wilderness needs a "gift" from them, but they also need a corpse to eat. Nat draws the losing card, and when Travis stops the girls from hurting her, he, Nat, and Javi make a run for it ... but Javi falls through ice and drowns, leading the team to procure his body and eat him later. As they all deal with this development, the cabin is lit aflame while they're sleeping, and the main suspect is Ben, who fled after Javi's death.

By the time we revisit the Yellowjackets in Season 3, Natalie is their leader, and in the glorious spring sunshine, life in the woods is slightly less terrible than usual. Still, the usual troubled dynamics remain. Shauna is still angry and resentful, pushing her teammate Mari (Alexa Barajas) away from camp, where she's captured by a surviving Ben. Despite that, Shauna forges a romantic connection with Melissa (Jenna Burgess), gaining a follower as the group decides to interrogate Ben — when they find him through Mari — and declare him guilty of burning down the cabin the previous winter.

When Ben tries to escape, Melissa, egged on by Shauna, cuts his Achilles tendon; though Natalie tries to bring him food, he goes on a hunger strike and is summarily force-fed. Natalie ends up killing him out of pity, and the girls feast upon his body ... only to seriously alarm unexpected strangers in the form of a group of researchers when they find the camp and see Ben's severed head on a stump.

Even though the researchers — including Joel McHale's Kodiak and Ashley Sutton's Ashley Sutton as Hannah Sophia Finch — promise the girls they can get them out of the wilderness, Shauna, Taissa, and Lottie weirdly bristle at the idea, despite Natalie's pleas that they agree to leave the woods. Hannah tries to secretly plot with Natalie, but when Shauna catches them, Hannah kills Kodiak to prove her allegiance ... and Natalie learns from Misty that they still have access to an emergency transponder that could allow them to call for further help.

The girls "choose" a "sacrifice" yet again — their livestock is, all of a sudden, dead — and, despite Taissa and Van's attempts to cheat the system and have Hannah choose the losing card, Shauna intervenes and it goes to Mari, who falls into a trap. While everyone is distracted, though, Natalie heads to a mountain, uses the transponder as a satellite phone, and gets a response before the season ends.

Now let's pivot to the 2021 timeline, where we reunite with (some of) the adult Yellowjackets as they all try to, more or less, live stable and normal lives. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is still with Jeff Sadecki (Warren Kole), Jackie's boyfriend who fathered the baby that Shauna lost in the woods; now, they have a teenaged daughter named Callie (Sarah Desjardins). Taissa (Tawny Newsome) is married to a woman named Simone (Rukiya Bernard), and they share a son named Sammy (Aiden Stoxx) as Taissa mounts a Senate campaign, while Misty (Christina Ricci) works as a geriatric in-home nurse. Then there's Natalie (Juliette Lewis), fresh off a stint in rehab who decides to head to New Jersey and reunite with some of her fellow Yellowjackets.

Things get messy pretty much immediately. Shauna, bored in her marriage and suspecting Jeff of sleeping with someone else, strikes up an affair with a young artist named Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot) after the two get into a fender-bender, but she soon suspects he might be looking for information about what really happened to the Yellowjackets out in the woods. Taissa starts to worry about Sammy, who's creating disturbing drawings and getting into trouble at school, while her political opponents lob cannibal accusations at her, and Natalie reunites with Misty as the two go looking for Travis after the two discover that they both received an anonymous postcard marked with the same strange symbol. Misty and Natalie ultimately find Travis's body, and though it appears that he died by suicide, they both have their doubts.

No matter what decade we're in, the Yellowjackets are completely incapable of staying out of trouble. While Sammy keeps talking about a mysterious "lady in the tree" that he sees at night — which turns out to be a sleepwalking, dirt-eating Taissa — Callie grows suspicious of Shauna after seeing her in public with Adam, and Shauna in turn grows even more suspicious of Adam when she, Taissa, and Natalie agree to pay a blackmailer over their past only for the blackmailer to escape. (Misty, meanwhile, is doing her own thing and torturing a faux journalist Jessica, played by Rekha Sharma, who's also sniffing around the Yellowjackets and who Misty summarily kidnaps.) When Shauna realizes someone has stolen all her journals, she heads to Adam's house to confront him — if you're trying to avoid accusations of wrongdoings like cannibalism, keeping a journal seems like a crazy thing to do, but we digress — and ends up killing him in a fit of passion.

When Shauna admits that she's just murdered a guy who, as it turns out, has nothing to do with the blackmail at all, her Yellowjackets help her clean up the body and hide the evidence. (She also admits everything to Jeff, the real blackmailer, who was trying to extort Shauna's friends as his furniture store sales flatlined; Warren Kole's frenzied question about Shauna's supposed "book club" remains a highlight of the season.) Simone finds a secret room in her and Taissa's basement with the severed head of their own dog and an apparent human heart, Misty poisons and kills Jessica, and Natalie is kidnapped ... only for Misty to learn that an adult Lottie may have been involved in Travis's death. 

After Natalie's abduction, Misty grows determined to find her friend — and in the process, she meets a fellow Citizen's Detective, the offbeat Walter Tattersall (a perfectly deployed Elijah Wood), who's looking into Adam's death. That's precisely what Shauna and Jeff are trying to cover up elsewhere, and as for Taissa, her disassociating is getting legitimately dangerous. After she fully hallucinates a visit from her son, Sammy — she and Simone are exploring a separation — she gets Simone into a car accident that lands Simone in the hospital.

Natalie, naturally, was kidnapped by an adult Lottie (Simone Kessell), who runs a bizarre, cult-like "wellness retreat" in a rural area. As she tries to adjust, Misty and Walter hone in on Lottie's center, Callie learns the truth about Adam's death and accidentally blabs important information to a police officer, and Taissa allows her "other" self — herself in a fugue state — to take control and ends up reuniting with an adult Van (Lauren Ambrose), who runs a video rental store and, as Taissa ultimately learns, has terminal cancer. 

As Season 2 of "Yellowjackets" draws to a close, the 2021 timeline sees all of the known adult Yellowjackets come back together — Shauna, Taissa, Van, Lottie, Natalie, and Misty — and they undergo hallucinogenic experiences together as therapy. As they grapple with everything they've repressed for years, they spend time in what Lottie calls her "Sharing Shack," where Shauna reveals that Jeff blackmailed them, Misty confesses to Jessica's murder, and Taissa finally comes clean about hiring Jessica to investigate her friends during her political campaign. 

That's when Lottie harkens back to the group's old ways. As she passes around cups to the women, she reveals that one is laced with phenobarbital, intending for one of them women to be a sacrifice to the "wilderness" (which she believes it requires). Though Shauna, Van, Taissa, Misty, and Natalie agree to participate in the ritual but then have Lottie involuntarily committed, they draw cards again, and Shauna pulls the Queen of Hearts, leading to a chase. Unbeknownst to her, both Callie and Jeff are at the compound trying to clean up the Adam fallout with Walter's help, and Callie shoots Lottie to protect her mother; in the ensuing chaos, Natalie falls onto a needle filled with fentanyl that Lottie's acolyte Lisa (Nicole Mains) tries to use to attack Misty. By protecting Misty, Natalie dies, and Lottie is removed from the scene by EMTs but tells the girls that the sacrifice is complete.

Once again, the adult Yellowjackets are in dire straits at the start of Season 3. Misty takes Natalie's death particularly hard, Shauna is receiving weird cassette tapes and dealing with Callie's issues at school, and Taissa and Van decide to "dine and dash" and accidentally cause the death of their waiter from a heart attack as he chases them. (At least they go on a cute date first?) When Lottie shows up uninvited at Shauna's house, Shauna reluctantly lets her stay, but a bond that forms between Lottie and Callie proves unsettling; elsewhere, Van learns that her cancer has stopped growing, and Taissa becomes convinced that the waiter's death was the sacrifice that caused this miraculous turn of events.

Eventually, Shauna kicks Lottie out of her house — specifically, when she sees that Lottie has gifted Jackie's heart necklace to Callie — but this decision has unexpectedly deadly consequences. As Misty scans her Citizen's Detective app, she comes across a crime scene photo of Lottie's body laying at the bottom of a set of stairs, sending her into a frenzy and starting a brand new investigation as she, Walter, and the other Yellowjackets try to figure out who could have killed Lottie.

To say Shauna loses her grip on sanity throughout Season 3 of "Yellowjackets" is ... a kind understatement. With Callie sort of spying on Shauna to figure out what the heck her mom could even be up to, Shauna listens to the cassette, interprets what she hears as a threat due to the fact that she figures out that the researcher Hannah's daughter is the one threatening her. As it happens, the adult version of Melissa, played by Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, is married to Hannah's daughter, so Shauna pays her a visit, bites out a chunk of her flesh, and makes Melissa eat it. Normal stuff!!!

Elsewhere, Misty discovers that Taissa and Lottie met on the day of the latter's death and that a large sum of money was involved ... and everyone reunites once again when Melissa, hitchhiking after escaping from Shauna, grabs a ride with Tai, Van, and Misty. During an altercation, Melissa kills Van — Taissa later cuts out Van's heart and eats it — and Callie ultimately confesses to her mother that she pushed Lottie down the stairs in a fit of rage. Still, Jeff and Callie leave Shauna, who cryptically writes a journal entry about getting her "power back."

Season 4 of "Yellowjackets" premieres on Paramount+ with Showtime on November 20.