Jonathan Lisco on Hallucination Scene, Jackie’s Return

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Yellowjackets” Season 3, Episode 3, titled “Them’s the Breaks,” streaming now on Paramount+ with Showtime.

After unwittingly tripping on shrooms during Doomcoming (Season 1), the Yellowjackets have now stumbled upon a new hallucinogenic substance in the wilderness: poisonous gas.

In the third episode of Season 3, the young plane-crash survivors learn that Coach Scott (Steven Krueger) is still alive when Mari (Alexa Barajas), who cracks under pressure after two questions, reveals that he abducted her and kept her in a secret cave. The Yellowjackets then embark on a manhunt to seek justice, because they think Coach Scott tried to burn them alive inside the cabin.

After finding the entrance to the cave, Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) divides the girls into groups to widen their search. Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Van (Liv Hewson) and Akilah (Nia Sondoya) explore a narrow and dark passageway, but run into trouble when their candles are extinguished by dripping water. The three girls are then separated, and each experience different hallucinations: Van is back inside the cabin and warms herself in front of the fireplace, Akilah wanders through the forest and communicates with a talking llama, and Shauna spots her son while wading through the lake. Any moment of happiness is brief, though, as their hallucinations take a dark turn.

“That entire sequence took quite a bit of work. Nia’s talking to the llama, Sophie’s in the lake, and then I’m in the cabin on fire — and that fire is practical. They love to have me around fire,” Hewson, who uses they/them pronouns, told Variety during the “Yellowjackets” Season 3 press junket. They added, “This show affords us really cool opportunities to do stuff that is, like, out there — and plays around with magical realism.”

The third episode marks the directorial debut of Jonathan Lisco, who also wrote the episode with co-creators and fellow showrunners Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle. Lisco described the classroom scene — Shauna, Van and Akilah’s shared hallucination — as a way to portray the “thin line between what’s happening objectively” and the characters’ “subjective, almost collective consciousness, blurring into reality.”

The girls also see another familiar face beside them, playing with a slap bracelet: Jackie (Ella Purnell), who froze to death at the end of the show’s first season, after she and Shauna had an argument.

“It’s always fun to have Ella back. It’s fun that these characters come and haunt us, because when they die, we’re like, ‘It’s fine, we’ll see you again.’ But it’s bittersweet, because she’s only there for like, one day. It feels like we’re transported immediately back into shooting the first season and I’ll get to have her forever on set, and then she disappears the next day,” Nélisse said. “But those dream sequences are so fun, because we have so much liberty and freedom to explore. There are no rules on what these dreams can be and represent.”

In an interview with Variety, Lisco spoke about that trippy hallucination sequence, Purnell’s return as Jackie, and the origin story of the Man With No Eyes.

This is your first time directing, period. Why did you want to direct this episode in particular? 

Well, I’m always a lover of the line between subjective and objective reality. I am also very interested in the way the young women’s psyches are breaking down, so to speak, in the wilderness, and then building themselves back up with new conventions and new standards for what is right and wrong. So this episode in particular that we wrote felt like a perfect opportunity for me, at least, to deploy that interest coupled with another. I love when the show takes you on a ride that is, in a way, beyond mere logic. I like when the show takes you on a ride that, hopefully, if we do our job right, can feel truthful, but not necessarily what you might call logical in a sort of linear, real-time space way. And so, I love playing with those ideas. I like the plasticity of them.

Why did the hallucination sequence involve Van, Shauna and Akilah?

When we were going over the various characters who could participate in the hallucination sequence, we felt that there was a potency to Akilah, Van and Shauna, because of what we could do with that Lynchian-type sequence. I feel like we’ve portrayed Akilah as being almost like a child of nature. She loves the animals, she’s very close to the Earth, she loves the garden. And so, of course, in the sequence, all of that turns very dark for her at first. There’s a Bacchanalian-like lust for the blackberries, but then they wind up twining around her legs and pulling her into darkness of the Earth, almost like the darkness that is typified in the show. 

With Van, obviously, she’s stoic, she’s strong, funny. Let’s talk about it from Liv’s point of view: They are playing a character that is stoic and is trying to push aide the fact that they were left for dead on the airplane in Episode 2 of Season 1. But now, it all comes back to haunt them. I don’t know if you noticed this, but it’s Javi’s hand, it’s the cabin man’s hand and it’s Laura Lee’s hand, all coming back from the dead to bind them into the chair and say, “No, you can never physically escape this trauma. It will define you for the rest of your life.”

And then, similarly, with Shauna, which is probably the most psychologically comprehensible one — at least on its face. Shauna has lost a baby. It’s perhaps one of the most traumatic things someone could go through. She’s only a 17-year-old woman in the wilderness, and now, she starts swimming toward this phantom child on the banks of this lake. And not only can she hear the baby — actually, it was a 7-year-old boy, but that’s beside the point — she’s swimming toward him and never can get close enough to save him, and never can get close enough to hug him. And then, from that aerial shot, she’s actually pulled back, as if to say that she might be complicit in what happened, and perhaps she never wanted to have the baby in the first place. So there’s all of that going on in the psychological stew and goulash of what we’re doing, and we just thought, Oh, that’s awesome.

Speaking of the classroom scene, we get to see Ella Purnell return as Jackie. What was it like having her back on set?

I adore that Ella always wants to come play in our sandbox no matter what. She’s always trying to come back. And when I said, ‘Come back for one day,’ she jumped at the chance to do it. She was totally game. And I shot her on what we call Lensbaby, so she’s sort of canted this way, with a little bit of a dream-like quality with her. But when she reaches out with the slap bracelet and just says, “Here, give it a try,” she’s just pure Ella Purnell, right? You can’t look away from what she’s doing. Her face just holds so many different meanings and so much intensity — a little bit of menace, but also quite a lot of “come hither.”

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The Man With No Eyes also appears in that hallucination sequence, and, in this episode, we find out the origins of the character while watching that terrifying ice cream commercial. Why did you want to incorporate that commercial into the story rather than leaving the No-Eyed Man as this purely supernatural character?

Well, I would argue that just because we included the ice cream scene and its origin story, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not quasi-supernatural. I think one of the engines of the show is to constantly play with the notion that something might be both — particularly subjectively from the character’s point of view. And so we thought it was very interesting to learn Taissa had actually forgotten that, as a kid, she had seen this image, and this image haunted her when her grandmother had died, but she kind of suppressed it. She’d totally forgotten about it, until, here she is with Van, and she sees it on TV. Now they go and they hunt for meaning, because the whole show also focuses on false pattern recognition. In other words, when you’ve had that kind of trauma, you’re looking for explanations, but you’re doing it retrospectively. You want to put a template of meaning over your experiences. So she’s sort of desperate to do that, and in doing that, she’s probably distorting the truth. So with that idea, we then decided to put the No-Eyed Man in their hallucination sequence, as if to say that whatever this delusion is, whatever is emblematic of this delusion, is actually speeing into all the girls’ psyches, not just Taissa’s, by way of association.

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This season, the Screaming Trees, as they’ve been called, have been a big element so far. Why did you want to incorporate this particular sound into this season? And does that sound mean the show’s leaning more toward the supernatural? 

I can’t tell you the exact answer to that, because you’re gonna get much closer to the answer if you watch the rest of the season. But sound design is an absolute necessity for us. It’s like the olfactory, too. We can’t smell when you’re watching TV, but that’s oddly the most embedded sense memory that you have. Audio is also really intense, so we play with it. I don’t know if you noticed, but when the No-Eyed Man is passing with his bar cart, I go tight just on the wheel of the cart. And the sonic design just, like, blows your head apart, as if to say this is the scariest part of the possible sequence — just the uncertainty of what’s happening. It fills you with that emotional response, as opposed to a directly logical one. And equally, the Screaming Trees are occurring, I would argue, objectively, but equally and probably more subjectively for our characters, and so how they’re interpreting it is really more important than whether or not it’s super loud or not loud at any given moment. It’s how in the storyline they’re interpreting what they’re hearing.

In the present timeline, Lottie gives Callie the heart necklace, and tells Shauna, “It never meant what you thought it meant.” Was that genuine?

I don’t want to blow the end of the season, so I have to be pretty careful. But I will tell you, in that moment, Lottie deliberately put the necklace on Callie because of what she thinks.

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And Lottie and Callie are also dancing and singing along to Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” which is famously used in several scenes in “Lost.” I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of comparisons between the two shows. Was that moment meant to evoke that famous bunker scene from “Lost”?

Maybe nobody will believe this, but the hard and fast answer is, no, we did not. I hope Ash and Bart didn’t have that idea and not tell me, but we just chose it because we thought it was perfect for the scene. We did not mean it to tether that moment in “Lost,” but now everybody’s talking about it. I hope it’s a good homage. We just thought it was fun in the moment and sort of got at the way in which Callie and Lottie were bonding at the time.

In another scene, Van and Taissa see a coyote with a dead rabbit in its mouth. Rabbits have been a recurring part of this show, particularly in relation to Jackie. What was the intention of including a rabbit in that moment?

It actually harkens back even to the pilot, when Shauna kills the rabbit with the shovel. There’s something about these people’s experiences that has inured them to like the spilling of blood, and the spilling of blood is very talismanic for them and sort of meaningful. It’s almost like an outbreath, even though it’s horrible. It’s like the doing of it means something. And so, when Tai and Van see the bloody rabbit with the blood dripping down, they have an epiphany that the spilling of blood may be essential to their storyline moving forward in some way, and that “It” wants more — meaning, we’re not finished.

This interview has been edited and condensed.