Yellowjackets “Doomcoming” Review: Season 1 Episode 9 Explained

Doomcoming Yellowjackets recap: season 1, episode 9 explained

High school dances have a ranking: prom first, homecoming a distant second, cotillion somewhere behind. "Doomcoming" proves that ranking holds in the Canadian wilderness too, since nobody remembers the dance and everybody remembers what the dance did. The episode runs two stories in parallel. In 1996 the stranded girls throw a homecoming party. In 2021 the adult Shauna deals with the fallout of a bad night in Adam's apartment.

Showtime's Yellowjackets, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, follows a high school girls' soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness in 1996 while en route to a national tournament, and the survivors twenty-five years later. Season 1 ran for ten episodes between November 14, 2021, and January 16, 2022, and "Doomcoming" is the penultimate hour. The season finale picks up where this one stops, so it sets up the shape of everything after it.

For anyone arriving cold, the show's structure is simple. Every episode alternates between the girls in the wilderness and the women they became, and each timeline answers questions raised by the other. "Doomcoming" is one of the cleanest examples, because the mushrooms in the stew and the body in the apartment both put people in situations they cannot talk their way out of.

The title is a pun, and it is also a clue. In the woods, the girls approximate the date of a real homecoming, and Jackie, who has by this point lost interest in survival, proposes a party to welcome their own demise. A full hunter's moon the next night adds the atmosphere, and the writers spend the hour winding the tension tighter and tighter.

2021: Adam, the diaries and Jeff

The adult timeline picks up from the previous episode. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) has slept with Adam (Peter Gadiot), and in his studio apartment, as she searches his drawers in a panic, she finds an unauthorized account of the Flight 2525 crash. The discovery sets off a flashback to the trauma she carries, and the scene ends with Adam dead and Shauna holding a blade. The killing follows her confirmation that he has been digging into her past.

The aftermath is as grim as the act. At home, Shauna finds her old diaries and confronts her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) about the glitter that tied him to events she had blamed on Adam. Jeff admits that he was the blackmailer. His furniture business was failing, he owed money to a loan shark, and the woman at the hotel was not a lover. The thing he did to protect the household nearly destroyed it.

Shauna then tells Jeff what she has done. He volunteers to take the blame, and she refuses, knowing that a sacrifice would bring down everything they built. Natalie (Juliette Lewis) and Taissa (Tawny Cypress) are the ones who walk into the apartment later and confront Shauna over the body. Natalie is no closer to solving the present-day murder of Travis, and Shauna's DNA is all over the place, which leaves the three women in a deeper hole than before. By the end, the couple are on the same side, and the only people left to deceive are Natalie and Taissa, whom Shauna convinces that Adam was the blackmailer. Natalie asks Misty to help get rid of the body.

1996: Doomcoming, the mushrooms and the hunt

In the wilderness, Akilah and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) gather grubs, which the group now eats without complaint. Only Jackie (Ella Purnell) refuses, and Mari (Alexa Barajas) fetches berry liquor to get the party going. The girls spend the day preparing costumes, gowns and decor. Misty (Samantha Hanratty) asks Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) to be her date and he agrees. Lottie (Courtney Eaton) toasts the fallen Laura Lee, and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) gives Van (Liv Hewson) matching masks.

The mood sours when the group eats the stew. Mari stirs mushrooms meant for a private tea into the communal stew, and by the end of dinner nearly everyone is hallucinating, Jackie excepted. Jackie sleeps with Travis (Kevin Alves) even though Travis still has feelings for Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), and Ben tells Misty he is gay, ending that crush in the bluntest way possible.

On the comedown, the group discovers what Jackie and Travis have done. They lock Jackie in a closet and hunt Travis through the trees, howling, in a sequence that plays as an animal chase more than a teen drama. They catch him. Lottie orders Shauna to cut his throat. At that moment Natalie arrives and stops her, and Travis lives.

Misty, Jessica and the ending

In the present, Misty (Christina Ricci) attends a reunion planning meeting with Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma), who tells her that the survivors have exchanged letters for twenty-five years, everyone except Jessica. Misty seems to consider a tell-all with the ghostwriter. The episode closes when Natalie arrives at Misty's door, needing her help, and has to ask for it.

Who plays whom in Doomcoming

Adam is played by Peter Gadiot and Jessica Roberts by Rekha Sharma in the 2021 timeline. The 1996 cast also includes Ella Purnell (Jackie), Courtney Eaton (Lottie), Kevin Alves (Travis), Liv Hewson (Van), Steven Krueger (Coach Ben Scott), Alexa Barajas (Mari) and Keeya King (Akilah).

Doomcoming review: why the episode works

This is the point in the season when the show stops pretending the survivors are only victims. The hunt of Travis is a direct inversion of the earlier survival drama: the girls stop being prey and start being the animals in the woods, and they do it on a night they chose to celebrate. The screenplay lets that happen in a way the audience can follow, because each step is supported by hunger, grief or loyalty.

Sports language runs through the hour, from Shauna's past as a midfielder to the "own goal" of a marriage in which both partners believed the other had cheated. The metaphor suits a show about a soccer team. It also makes a quiet point about the group at the center: they are still a squad, with positions, plays and a captain, even as the rules of the game change into something older and meaner.

The present-day story is equally strong. Shauna has already made a grave choice, and the writers have the adult characters spend the hour covering it up. Jeff's reveal is the sharpest twist: the husband thought to be the weak point turns out to have made a desperate mistake, and the marriage comes out of the conversation as a team, with a body in the room.

Where the episode stumbles is in tone. The mix of gallows humor and shock sometimes blunts the horror, and the closet scene in particular tips toward melodrama. The cast carries it anyway. Lynskey is superb as a woman who cannot stop making decisions, and Eaton's Lottie gains menace each time she says nothing.

Ben Scott's coming out deserves a note of its own. The reveal arrives in the middle of a hallucinatory night, and it resolves a running thread of Misty's crush with a clarity the episode otherwise avoids. It is both funny and sad, and the moment lets Steven Krueger play the coach as a person and not merely a lifeline for the girls. Misty's reaction, as always, is to return to the sidelines and watch.

Natalie's choice at the end of the hunt is the hinge of the hour. She is the one person who steps into the circle and says no, and her reward is a fresh grudge from Lottie, who tells her that darkness is part of survival. That argument runs through the rest of the season, and it begins here. The finale, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi," aired a week later on January 16, 2022, and makes the consequences of this night impossible to ignore.

For anyone who is on the fence about Yellowjackets, "Doomcoming" is a good test. If the party scene and the hunt are compelling and not merely repellent, the series is probably worth finishing. If not, the finale will be a harder watch.

Sources

• Yellowjackets (TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: season 1 episode list, writers, directors and air dates.