SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses the season 2 finale of Yellowjackets.
From the pilot episode’s plane crash to Laura Lee’s explosive midseason departure (pun intended) to Jackie’s icy farewell, Yellowjackets made one thing abundantly clear: anyone (and I do mean anyone) could die at any moment. For a drama centered on survival, predicting which characters will make it out of the season alive and which will bite the bullet can be nearly impossible. And as we now know, who survives and who doesn’t can come down to something as simple yet unpredictable as luck of the draw. But while season one may have featured a number of shocking deaths in the 1996 storyline, there was still one major plunge it didn’t take: killing off a main character in the present day. With the season two finale though, we’ve finally gotten our first heartbreaking casualty of the present-day storyline—and it couldn’t be harder to say goodbye to Natalie Scatorccio.
It was (somewhat shockingly) Juliette Lewis’s Natalie who ended up dead in the season two finale (along with Kevyn Tan RIP), marking a significant turning point for the show. Granted, we did lose present-day Travis early in season one, but at that point in the show, we hadn’t gotten to know Travis all that well yet. With Natalie’s death in the season two finale “Storytelling”, it feels undeniably different—we knew Natalie, we loved her, and more than anything, we were rooting for her to live.
On paper, Natalie being the first Yellowjacket to die in the present-day storyline isn’t all that much of a surprise. As early as her introduction in the pilot, her character has been one riddled with self-hatred, haunted by her actions in the wilderness. Natalie was plagued by suicidal thoughts, which eventually manifest into an attempt to shoot herself at the end of season one (before she’s rescued by Lottie’s cronies, that is). Between losing herself in drugs and stints in rehab, Yellowjackets very clearly painted Natalie’s coping mechanism as the most unpredictable and perhaps unhealthy of the survivors—she’s endured a nearly-endless battle to cope with her trauma, but more often than not ends up falling back on destructive behaviors when she can’t.
But while she may have been presented early on as one of the most self-destructive characters on the show, Natalie (at least, in the present day) spent nearly the entirety of season two attempting to change that. And if her heartbreaking reaction to her own death is any indication, she genuinely didn’t want to die when her time finally came. It’s a cruel twist of fate for Natalie, and that’s what makes her death so brutal. Over the course of season two, we see Natalie taking shaky baby steps to commit to Lottie’s therapies and try to work through her trauma in healthy outlets. She learns to channel her emotions and acknowledge the pain instead of trying to run away from it or numb it with booze and drugs. She also forms a friendship with Lisa (Nicole Maines), which serves as a touchstone to her younger self.
It’s an even harsher turn of events when Natalie (who’s been so diligently working on her sobriety) is ultimately killed via a tragically accidental drug overdose at the hands of her best friend. Okay, maybe Natalie wouldn’t have called Misty (Christina Ricci) her “best friend”, but Misty certainly thought of herself that way. This is why her accidentally injecting Natalie with a lethal dosage intended for Lisa (Misty was actually trying to save Nat) is so heartbreaking and ironic on so many levels.
Though it’s difficult to say who suffered the most on Yellowjackets (and maybe even a fruitless endeavor, considering they all had it pretty bad), Natalie’s run on the show has always felt particularly tragic. Between the accidental death of her abusive father, her toxic relationship with Travis, her trauma in the wilderness, and the rest of the Yellowjackets attempting to kill and eat her (before Javi’s sacrifice, that is), Natalie’s tenure was one riddled with pain and despair. Through all of it though, Natalie somehow (maybe miraculously) managed to remain the beating heart of the series. After all, it was her unwavering moral compass and desperate want to not hurt others that made her frequently violent encounters all the more personally painful for her. Natalie has never wanted violence or pain in her life, but fate had other plans. Her character has come so far, and it is especially cruel that she dies before she can truly find peace.
Granted, she isn’t gone for good—at least, not in the show’s context. Though present-day Natalie is now six feet under, we can still look forward to scenes with Sophie Thatcher as 1996 Natalie. Her journey is just getting started, having been newly anointed as the Queen of the hunt after surviving the first ritual. But if Natalie’s ’96 scenes weren’t bittersweet and gut-wrenching already, it’s going to be all the more painful watching her in the flashback storyline now that we know how she ends up. Though Natalie’s final scene—a disorienting dream/death sequence on the plane that features both teen Lottie, Javi, and teen Natalie—is undeniably a beautiful sendoff for the character, it’s hard to truly feel that Natalie’s story has a sense of closure or symmetry. While I have the utmost faith in the Yellowjackets writers, Nat’s death is always going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Goodbye, our beautiful punk queen, we miss you already.
(featured image: Showtime)
