I liked Yellowjackets the first time, when it was Lord of the Flies.

Last week, once my Paramount+ streaming service became Paramount+ with Showtime, I started binge-watching one of Showtime’s more popular shows, the horror-thriller Yellowjackets.

I’m partway through the show’s second season … but … what in the world is going on here?

All right … let’s start right off the bat with the premise. A high school girls’ soccer team, on their flight to a championship tournament, crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness, with no means of escape. And what happens to them? Well, we get storylines of their time in the woods, as well as their time after they were rescued. There’s a lot of psychological drama in this show, a lot of horror, and a fair amount of “are you fucking kidding me” moments in this series.

But I will say this. It’s not like we’ve never had a TV show where a plane crash was the start of the series. I mean … there was Lost …

Heck, the premise was also created in 1969, when ABC aired a 45-minute drama series called The New People, where survivors of a plane crash tried to create their own society.

Hell, it wasn’t the only “flight crash into a new environment” series on ABC that year!

Oh, and the “plane crash series” also been the basis of a children’s show that aired on NBC for a few seasons.

Now let’s also address what happens to the girls in Yellowjackets once they crash-land. The girls have mental and emotional changes throughout the series, as they adapt to the harsh climate and conditions. And of course, they find an abandoned cabin and a rifle (and unlimited ammunition that just HAPPENS to exist) so that they don’t completely die out there. Because plotline, right?

I mean … the whole emotional breakdown of the Yellowjackets crew has to have drawn its influence from the classic Lord of the Flies novel. It just has to. Trust me, I’m almost expecting one of the Yellowjackets to furiously shout to another Yellowjacket, “Sucks to your ass-mar!”

And … of course … there’s the underlying mystery of “what happened in the woods” that we’re going to have to wait for a few SEASONS to completely unpack. Why? Because if you can milk a premise for as long as possible, you can draw in the viewers.

I mean … that’s how we got another “mystery plane” TV series in Manifest, right?

Now mind you … I’ve only gotten up to Episode 2 of Season 2 of Yellowjackets, so I have no idea how this show will turn out, or if there’s another plotline that can completely turn this series on its head.

But for now … it’s just an “okay” show for me. The plotlines have a bit of a “Chekov’s Gun” feel to them, in that if something happens in Episode 3 that seems out of the ordinary, it’ll be clear in Episode 6 with a “were you paying attention” flashback to that initial moment in Episode 3. But I suppose that’s the blessing and the curse of episodic genre television.

So … let’s see what happens as the show progresses.

Maybe the show gets better.

If not … well, maybe I can check out this Dexter show on Showtime that everybody’s raving about.