Without Her: Watching ‘Yellowjackets’
No spoilers. I promise.
I turn on Yellowjackets early in the morning because it does not matter when I watch it.
I’m not waiting for anybody and this pre-dawn Saturday when I can’t find a way to fall back asleep seems like as good a time as any to finally queue up Season 3.
Used to be I’d only watch the latest episodes on my couch on Saturday nights with the one I once loved and maybe still do, depending on how you choose to define love. But that’s no longer penciled into my schedule and so it’s not necessarily about time of day anymore. Not when you can do whatever the hell you want to fill your time.
No one is going to get upset if I binge the first few episodes without them. There’s nobody to posture for after I have impulsively and inconsiderately done so, when they come over to watch it, pretending like I haven’t seen the latest episode(s) and then overcompensating by gasping too audibly during and sometimes even before the pivotal moments I’ve already witnessed.
I’ve got no one to show my tell.
Talk about Stray Dog Freedom. If I’m the kind of lucky stray dog who happens to have easy access to Paramount Plus with the Showtime add-on. Which I do. It’s less per month than taking an Uber to a date, if you want to think about it that way. And it brings me hours of joy or something vaguely similar (they’ve got Frasier and Beavis and Butthead on there). Maybe it’s simple as a way to escape for a little while. So, in my mind, well worth springing for.
The show has been coming out with weekly episodes for more than a month now, and as an avid and vocal fan it’s surprising that I haven’t been digesting them every Friday when they drop, then eagerly awaiting the next week to pass so I can do so again. But despite it being one of my favorite shows to come out in the past few years, I’ve been putting it off. I tell people it’s because I want to save them for a more binge-able consumption, or that I haven’t started because I know episodes are finite and there’ll be a long time to wait between this season and the next, if the show continues to a fourth. But in reality I’ve been hesitant because I’ve only ever seen the show with her and am wary of the emotions it’ll bring back to the forefront (they’re always lurking somewhere close by) when I continue on with Yellowjackets without her.
There’s something about having a series that is one of “your shows” with someone you often share a tacitly agreed upon assigned seating arrangement and dual custody of a Fire Stick and remote. It becomes something sacrosanct that you only watch together, only go through together, and you discuss each episode in hushed tones during the pivotal scenes themselves (“Holy shit, they’re playing Elliott Smith’s “Pitseleh” right now; this soundtrack rules”) or more animatedly after the credits roll (“What the actual fuck did we just witness?”).
I have thought about bagging the series altogether, just never finding out what happens and watching something else from the borderline-infinite options the gods of the streaming services provide on a daily basis. But I realize my penchant for avoidance is a borderline superpower, though not one used for the greater good (or my own solipsistic good) very often — and while the way I live has gotten me pretty far, it’s difficult to have many inklings that nag at me about how it’s taken me all the way down a non-ideal path. And maybe it’s time to change the way I approach things, which is to say actually approaching them instead of running screaming in the other direction until I get to a place where I inaccurately tell myself the memories can no longer get me.
In short, it’s time to lean in in a somewhat strange, see if I can still find something that sparks joy (strange to say a very dark show like Yellowjackets does such a thing, but if you know you know) in something I didn’t love until the time I loved her, because the show did not exist (publicly) until I already did.
I wonder if I can make what once was ours, in our little way, all mine, at least in my mind.
I gather my beverages and blankets, close the blinds, open the Paramount app and fade in.
When I watch the previous season’s recap, I’m reminded not only of the show’s progression, but the moments we spent watching it together, which bleeds into recalling several other moments we spent together that I simultaneously cherish and wish I could completely wipe from my memory. I think of the mistakes I made and wonder once again if it’s a mistake to continue watching this show, what with the potential unpacking of emotional baggage better left out on the curb, to keep going with this strange thing I now feel an obligation toward that has become much more symbolic than sitting down for a 45-minute episode.
But then the recap ends and what comes next begins.
The show goes on and what happens now, even though it’s not up to me, will be tainted and influenced by the past, of course, but, in a certain vacuum, is now the story that really matters most. Most everything moves on in some way, and the majority is going to do so with or without you.
And who knows? This could end up being the best season yet.
