Yellowjackets season 3 finale made me shocked, surprised and sad – here are 3 things you may have missed

To say that the last episode of Yellowjackets season 3 was a killer would be an understatement: it was a highly dramatic, often surprising and very violent end to not just the season, but to some of the key characters too.

Warning: serious spoilers ahead!

If you haven't already seen the entire third season of one of the best Paramount+ shows please don't read on, because there were some important things in the season finale that I want to talk about, and in order to explain them I'm going to have to include some massive spoilers.

Trust me: Spoiling any of the surprises for you is definitely not what the wilderness wants.

Misty's smile was misdirection

One of the most disturbing parts of Yellowjackets' very first episode was what happened immediately after the horrible death of Pit Girl, who of course we now know to be Mari.

There's a lingering moment in the pilot where, post-cannibalism, the camera focuses on Misty and she doesn't seem upset; she seems happy, with what you could describe as either a smirk or a smile.

It turns out that that was misdirection: we were set up to think that Misty was heartless or even evil, and in successive seasons that was reinforced by the animosity between her and Mari. But we now know that Shauna, not Misty, was the person who ensured that Mari would be Pit Girl.

Seeing Misty's smile in context at the end of season 3 showed us the real story: Misty was smiling because she knew her and Nat's plan – getting away to make that phone call on the repaired satellite phone – had worked.

Shauna's crown is hollow

In the very final moments we see Shauna become the Antler Queen, which of course you saw. But that coronation is misdirection again, because it's already a hollow victory: the Yellowjackets are turning against Shauna in both timelines because of her shocking actions.

Of course we know she makes it back home in the 1990s timeline, because if she didn't then we wouldn't have the present-day Shauna to be horrified by.

But with Misty and even Tai now lined up against her, I'm really not expecting a happy ending to Shauna's story. Not least because...

Callie is a killer

Among the many revelations of the finale, one of the biggest is the identity of Lottie's killer – Callie. When Misty works it all out, she isn't slow to tell Jeff and Shauna. Jeff realizes that Shauna is, to put it mildly, not the greatest role model Callie could have, and spirits her away.

But something strange happened in the finale when Shauna finds empty closets and no sign of a note: nothing.

After an entire season where Callie and Jeff's characters became really important, their story just stops dead. We're no wiser about where they are or what they're doing than Shauna is.

I think that's a third bit of misdirection. I reckon that we're going to see a lot more of Callie in season four – and that that's not going to be good news for Shauna.

Remember, this is a show all about teens murdering people, and Mari's final words to Shauna were "you deserve all the bad things that are going to happen to you"... are you thinking what I'm thinking?

You might also like

• Paramount+ price: how much does each plan cost?
• 5 new movies on Paramount+ with over 94% on Rotten Tomatoes
• MobLand is the most-watched Paramount+ Original series premiere ever