Towards the end of 2021, the Yellowjackets TV series took audiences by storm, providing horror, mystery, and drama in equal measure with its story of cannibalistic kids. Now, the screenplay for the pilot episode has been released, and it reveals the nicknames given to the survivors on the island that had previously been unknown to us.
Yellowjackets is a drama series from Showtime, and holds the second highest viewing figures for the streaming service. The show takes place both in 1996, when a plane of teenagers crash land on an island and go to desperate lengths to survive, and stars Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci as the adult counterparts to these characters.
In a recent feature from Deadline, the script for the pilot episode of the critically-acclaimed series has been examined more closely, and the identities of the cannibal survivors has become a little bit clearer. At the time of watching the episode, the animalistic alter-egos of the survivors were unnamed, but it seems the answers were in the screenplay all along.
The pilot episode, which is written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, and directed by Karyn Kusama, offered viewers a dark and tantalising taster of what was to come, and left audiences with plenty of questions going into the series.
According to the script, the cannibals carry titles like The Hunter, Butcher, The Overseer, and The Shamen. The fact that the girls have come up with sinister monikers for each other, suggests that they had been operating in this way for some time, and clearly had their own specific roles in the heirarchy.
Everyone involved in the show has made it clear that no one knows who the cannibals we see in the cold open of the pilot episode actually are. With the names replaced in the script in such a way, the real identity of these characters only deepens, and we will have to wait for the Yellowjackets season 2 release date for more answers.