‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: ‘Barbecue’

Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Croak’

R.I.P. Edwin. We hardly knew you.

The timid herpetologist (Nelson Franklin) who finds the Yellowjackets dancing by the fire in their cannibalistic ritual meets a quick end this week.

Almost immediately after his cheery greeting — followed by his revulsion upon discovering Ben’s decapitated noggin — Lottie creeps up behind him and whacks him in the back of the head with a hatchet. That’s what the Wilderness wants, she declares. All the other Yellowjackets are rightfully upset. Finally, they have contact with the outside world, and she immediately goes and murders someone? What gives?

But Edwin wasn’t the only visitor to the Yellowjackets camp. He arrived with two other souls who end up in the Yellowjackets’ custody: His girlfriend and fellow scientist, Hannah (Ashley Sutton), and their guide, the mysterious loner Kodiak (Joel McHale, even more sardonic and surly than usual). If the end of Episode 6 was a thrilling tease, Episode 7 is the confirmation that “Yellowjackets” is moving its plot forward both in the past and the present.

All of that revolves around the arrival of these new figures, whom we’re introduced to in a prologue of sorts that begins three days before they meet our deranged soccer team. Edwin and Hannah are deep in the woods studying the mating habits of “Arctic banshee frogs.” The hilariously-named Kodiak is their guide.

Hannah is intrigued and somewhat aroused by Kodiak. Edwin is deeply suspicious of him. One night, after smelling what he thinks is “barbecue,” Edwin goes wandering off looking for other souls in this forest. He finds the Yellowjackets.

He instantly dies thanks to Lottie. Kodiak shoots Melissa with one of his arrows and he and Hannah start running, pursued by our girls and Travis with torches. Their hunt for Kodiak and Hannah has a double purpose. On one hand, they can’t leave any witnesses behind; on the other, they need people to get back to civilization.