Showtime’s Yellowjackets has seen plenty of major characters die, but Ella Purnell’s Jackie is arguably the most important.
Fans have been waiting years for the hit survival thriller to return. Yellowjackets Season 3 is reportedly set to wrap filming sometime this October, with a specific release date still yet to be confirmed.
The series has been critically acclaimed since its debut, telling a grounded and gripping tale of a group of (now) adult survivors reconciling with having been stranded and forced to live off the land after a devastating plane crash they were involved in as teens.
The results of this Lord of the Flies-esque series of events have had fatal consequences for some characters, including the charismatic Jackie Taylor.
How Did Jackie Die in Yellowjackets?
One of the characters who tragically died during the events of Yellowjackets is Ella Purnell’s Jackie Taylor.
Thanks to the series’ dual timelines (one focusing on the show’s adult version of its characters and the other on them as teens stranded in the Canadian wilderness), it is revealed early on in Season 1, which is now streaming on Netflix, that Purnell’s Jackie did not make it out of the group’s survival effort alive.
Purnell (who recently came to prominence as a part of the Fallout series cast) is seen exclusively in the 1993 timeline, as the teenage leader and captain of the girls’ soccer team at the center of the series.
However, as their plane goes down over the Canadian Rocky Mountains, leaving this group of teen girls to fend for themselves in the untamed wilderness, Jackie is one of the characters who is eventually pushed to her death.
Fans find out early on in Season 1 that Jackie died and never made it out of the woods as a teen, but the circumstances surrounding the character’s untimely demise remain shrouded in mystery for most of the season.
The show does eventually reveal to fans who exactly Jackie bit the dust, with her death ultimately coming as a part of the Yellowjackets Season 1 finale.
After years of burbling tension between Jackie and some other members of the Yellowjackets team, everything comes to a head to close Season 1.
Earlier in Season 1, audiences are made aware of some of the drama between members of the team that they have now brought into the wilderness with them.
This pressure is added upon when, during the now-infamous Doomscoming survivor party, Jackie sleeps with the on-again-off-again boyfriend of her fellow teammate Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher), whom they had met in the woods.
In a heated moment between the team, stuck within the remote cabin they have set up shop in, the girls have it out with each other.
The rest of the team confronts Jackie about her transgression back before the plane crash, calling her out for her act of infidelity. While Jackie is evidently mad at the team for coming at her, she is furious that her friend Shauna (played by Sophie Nélisse) is doing nothing to stand up for her.
Jackie finds this rather hypocritical given that it had previously been revealed that Shauna had slept with Jackie’s boyfriend, Jeff, and is pregnant with his unborn child.
This causes Jackie to blow up at her former BFF, going at Shauna until Jackie is forced from the cabin by the other girls.
It is at this moment that the rest of the Yellowjackets team essentially leave Ella Purnell’s team captain for dead. The next morning, the girls emerge from their cabin to find Jackie’s body frozen and dead on the ground.
Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, The young teen had frozen to death overnight, succumbing to the brutal cold after her teammates banished her from the relatively safe confines of their deep woods cabin.
This moment leaves a sinking feeling in the viewer's stomach, as it is essentially revealed that Shauna, a person who has been seen interacting with Jackie’s family as an adult in the series, was responsible for the death of their daughter all those years ago.
Yellowjackets Season 3 is seemingly set to come sometime next year, with Season 1 streaming now on Netflix.
