Shauna and Adam's storyline came to a bloody end in Season 1 of Yellowjackets.
The Paramount+ series follows a group of teenage girls who are stranded in the Canadian wilderness after their plane crashes and examines the twisted lengths they go to in order to survive.
Yellowjackets also follows the survivors of the crash 25 years later, revealing who the characters have become since their ordeal and what they're willing to do to keep their past a secret.
What Happened Between Shauna and Adam in Yellowjackets?
Much of adult Shauna's (Melanie Lynskey) storyline in Season 1 of Yellowjackets was taken up with an affair she had with a man named Adam (Peter Gadiot).
The two meet after Shauna accidentally rear-ends Adam's car and they hit it off.
After Shauna begins to suspect that her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) is having an affair she feels encouraged to pursue a romantic relationship with Adam.
After a few intimate encounters, Adam is shown to be prying personal information out of Shauna. She soon learns that he is not being truthful about his identity and is trying to find out about her past with the Yellowjackets.
This all ties into a broader plot point in Season 1 that saw the surviving Yellowjackets members being blackmailed by an unknown person.
Shauna jumps to the conclusion that Adam may be the blackmailer or at least part of the conspiracy, so she stabs and kills him in Yellowjackets Season 1, Episode 9.
Why Shauna Murdered Adam, Explained
While Adam's death was far from the only one in Yellowjackets so far, it was an act that had major repercussions for Shauna and those around her.
Shauna's murder of Adam was not planned. It was a crime of passion driven by her fear and paranoia that her past was going to be exposed.
While not all of the Yellowjackets' secrets from their ordeal in the wilderness have been revealed in the show yet, the group has engaged in some pretty sickening acts that would ruin their lives should the secrets be exposed in the present (such as the death of Shauna's best friend Jackie).
Unfortunately for Shauna, the murder was in vain as Adam was later revealed not to have been the blackmailer.
The blame instead lay with Shauna's husband, Jeff (Warren Kole), who had stolen his wife's journals to try and pressure her old classmates into providing money that would help save his struggling furniture business.
To protect her husband, Shauna lied to the other Yellowjackets, Misty (Christina Ricci), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), and Natalie (Juliette Lewis), and painted Adam as their blackmailer, which meant they would help her cover up the murder.
The whole situation was a mess that impacted Shauna's state in Season 2. Actress Melanie Lynskey told Collider in 2023 that Shauna made a "series of bad decisions" in Season 1:
"I think that she’s being guided by pure panic and the knowledge that she's just made a series of bad decisions, and she probably shouldn't make any more, but she just can't seem to stop... she’s not yet processed the fact that she actually killed someone who really liked her, and what does that mean?"
Shauna's relationship with Adam was a defining moment in Yellowjackets, that continues to impact the characters, particularly Jeff and Callie (Sarah Desjardins), in Season 3.
New episodes of Yellowjackets Season 3 are released on Paramount+ on Fridays at midnight P.T./ 3 a.m. ET.
