What happens to Shauna’s baby on Yellowjackets?
In the first season of Yellowjackets, fans were shocked to learn that Shauna (Sophie Nélisse as a teenager and Melanie Lynskey as an adult) is pregnant while trapped in the woods with her teammates. Before leaving for a trip to the national teams, she had sex several times with Jeff, her best friend Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) boyfriend. Today, Jeff (played by Warren Kole as an adult) and Shauna are married and have a teenage daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins). But Callie was born in 2004, so fans always knew she wasn’t the baby Shauna was pregnant with in the woods in 1996. It’s 19 months before the “Yellowjackets” are rescued, so fans also knew Shauna wasn’t pregnant when the rescue finally happened. In episode six, which was released to stream on May 5, viewers finally learned the baby’s sad fate.
As a result, Shauna goes into labor in the middle of a snowstorm and the team tries to gather themselves to deliver the baby in their small cabin. Although Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) was the one who taught sex education at her high school in New Jersey, they’re all out of their league when it comes to Shauna’s labor. Misty (Samantha Hanratty as a teenager), usually very helpful and willing to throw herself into cruel situations, immediately feels overwhelmed. “Save our baby,” says Lottie (Courtney Eaton as a teenager), which is both motivating and quite chilling. The team eventually decides that they must shed blood for the wilderness to save the baby, and they pray for Shauna and her child. Shauna wakes up with everyone happy and the baby in her arms.
But Shauna is struggling to feed the baby – definitely hampered by the fact that she is starving – and after falling asleep again, she wakes up to find Lottie with the baby and terrified. She eventually persuades the baby to eat. But when she wakes up again, she hallucinates that all the other girls ate the baby. It’s a cruel, dark sight.
And then she finds out the truth. During labor, she lost a lot of blood and passed out. Everything she thought she would experience after the baby was born was a dream. They lost the baby and almost Shauna. Shauna cries and struggles to accept the truth and the episode ends.
In the present of the episode, the adult Shauna also reflects on the lingering trauma of losing the baby and how it affected her relationship with Callie. Of course, since this is “Yellowjackets,” it happens while she’s being questioned by Detective Saracusa (John Reynolds) about Adam’s murder. She says she never wanted to be a mother and that she did it to save her marriage. She says she was also motivated by “shame.” At the same time, she’s also trying to get Saracusa to leave Callie to investigate, so while there’s probably some truth to her words, at least some of it is acting.
New episodes of “Yellowjackets” begin streaming on Fridays and on Showtime on Sundays.
