Showtime's Yellowjackets came out of nowhere at the end of 2021 to become one of social media's most beloved new obsessions--and it's not difficult to see why. The weekly episode releases teased a mystery sprawling through two different timelines that involved, among other things, the looming threat of cannibalism, murder, and maybe even vengeful ghosts hiding dark and terrifying secrets. For those of us who lived through the real-time releases of cult classic shows like Lost, it felt like a welcome return to the frantic week-to-week theorizing and puzzle solving that has too frequently been lost in binge-watch friendly releases.

Loosely inspired by William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Yellowjackets Season 1 focused on a tragic plane crash which left a high school girl's soccer team (the titular Yellowjackets, the team mascot) stranded in the Canadian wilderness for over a year back in the mid-'90s. While those events unfolded, the story also zeroed in on the surviving girls, now adults with families and lives of their own, trying to navigate their respective trauma in the present day. The first episode strongly implies that the girls resorted to cannibalism to survive the winter, and also may have formed some sort of tribal or cult-like hierarchy, but the adult survivors have resolutely taken to never talking about their experiences even 25 years later.