Yellowjackets Season 3 is tossing in more than just a few references to the late ‘80s and ‘90s, with a recent episode not only referencing Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, but also the long-forgotten Nickelodeon’s children’s show Eureeka’s Castle. Warning: This post contains spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 3.
The series, which featured puppet character who live in a giant’s wind-up music box, originally ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. block from 1989 until 1991, and was briefly referenced in Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 3, “Them’s the Brakes.”
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The moment came during an emotionally charged scene in the cave between coach Ben (Steven Steven Krueger) and Mari (Alexa Barajas) early on in the episode. As Ben grapples with his current reality, Mari shares anecdote about watching her 4-year-old cousin die of brain cancer when she was just 12 while they were watching a Nickelodeon show “with the stupid puppets and the dragon,” Eureeka’s Castle. Later, as she was waiting for her parents in the waiting room, the episode was still on.
“I think, maybe there are two versions of reality,” she tells Coach Ben. “Most of the time, the other one, the bad one is just hiding, or waiting. But it’s all real.”
While there is plenty of debate among fans about the deeper meaning of Mari’s speech, it painted a grim reality: despite all of the terrible things they’ve been through, the world is still turning. They are in the “bad” reality. The one where they stepped on a plane that later crashed; where they resorted to cannibalism for survival; where nobody is looking for them because they think they’re dead. The one where, just a few episodes later, the surviving Yellowjackets would find their coach guilty, hold him captive, kill him, and eat him, cutting their final tether to their civility.
“Every time they’ve eaten somebody before, it could be explained away if they were to get rescued. Here, they straight up killed somebody and are now making a ceremony out of eating that person,” Krueger told The Hollywood Reporter. “We see the floodgates open. You start to see why they got to the place they got to, and we finally get that connection to what we saw [in the pilot].”
Yellowjackets still has a few more episodes left this season, and after the most recent episode, “Thanksgiving (Canada),” ended on a massive cliffhanger when a man and a woman – presumably hikers or scientists, according to some theories – stumbled upon the girls in the middle of their cannibalistic feast, things are sure to get even crazier from here on out.
New episodes of Yellowjackets stream weekly on Fridays on Paramount+ and Showtime and air at 8 p.m. on Sundays on Showtime’s linear channel.
