'Yellowjackets' Fans Can't Stop Theorizing About Adam's True Identity

By Alyssa Fikse

Showtime's new horror drama Yellowjackets has audiences theorizing like crazy. The dark new series follows a high school women's soccer team that gets stranded in the Canadian wilderness after their plane goes down on the way to the national championship. The girls are stuck In the middle of nowhere for 19 months, battling brutal weather, starvation, and a seemingly supernatural force that wants to keep them trapped. Cutting between the past horrors and the survivors dealing with the fallout of their decisions 25 years later, Yellowjackets wants its viewers to examine the deepest, darkest parts of the human psyche.

After just eight episodes, Yellowjackets fans have numerous questions, some of which will surely remain into the already renewed second season. When did the team eventually resort to cannibalism? Who is the Antler Queen? Who is the girl in the pit? Who murdered Travis? However, one of the biggest questions plaguing fans is the true identity of Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot). Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is stuck in a stagnant marriage and arrested development due to the trauma of the woods, and early on in the season strikes up an affair with artist and mechanic Adam. She suspects that her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) is cheating, so a fling Adam starts off as a bit of revenge. However, it soon became clear that Adam is not who he says that he is.

The Yellowjackets Reddit boards have been abuzz with theories, with most believing that Adam is a grown-up Javi Martinez (Luciano Leroux), the youngest son of the soccer coach who ended up in the wilderness with the team. It is currently unclear who of the 19 crash survivors made it out of the woods beyond Shauna, Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Misty (Christina Ricci), and Natalie (Juliette Lewis), so Javi could be living under the assumed name of Adam in order to stay out of the spotlight.

The surviving Yellowjackets are also being blackmailed by some unknown entity, with someone even breaking into Shauna's safe to steal her burner phone and journals documenting the horrors they witnessed and committed. Could Adam be exploiting the Yellowjackets' notoriety for a quick buck? Or is he an investigative journalist seeking answers alongside Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma)? Others posit that he is a deranged superfan trying to get as close to the story as possible. It's clear on the show that the survivors are something out of legend in the true crime community, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that Adam is an obsessive stalker. People have pointed to Adam's extensive back tattoo as proof of this theory. 

Another more grotesque theory is that Adam is actually Shauna's son, the grown-up child that she is pregnant with during the woods timeline. However, despite being outlandish, Adam is about a decade too old for that theory to come to Oedipal fruition. A less horrific version of that is that he is a relative of one of the girls that died seeking revenge or answers. While viewers will have to wait a little while to get answers, Lynskey herself is stoking the fires of speculation on Twitter. "Yes I've read your Adam theories, and just so you all know, there's one that basically no one has mentioned yet. I'm surprised but also not surprised!" she tweeted. There are just two episodes left in the season, and more twists are surely on the way. Yellowjackets airs on Showtime Sundays at 10:00 p.m. ET and is available to stream on the app Sundays at 12:01 a.m. ET.

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