How Are They Lost In 'Yellowjackets' Exactly?
One of the best new shows on TV right now is Yellowjackets, which surprisingly isn’t a cartoon about anthropomorphic wasps or a docuseries about raincoats. At the risk of oversimplification, Yellowjackets is basically Lord of the Flies, but with a ‘90s high school soccer team made up of teen girls – thus, it features more Smashing Pumpkins and Hole songs than the classic William Golding novel. The team becomes lost after their plane crashes in “the wilderness of Ontario.” Through flashforwards to the present day, we learn that this ordeal lasted for 19 months, and some of the kids eventually dabbled in a soupcon of … brutal woodland cannibalism.
But as great as the show is so far, we have one big issue with its premise – no, not the breakdown of civility and the formation of rival flesh-eating cults, we totally get that. We’ve all spent more than 45 minutes in an IKEA. We’re talking about the setting. First of all, Northern Ontario isn’t full of giant, snow-capped mountain ranges.
And how exactly were these kids lost for 19 months? Judging from Google Maps, if one were to walk more than the span entire friggin’ province of Ontario for only 6 hours a day, it would take you less than two months.
Sure, that’s on a paved road, and these kids are in the woods, but A) they’re likely in the middle of the province, so it would ultimately take way less time than that, and B) they’re probably stuck in either a provincial park or a wildlife conservation area that would be monitored to some degree.
Of course, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few episodes. Still, presumably, if they just picked a direction, either East or West and started walking in said direction, in a province of nearly 11 million people (in 1996), it seems doubtful that they would have gone full Hills Have Eyes before running into like a Tim Horton’s or something.
The reason for this peculiarity seems to be that the show was “loosely inspired” by the 1972 “Andes Flight Disaster” (that also inspired the movie Alive), but that plane went down in the perilous Andes Mountains of South America. We’re guessing that the writers of Yellowjackets wanted to tell a similar story but couldn’t come up with a believable reason why these New Jersey teens would travel such a distance and just figured that viewers would simply accept that Canada is a hopelessly impenetrable mass of untamed nature.
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Top Image: Entertainment One
