yellowjackets: vanessa “van” palmer

the long, continuous fall of our jester

ALERT! Below contains serious spoilers for Yellowjackets: Seasons 1, 2, and 3. Catch up on SHOWTIME before joining the team! Buzz Buzz Buzz!

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"You're on fire today, Jackie. Oh, wait. That was supposed to be me, huh?"

She’s narrowly survived a plane crash. Her hair and parts of her face have been burnt, she’s in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, and to make matters worse, she had to watch two of her teammates willfully leave her behind to save themselves. Vanessa “Van” Palmer, however, survived—like she always does. She could live, for the moment, out of spite against Jackie and Shauna: two of many teammates Van relied on and was betrayed by in her proceeding time in The Wilderness. The joke breaks the tension—leaving Van the ability to vent, yet still get off scot-free with her teammates. (She doesn’t yet realize how important this ability will become.)

Every time, Van lives long enough to deliver her punchline. That is, until the latest season of Yellowjackets. 

Following her twist-death in the pre-finale of Season 3, fans will be saying goodbye to adult Van (played by Liv Hewson) while watching the Van of the ‘90s spin further tricks and tales to keep herself and Taissa alive. In a sense, Van will always be alive, within The Wilderness. A sort of Schroëdinger’s cat thought problem: Van is both dead and alive. She died in that plane crash; she survived the wolf attack. She was stabbed to death; she wants to call her mom. 

But the ending of Van’s story doesn’t feel like the juxtaposed finale of last season, where adult Natalie’s death is shown next to young Natalie’s ascension. Van is not becoming an Antler Queen; instead, Van is being forced further and further from their comfort zone. While The Wilderness itself remains foreign to the girls, Van has survived thus far performing as the Antler Court’s Jester. The close of this last season shows a terrorized and traumatized Van, using her former card games to choose who will be hunted in a needless, sadistic, Shauna-spree. 

The Yellowjackets aren’t playing games anymore, under Shauna’s reign. How, then, will Van survive?

From their first moments in the Wilderness, Van slots neatly into the role of the Jester of the group. In her life before, she already seems a jokester—a charismatic goalie with a sharp tongue for stuck-up underclassmen. While she’s responsible for everything from waking her (presumably drunk or using) mother up for work, to doing the makeup of freshman player Allie, Van does it all with dry humor and the ability to crack a smile, even in the midst of team conflict. Van makes herself into a clown as a defense mechanism—and this is far from a criticism. Jade has done the same thing for most of her years on this planet. 

Van seems to be there for the amusement of the group, but upon closer look, her role as the Culture Czar of The Wilderness is anything but benign. Van’s ability to turn fear, rage, or sadness into humor gives her an invaluable role out there: one tangential to, yet different from, a spiritual role like Lottie’s. Van is our jester, our orator, and our Gamemaker during their time in Oblivion. She creates meaning for the Yellowjackets, turning ordinary events into monuments of history. She can laugh her way through anything, but when it comes down to it, Van always takes responsibility. It’s what she does.

While the moments we have of her high-school life are sparse, here’s what we can tell you about Van: she’s an adultified child. With a (presumed) addict for a mom, she likely grew up with a paired sense of discomfort. Things feel scary and heavy for Van as a child, while also likely feeling out-of-control; whether or not Van wakes up her mother every morning, her mother will continue to drink, or use, or do whatever it is that leaves her immobile when it’s time for work. That’s a lot for a child to handle! 

It’s only natural, when your mom isn’t a mom, to develop the paired strengths of keeping things fun and light, while also keeping things under control. Van takes to a campfire story circle in the same way she takes to the Wilderness’ ruthless rules. She’s a latchkey kid, after all; she does what she needs to do, but doesn’t have a problem having a little fun while she waits for Mom to come home. In the Canadian Wilderness, the Antler Queen becomes Van’s Mom. She follows Lottie’s superstitions, Natalie’s governance, and now, Shauna’s savagery.

It’s this background which primes her perfectly for her time in the Wilderness, which featured for Van a series of close calls with death—from the burning plane, to the mouth of a wolf, to a fiery false-burial. Perhaps it's these escapes which instill a sense of Island Time in our Van. Since that first encounter with death-by-fire, she seems to take the approach of a soul wandering through purgatory (that is, until the scientists roll into camp in “Croak”). She exists, but not really. Not outside of the team or their camp.

She is wandering from one day to the next, doing what she can to entertain herself and her teammates. She doesn’t think too much about getting home, at first; she thinks about staying alive, keeping fragile relationships together, and keeping each member of the team at bay enough to see the next sunrise. It’s gallows humor, some days—especially as the Yellowjackets descend into their first and second winters. But it’s the moments that Van creates for the girls that keeps them going. 

Van’s hope for the future is part of what makes her such a convincing storyteller – she’s like a true convert to The Wilderness’s MLM scheme. She’s got all the other girls believing, even just for a moment, that they will go home, that this will all be forgotten, or that it wasn’t real to begin with. But who is Van without The Wilderness? She was all too eager to resume her duties at Lottie’s compound at the end of Season 2. Van has no sense of self outside of what she can do for others. 

Consider, for example, her final, dying mission: To retrieve the love of her life, the true Taissa, from the Sunken Place where Other Tai has kept her for months. At the end of the day, even with mission complete, Van still dies for The Wilderness. 

She never seems to get enough credit. She holds space for everyone while almost never considering her own wants or needs. It’s a pattern that she’s used to, like a fully-conscious, teenage baby. But in place of wanting to go to Disneyland, Van just wants to go home. She wants to call her mom, she wants to hold Taissa’s hand in public, and she wants to know if Scully and Mulder get together in the end. But she has no career ambitions like Taissa, no family to go home to like Shauna, no spirituality like Lottie, no coping mechanisms. She can only hit pause on the tape, neither rewinding nor progressing, just stuck on an endless loop of fate and chance. 

Van is a natural exhibitionist, and her ability to turn anything into a show or a *moment* helps the Yellowjackets settle into their micro-society. In only the second episode, Van urges the team into the water of their newly-found lake, egging on her teammates to join chicken fights and laugh jovially inside their own disaster site. As the days and weeks in the Wilderness stretch on, it’s Van who bangs on the team’s dying boombox, insistent upon more verses of This Is How We Do It to play through the low-spirited cabin. And as Van is increasingly swayed by Lottie and the pull of The Wilderness, it’s Van who sits dutifully before a swollen, bleeding bear heart. It’s Van who transforms the love of her life, Taissa’s, sleepwalking alter into a meditating, pine-needle-sensing, Wilderness baddie. No matter whether it’s for fun or for It, Van has a real sense of ritual. These early, easy moments in the Wilderness make way for her true role, that which she steps into when the going gets really tough.  

Allow us to narrate the above scene from “Storytelling,” the Season 2 finale. Van sits comfortably in a cabin rocking chair, scar lit by the fire; Akilah asks her, childlike, “Hey Van? Can you tell us a story?” The girls coo in agreement, calling out suggestions—The Truth About Cats and Dogs, While You Were Sleeping, The Princess Bride. It’s clear Van has done this before, many times. But something happens on this night: the same one where they bled, butchered, cooked, and ate the 13-year-old Javi. Something seems to stir in Van as she replies, “What about something you haven’t heard before?” 

She goes on to describe, with fairytale lilt and language, the girls’ time in The Wilderness. She rationalizes their horror along the same lines as Lottie’s growing pagan beliefs. The Wilderness has built us a house! The Wilderness is lonely and full of life! The Wilderness is beautiful and violent! The Wilderness is (the subtext seems) just like us. 

The final two episodes of Season 2 are important for Van—and not just because it gives us writers a name for her role. It’s at the threat of losing Lottie—close to death up in the attic cabin after being pummeled by Shauna—that Van reveals the all-important deck of cards, complete with a scratched-out Queen of Hearts. She is the one who shuffles, steely-eyed, and it is from Van that each of the Yellowjackets must choose their fate. And it’s her who watches, dare I say hungrily, waiting to see the first drop of blood spilt—no matter if it’s Natalie or Javi. Finally, when The Wilderness makes its choice, the same satisfied snarl is on Van’s face. This isn’t the same Van line-dancing to Montell Jordan.

This isn’t our Jester—this is something much wiser, deeper, scarier.

Van during a Hunt is a much different person. Van who tells stories around the campfire or cracks jokes in the middle of team meetings is gone. In her place is someone who instead implicitly understands the power in reading a room—there is survival on the other side of it. The games start changing here, and something new gets awakened in Van through her latest one. Perhaps it’s the power in knowing her little card game can have such lethal consequences. Perhaps it’s her extended time in the Wilderness getting to her. But following the close of Season 2, Van became more than the Wilderness’ entertainment—she began acting, sometimes in Lottie’s stead, as the Wilderness’ conduit.

Van shuffles the cards, but as we see in Season 3, she also has control over who gets the card. She has control over other people’s fates, but doesn’t want to be seen having that control. It’s all a means to an end: it’s a way for her and Taissa to survive The Wilderness, together. Just as she might have shrugged off the enormity of caring for her alcoholic mother, Van wants no credit for contributing to someone’s death. She will enjoy the hunt, but doesn’t want to be the decision-maker.

In truth, since returning to the ‘real world’, Van’s chosen to fully detach from reality, preferring to exist in a limbo between the nineties and the present-day. Owning a video store for physical media (maybe she would have The L Word: Generation Q on DVD?) in 2023 is beyond insane—it could only remain open via Mob assistance. But she doesn’t have another choice: Adult Van is stuck. She can’t move on. She hasn’t been able to since that plane first went down in the Canadian Wilderness. Like in All of Us Strangers, Van seems to only exist in conjunction with the other Yellowjackets. Her individual life ended in that plane crash, and her new life, serving the collective, began.

The Adult Van—while, admittedly, 100 times less interesting than her younger counterpart—carries traces of this avoidance as we watch her continually dodge death and consequence. As her and Adult Tai run on borrowed time to keep their affair (oh sorry, did you forget?), Taissa is the one to drive their interactions with The Wilderness forward. Taissa lights the match, Taissa puts the Queen of Hearts on the pavement, Taissa opens the unlocked door. It’s Van who, moments before the women go in for the kill, decides she doesn’t want to live on stolen time. She doesn’t want to game The Wilderness to stay alive.

By the end of the season, Adult Van is dead. Might this be a consequence to Van deciding, once and for all, not to play anymore?

In Van’s time in the Wilderness, they had a direct impact on who lives and who dies (and who tells their story). In acting as a messenger for The Wilderness, Van did more than play the Court’s Jester. Van played God, and chose the rules with which the Yellowjackets would survive. The Queen of Hearts was chosen as the card of death during the first hunt, which began as a sacrifice of desperation. Van’s card, that night, was the Jack of Hearts—it almost looked like the Queen upon first watch. 

The Queen of Hearts, like the Antler Queen, functions as a sort of determiner of death—it mothers from a position of power. As a jester figure, Van fell into a comfortable pattern. Tell stories, crack jokes, keep the team on track, all while effortlessly emotionally regulating the entire camp. The Jack of Hearts, meanwhile, provided the opportunity for Van to become something more. As the Jack, Van enters the administrative, project management side of it all. It’s an omen to her development in The Wilderness: She starts, as they all say, just following orders.

As Van gains confidence in her system, she feels emboldened to create further rules based off card draws. In Season 3, when the girls have to decide what to do with the tortured, dying, hunger-striking Coach Scott, it’s Van who names the “suicide King” (or the King of Hearts) as the draw necessitating a kill or sacrifice. And when it’s Tai who must shoot their Coach, Van encourages her to tap into her sleepwalking self. She, like all avoidants do, tries to help her partner by suggesting she create distance from the hard thing. It’s just the draw. It’s just the cards. It’s just other Tai. (More on this soon.)

These draws themselves, it’s worth a mention, offer the girls a reasonable distance from the brutality they inflict. It wasn’t their own agency, it was desperation. It wasn’t their choice, it was the draw. It was the cards. Maybe, it was even Van. 

Occult rituals like the ones the Yellowjackets perform in the Wilderness are the driving force of the trauma bond between the young and old versions of the team. It’s a tried and true survival method: people turn to unconventional wisdom during trials and tribulations. (I just know the Yellowjackets’ Saturn returns must have sucked.) But for each sacrifice, each step outside of the bounds of normalcy and society, there are still rules. And with the rules, there are roles.

Van’s storytelling capabilities have kept her seated close to power: first, with Lottie and her deification of The Wilderness; and second with Nat as the patented PR professional, spinning whatever narrative Nat (or Taissa) decides on. With Shauna, Van’s power dwindles – rarely, in the 2025 era, are Van and Shauna ever connected mentally, emotionally, or physically. Certainly not like Van’s other connections. At the very least, we know that she makes it home. 

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend us your eyes: we come to bury Van, not to praise her. In truth, we don’t know where young Van’s story leads, but we know where it ends. For all the card tricks and slights of their hands, Van still dies. Of course, she could have died even earlier. But as cradle Catholics (and fans of Conclave) like us know, escaping death multiple times doesn’t equate luck – it lands you sainthood.

Van is knighted by the cards, martyred by The Wilderness. She’s the patron saint of the Yellowjackets, always helping them compartmentalize their experiences, reinforcing the skeletal soccer-teammate bond, and, most importantly, reminding them that they’ll all get home.

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Check out the rest of the articles from this series on JADE FAX: