“Digestif,” the Yellowjackets episode that follows the aftermath of the girls’ midnight feast on Jackie’s remains, opens with a different kind of foodie flashback. A little while before the team takes off on their fateful flight, Coach Ben, with his megawatt smile and his Vidal Sassoon hair perfectly intact, is tasting the chowder his boyfriend Paul is making. Their easy rapport suggests a loving relationship, albeit one with a thorny complication—Paul wants Ben to move in with him, but Ben is still in the closet. Then the show cuts back to the cabin, with Ben staring at the ceiling, digesting the fact that the girls he used to coach just ate their team captain.

Ben has always held an intriguing position in the show’s 1990s timeline as the sole surviving adult of the plane crash that stranded the Wiskayok Yellowjackets in the wilderness, a role that should grant him authority but only ends up emphasizing his powerlessness.
Some of the ways this plays out are funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way. When Tai confronts Shauna over the fact that she’s been giving Jackie’s corpse a makeover, Ben is so out of his depth that all he can muster is a dazed “Holy Christ.” But for the most part, the decision to strand the girls with one adult—a coach and classic authority figure, no less—serves to crank up the sense of dread. Coach Ben provides just enough of a veneer of normalcy, a suggestion that someone is in charge, to make the girls’ turn toward darkness even more chilling.

Lord of the Flies examines a classic childhood terror: What happens when you have no parents or adults to take care of you? Yellowjackets evokes a more complex, adolescent fear—the realization that the adults in your life don’t know everything (frankly, they might not know anything) and you can’t always count on them. At first, even after he loses his leg, Ben attempts to sustain his leadership role, teaching the girls basic survival skills and how to hunt.
But as it becomes clear they aren’t going to be rescued any time soon, his tenuous authority evaporates, like a nightmare version of the hapless teacher getting rolled by his students. He tells Laura Lee she can’t fly the plane; she does anyway and dies in a ball of flame. He tells the girls that no one is being sent outside to sleep during Shauna and Jackie’s fight, but Jackie goes anyway, and freezes to death. By the time the girls turn to cannibalism, the only thing Ben can do is refuse to partake.

For the girls, in spite of their fear, there’s a kind of dark freedom in the woods. Lottie and Misty, for instance, gain the kind of power and acceptance for being themselves that they never would in the strict hierarchies of high school. But for Ben, the lone adult, there is no freedom. While he may have no authority, he still has responsibility, and he knows if they are rescued, he’ll be held to account in a way the rest of the survivors won’t.

So as the girls and Travis devour Jackie, Ben watches, and you can sense his horror and uncertainty. Should he go out there and tell them to stop? In the end, all he can do is shut the door. The next day, apart from his acid observation that if the girls bury what’s left of Jackie near the plane, “at least it will look like she died with the rest of them,” what Ben is truly feeling is fear. He even envisions one of the girls crawling toward him, frothing at the mouth, ready to eat him.

I’ve felt compassion for Ben since the beginning of the series. He hasn’t tried to kill anyone, or steal someone else’s romantic partner, or eat anyone for dinner. But his decision-making revolves around things he does not do, rather than actions. So it feels especially poignant when, in a flashback near the end of “Digestif,” Ben tells Paul he’s quit his job, and that he’s ready to live openly with the man he loves. “I’m going to live how I want to,” he says. “How I know I’m meant to. I’m going to be the person I know I am.”

It’s a terrific line, and also one that Ben never uttered in real life. When he finishes his speech, a TV set in the background announces that the Yellowjackets’ plane has gone missing, and you realize it’s a fantasy, not a flashback. Ben has imagined the whole thing, picturing the different path he could have chosen. Coming out might have cost him his job, but it might also have saved his life.

Unlike Jeff, who, while more complex than he first appeared, exists as a foil to Shauna, or Randy, who is simply comic relief, this is the first time we’ve gotten any nuance or background on a male character. And while I can’t say it bodes well for Ben’s odds, having his perspective in the mix will matter, especially as it becomes harder to tell if there are supernatural elements in the forest or if the creepy wilderness woo-woo is a projection of the girls’ minds. It’s certainly intentional that Ben is reading The Magus, a postmodern novel about a protagonist who loses his ability to distinguish between what is real and what is fantasy. And while it may feel like Ben is being set up as an anchor to reality, a counterpoint to Lottie’s growing coven, I’m beginning to suspect the opposite. While we don’t know what’s coming, I can’t see Ben throwing in with Lottie, let alone turning to cannibalism, so it’s possible his only option will be to retreat more and more into himself, turning to fantasy as a coping mechanism. We’ve already seen him, like Lottie and Tai, starting to imagine things that aren’t there.

Either way, the central question that Ben poses—What does it mean to be “the person I know am”?—is also the central question of the series. Each of the show’s characters returns to it obsessively. In the beginning of Season 1, the wilderness flashbacks felt like the subplot to the present-day timeline, a gruesome puzzle box that dripped out just enough information to make the adult Yellowjackets’ storylines crackle. The second season flips that relationship. Maybe the point of the show isn’t “What are the consequences of trauma over the course of a life?” Maybe it’s actually “What do you do when the past is so alive it feels more real than anything in your life now?” For all the darkness of the woods, there was a sense of freedom, a realness the adult Yellowjackets have been trying to recapture all their lives. Nat admits that after they left the woods, “I lost my purpose.” When Shauna very convincingly threatens to shoot the man holding her stolen minivan hostage, it’s clear this is the only version of herself where she feels fully alive.

The experience of watching Yellowjackets as a Gen Xer who would also have gone to high school in the ’90s is that you are somehow roped into this question as well. What does it mean that a song by 10,000 Maniacs, Tori Amos, Liz Phair, or the Cranberries can conjure up a specific moment more vividly than any current cultural reference? Does anything feel as sharp and real as it did when you were 17 years old? Probably not—that’s the relief of getting older—but I will also say that, when I watch actors like Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci strut to “Come Out and Play” by the Offspring, none of today’s endless cultural flotsam feels as resonant as this murderers’ row of actors, these songs, these images from my adolescence. If the joke of Yellowjackets is that a violent, cannibalistic cult is an extended metaphor for the brutality of teen girls, then the gutting heart of it is how the joy and pain of adolescence resonate more keenly than almost anything we experience as adults.

As for Coach Ben, I want to believe he can become the person he knows he is. It’s almost embarrassing how much I want him to step up, to take charge, to be a steady presence and source of support to these girls, who, like all teens, swing between intense courage and vulnerability. I want an adult in the room, someone they can count on.

But Yellowjackets is not that show. I count the chances of a middle-aged Coach Ben showing up in the present-day timeline to be exactly zero. So while I hope that, whatever comes, Ben gets a moment where he feels like he is living fully on his terms, I think it’s more likely he’s going to stay where he’s always been—on the sidelines. Say what you will about the Yellowjackets, but at least they’re out on the field.