Yellowjackets Season 3, episode 1: Who brought that *very* convenient architecture book?
In the first post-credits scene of the season, Yellowjackets Season 3 takes us into the brand new wilderness base of our missing football team. And just look at those huts!
The last time we saw the Yellowjackets in the past they were huddled together in the snow watching their dark, spider-webbed cabin home of Seasons 1 and 2 burn. As Cat Steven's "Morning Has Broken" plays over this Eden-like alternative in Season 3, we see the team has been busy building their new spring home. Superbly constructed dwellings, woven from twigs, fibers, and other materials, encircle a campfire, the site dotted with chairs the team have hauled from the plane wreckage. There are some A-frame huts, some flat-roofed built with larger branches, and one exquisite pear-shaped hut with a circular opening.
I'm sorry, who in this team is an actual architect, design expert, or studied survival training? These are exceptional!
Having survived this long in the wilderness, it's not a surprise this team is able to construct sturdy dwellings — they've made their own clothes, period products, culty headresses, and makeshift altars, and served each other up for dinner. Misty has proven skills in first aid and DIY amputation, but she's never indicated any interest in nomadic shelter design.
The show answers this question for us, with the next shot a close-up of several tattered books, including a title called Art and Architecture of the Ancient World by G. Smyth, M. Garcia, and W. Parker, a book created for the show. The cover shows two images of huts, both similar to the Yellowjackets' structures. It looks like an old textbook, definitely a few decades old.
My question, however, is whose book is this? I reached out to the Yellowjackets production team for answers, but in the meantime there are really only two possibilities I can see.
The first, one of the Yellowjackets found it in the cabin and valued it enough to rescue it from the flames when the team's temporary home was burned down in the Season 2 finale. The five books, though they look very battered, don't look burned, so if they were in the cabin, someone thought to grab them at the first sign of danger. But remember, Laura Lee taught herself how to fly a plane from the cabin's cursed library and look how that ended.
The second possibility is that someone brought the book with them on the plane, and either had it with them the whole time (and saved it from the fire) or retrieved it from the wreckage after the fire. Maybe the pilots (RIP) or Coach Bill (RIP) were really into art and architecture history? Was it a textbook of one of the students (though it seems a very old one)?
It's such a specific, useful book for the Yellowjackets to have in this moment of need, basically an instruction manual on sophisticated architectural techniques and climate-appropriate ventilation, right here in the wilderness — and we're shown it in close-up. Such a tome feels so convenient. But who does it belong to? WHO?