The third season of Yellowjackets is a bit like getting lured back to the high school reunion that was delightfully fun the first time but eventually becomes an exercise in diminishing returns. Maybe it’s part of our soft human inability to let go of the past, especially coming-of-age drama that seems increasingly romantic and valid as we continue hurtling toward old age and (hopefully) painless deaths. Maybe it’s the misplaced optimism that middle-aged reunions will evoke some kind of sobering epiphany about lost youth or, god forbid, a painful opportunity for personal growth or redemption. Or maybe we just go for the free food and cheap wine while hubris rears its ugly head.

Either way, these are not unique themes to Yellowjackets. We are not here for drawn-out hand-wringing and easy fillers. Some of us are here to watch our childhood It Girls behave badly, but all of us are here for the teen cannibal drama.

Yellowjackets has a juicy premise: a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness forces a teen girl softball team to get weird (and a little cannibal-y) to survive, while in the present, the handful of adult survivors are forced back together after years without contact. The last season ended with the cabin burned to a dramatic crisp, and we reunite with the girls in the warm, bustling heart of spring, complete with organized activities, domesticated ducks and bunnies, and makeshift huts. Van (Liv Hewson), who serves as a kind of overinflated town crier / meta narrator, addresses her teammates with the familiar recap words “previously, on Yellowjackets,” as she recounts the events that led them to their current status quo.

Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), of course, is furiously journaling alone. The show also brings a couple of “who were they again?” characters into the spotlight for the season — low-key familiar faces who become increasingly more important to the main ensemble of teen survivors. “You suddenly have a personality?” Shauna says to one of them. “You’re not going to turn out to be fucking boring, are you?”

Shauna, girl… I’m having the exact same thought about the series as a whole. I’m not sure if we’ll actually get to see how the girls pulled themselves together after the fire, but the end product we’re given — more girl rituals, girl games in the forest, girl hallucinations, girl hierarchies — is more or less a Florence & the Machine-themed LARP with a side of PTSD. The first three episodes are largely more of the same of what we’ve seen: messy trauma-slinging and (at times, overly polished) awkwardness from the adults, and unmitigated bile and angst from their younger selves.

There are a bunch of food metaphors and food-themed character arcs with lines like “you can’t just DoorDash human entrails” and a spectacularly silly bit of VFX. We also focus more on Callie (Sarah Desjardins), Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey as the adult version) daughter, who has perhaps one of the best resting bitch faces I’ve ever seen onscreen. There are a couple of meaty moments where the show peels apart the politics of necessity in longtime friendships, particularly between Shauna and Misty (Christina Ricci), that do introduce new and relatable tensions. The women may not be stranded in the woods anymore, but that doesn’t make their interpersonal relationships any less painful.

The fourth episode jolted me awake: a kangaroo court full of angry kids who aren’t entirely sure what a trial involves, aping civilization by cosplaying high-powered, bloodthirsty lawyers (the episode is literally called “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis” as a nod to Sidney Lumet’s classic film). I will never turn down a pseudo-procedural, especially when it’s run by violent, traumatized teenagers looking for an excuse to get medieval. I’ll gladly watch a sympathetic protagonist show her whole ass by being an abject monster; the young cast here does a stellar job of digging into the ugly soft power play for camp leadership.

The whole trial is a great close-up of the stilted teething period where the girls’ fledgling rites are still marked by hesitation and peer pressure; it’s also a nice narrative foundation for the opening sequence in the very excellent series premiere that got people hooked on the show in the first place.

The jury’s still out on how season 3 is going to ride out. As I’ve written about Yellowjackets in the past, sentimentality and nostalgia and all of that rose-colored stuff is a hell of a drug when taken strategically with thought and purpose and skill; in heavy-handed, unrefined doses, it’s about as charming as the hundredth wave of Urban Outfitters Nirvana T-shirts floating around in a corporate vacuum. The music supervision is still really grating — amateur cuts and edits and fades that feel way too forced. One particular appearance of a Limp Bizkit song felt like something I’d hear at a house party in the ’90s, which, if intentional, did not land.

“There’s something about the belief that TV is inherently deeper and more profound than film because it has more time that has always perked up my eyebrow,” critic Angelica Jade Bastién posted about the dichotomous relationship between film and TV. This approach is perhaps the biggest albatross around Yellowjackets’ neck — the fact that it was first sold as an ambitious five-season show that seemed at once promising and also wildly overstretched for a very finite, contained premise. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Yellowjackets, even when firing on all cylinders, almost certainly does not need to be five seasons long. The fourth episode certainly offered a few promising glimpses at some new story arcs.

But for now, I’m only sticking with this middle-aged multi-train collision because the whole cast is doing a phenomenal job of carrying the pacing and writing on their survivalist-trained shoulders.

_{Season 3 of Yellowjackets premieres on Showtime on February 14th.}