This article contains spoilers for the entire first season as well as the second-season premiere of Yellowjackets.

Leave it to Yellowjackets to make a game of MASH creepy. In the second-season premiere of the breakout Showtime thriller, best friends Shauna (played by Sophie Nélisse) and Jackie (Ella Purnell) are joking over Shauna’s results. (She’s going to live in an apartment in New Jersey with a million dollars to her name! Neat!) The whole scene could have been plucked from a charming teenage comedy if not for the fact that, well, Jackie’s dead, and Shauna’s imagining all of this. In reality, she’s speaking to Jackie’s frozen corpse, which she’s disturbingly propped up against a wall. And Corpse Jackie isn’t a fan of the hangout—it’s far too cliché. As she observes to Alive Shauna, “It’s, like, Haunting 101.”

Yellowjackets enjoys combining horror and cheek to unsettle the viewer. The show operates as a tonal and narrative juggling act unfolding via two timelines: The first, set in the late 1990s, follows the titular American high-school girls’ soccer team, whose tournament-bound plane crashes in the Canadian hinterlands. The second, set in the present, tracks the adult survivors as they cope with their trauma and lingering paranoia. Both arcs are alternately delightful and brutal, deftly mixing coming-of-age milestones with violent endurance. Season 1 included an affair that ended in a murder, a beheaded puppy, and a hallucinogen-assisted homecoming party—not to mention an infamous cannibal feast that occurs in the pilot episode’s first scene.

[Read: The TV show for the age of conspiracism]

Pardon the pun, but Season 2 is even meatier—as in, yes, more cannibalism, but also much more plot. In the ’90s, it’s winter, and the girls are starving and irritable, splitting into factions that threaten to devolve into bloodshed. In the present, the reunited Yellowjackets disband after helping Shauna (played as an adult by Melanie Lynskey) cover up a crime, and each character goes on a quest to piece together the past. This yields about a dozen story arcs that the show valiantly attempts to push forward in each episode, while simultaneously introducing new characters, locations, and mysteries. And yet, the series keeps a keen focus on how friendships formed in adolescence can be more menacing than anything the girls faced in the wilderness. Yellowjackets understands the potential toxicity of teenage intimacy, and how best-friendship can sometimes activate awful impulses.

Consider Shauna’s imagined conversation with Jackie. A different show might have conveyed Shauna’s grief in a more conventional way: showing her sitting silently by Jackie’s grave, perhaps, or rummaging sadly through her dead friend’s possessions. But Yellowjackets toys with the viewer instead. The audience hears Jackie’s voice as the Smashing Pumpkins plays softly in the background before they see her in the flesh, scribbling Shauna’s MASH-decreed future. The moment is bewildering in its mundanity; I started questioning my own memory, wondering if this was a flashback or if the events of the Season 1 finale had somehow been dreamt up by the girls. The trick is quickly revealed, but the disorientation lingers.

That feeling reflects the thrilling confusion of teenage relationships, with their terrible mix of hormones and anxiety. One second, your bestie is warm and communicative; the next, she’s giving you the cold shoulder. Shauna and Jackie’s relationship was defined by such extremes, and by constant doubt: Is Shauna loyal to Jackie, or is she resentful of her influence? Does Jackie even like Shauna, or is she merely tolerating her? That Shauna can still imagine Jackie alive is a testament to their bond; that she imagines Jackie taunting her speaks to its tenuousness. Shauna’s choice to spend her days—while pregnant, by the way—talking to Jackie’s corpse is at once tragic and tender.

Not every friendship on the show runs so hot and cold, but the new season of Yellowjackets consistently explores the dangers of youthful closeness. The clique forming around Lottie (Courtney Eaton) and her possible supernatural powers may help some of the girls have faith that they’ll survive, but it damages the trust among the team. The closer Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) grows to Travis (Kevin Alves), the more worried she becomes about losing him. An unexpected rapport between the ostracized pair Misty (Samantha Hanratty) and Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) is both adorable and alarming—the two have barely anything in common beyond their lowly place in the social hierarchy and a mutual desperation.

[Read: The bloody, brutal business of being a teenage girl]

The waxing and waning of these teenage relationships gives the half of Yellowjackets set in the wilderness more cohesion than the half that takes place in the present. The adult Yellowjackets are involved in disparate story lines: Misty (Christina Ricci) goes on a near-farcical road trip in search of Natalie (Juliette Lewis); Tai (Tawny Cypress) is caught in a horror show of possible hallucinations; Shauna’s domestic troubles gets soapier and more intense. Still, the show roots each of the grown-up characters’ choices in the decisions they made as teens. Alliances and divisions established long ago continue to bless and poison their present.

In fact, this is where Yellowjackets works best. I, too, want to know the answers to the show’s biggest theory-driving questions—who the Man With No Eyes is, what happens to Shauna’s baby, how the team returned to civilization. But the Yellowjackets’ response to these potentially supernatural mysteries can be more disturbing than the mysteries themselves. The characters are perfectly capable of endangering one another without the help of an otherworldly force. Toward the end of the Season 2 premiere, Shauna bites into Jackie’s ear. That’s not the wilderness casting some spell. That’s just a teenager succumbing to a gut feeling—of grief, of derision, of hunger—that she can no longer ignore.

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My colleague Alan Taylor has published thousands of photo essays in his time at The Atlantic. I spoke with him about the art of telling a visual story and which photos have stuck with him over the years.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The most disturbing part of Donald Trump’s latest rant Life is worse for older people now. People aren’t falling for AI Trump photos (yet). Seeing Things

Since joining The Atlantic in 2011, my colleague Alan Taylor has published more than 2,700 photo articles. Multiply that by an average of 24 images per story, and you’ll get closer to approximating the amount of photos he’s looked at in his time here.

When he was working as a web developer in the ’90s, Alan first became fascinated by the images he saw on news agencies’ wires. At The Atlantic, he pores over those resources to publish photo essays about what’s going on in the world. But he also follows his curiosity wherever it takes him, curating collections of wacky, fun, and beautiful things worth seeing: the geometric carvings of salt mines, the world’s tallest statues, life viewed under a microscope. I talked with Alan about what he’s learned from more than a decade of creating photo essays.

Isabel Fattal: Looking back on the tens of thousands of images you’ve worked with, can you think of a few that stand out?

Alan Taylor: I was looking through some of my archives, and it’s often the ones with a really personal touch, something very human. For example, this famous image of Barack Obama.

Pete Souza / The White House

You don’t really need a caption for that. Being a human and seeing that image in front of you, you know what’s happening. And as soon as you move beyond the recognition of the feeling, you think about what this says in American history and society. You’ve got this little boy reaching up and touching the hair. His hair is just like mine. He’s just like me. I could be this. And I’ve just said far more than needs to be said about it. It’s just there.

There’s another one, from when the pandemic was near its height. This is a doctor in full protective gear, embracing a patient. At that stage of the crisis, people were moving out of a state of panic and trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and toward the sense that, Oh, wow, we should have some compassion for the caregivers too. This is deeply troubling and serious.

Go Nakamura / Getty

Isabel: Are there kinds of news events where you find images to be the most effective way to tell the story?

Alan: Typically broad-scale disasters, such as hurricanes and floods and fires. When they first hit, you can do a whole lot more with a handful of photographs than you can with a few paragraphs. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and Donald Trump flew there to survey the damage, I really wanted to emphasize, This is what Puerto Rico looked like when Trump went to visit. So I put together a story. If you can sense there’s a question out there that you have that other people probably have, you can put it out there.

And then there are the stories that are about the images themselves. In 2013, North Korea issued photographs of a military drill they were doing, and it had some hovercrafts coming in to land on a beach. And I just saw it as I was going through the news feed, as I always do. And I noticed, Oh, wow, this looks weird. Wait a minute. This is Photoshop. This image has four or five hovercraft, but really, there’s probably only two there and one or more is cloned a couple different times. So I did this little exposé on it. I’m sitting up here in my home office in the attic in the suburbs and going, Oh my God, I’ve seen something that nobody else in the world has noticed here.

Isabel: The power of looking closely.

So where do you get your ideas for some of your more random and fun photo essays, such as salt mines or the pope versus the wind?

Alan: You’re missing probably the silliest one I’ve ever done, which is just cows. It’s pictures of cows, and it’s titled “Cows.” I love that. I put out a tweet promoting it, and the first response was, Is everybody okay over there?

Valerie Kuypers / AFP / Getty

“Pope vs. the Wind” was fun because I thought, I see these pictures all the time. Photographers are assigned to travel with the pope and go to these different places, and there’s only so many different photographs you can get of a scene. And when he’s wearing the skullcap (zucchetto) and a small cape, the wind is having a great time with those. I realized, Wait, there’s a body of images out there of this phenomenon. I can do something fun with this.

Filippo Monteforte / AFP / Getty

The main reason that I spend all day, every day, looking at all these photographs is that they can accidentally clump together and help me come up with story ideas. It’s always fun when you can find some sort of an underlying theme over years and years.

Related:

Photos of the week: Sky Bar, Kansas sunset, flooded fields Photos: National Napping Day Today’s News U.S. military officials said that a U.S. base in northeast Syria was targeted by a missile strike, just one day after a suspected Iranian drone struck a coalition base in the same region and killed an American worker, according to the Pentagon. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a deal between the U.S. and Canada that would allow both countries to turn away migrants at unofficial border crossings, effective tomorrow.   A federal judge reportedly ordered several former aides of Donald Trump to testify before a grand jury in the criminal inquiry of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: Kate Cray explains how ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your family’s roots. Work in Progress: The internet loves bad news. That’s bad, Derek Thompson argues.

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Evening Read One of many AI-generated images circulating on Twitter that depict a fabricated scene of former President Donald Trump being arrested. (Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Elliot Higgins / Midjourney v5)

The Trump AI Deepfakes Had an Unintended Side Effect

By Megan Garber

The former president is fighting with the police. He’s yelling. He’s running. He’s resisting. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him.

When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict—the arrest of Donald Trump—has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump’s Teflon coating—so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences—finally worn away? Pics or it didn’t happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the religious right. Don’t cut corners on indicting Trump. Blue check marks were always shameless. Culture Break Macall Polay / HBO

Read. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, a transportive collection of every short story by the late author (most of which were set in small-town Mississippi), or another of eight books that will take you somewhere new.

Watch. Catch up on Succession in anticipation of the fourth and final season of the acclaimed series, which premieres on HBO Sunday.

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.