Yellowjackets' Christina Ricci Knows Why Misty Pushed Walter Away
Contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets" Season 2 Episode 5 — "Two Truths and a Lie"
Friendships, alliances, and relationships are always on pretty shaky ground on Showtime's "Yellowjackets." Between the two timelines, a veritable treasure trove of cannibalism-related secrets, and some apparent supernatural stuff at play, it can be hard for the characters to trust one another, and this is especially true when it comes to Misty. Played by Christina Ricci as an adult, Misty is eternally cheerful on the surface, a lover of musical theater and her pet bird, but this covers up an extremely dark underbelly. Let's not forget that she's committed actual murder as an adult and, as a teen played by Sammi Hanratty, she destroyed a plane's black box that would have led to the entire soccer team being rescued from the remote wildnerness and then murdered her teammate and only friend Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman).
Misty's given a perfect foil in Season 2 with Elijah Wood's similarly chipper and also unsettling Walter, but by the fifth episode, "Two Truths and a Lie," she's starting to wonder what he's really up to. According to Ricci, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, she knows exactly why Misty's pushing Walter away. When Walter catches Misty in a lie about the death of Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot), a secret she's been keeping since Season 1, Misty knows just what to do, and her experience with Crystal is a huge part of that. As Ricci told the outlet, Misty can't let people in anymore after what happened with Crystal, and she's not about to let her dark history repeat itself.
Misty knows Walter would see her true nature — and she can't have that
"That is one of the things that perhaps informs her hesitancy to really get involved with Walter," Ricci said to THR. "I think there should be a certain amount of hesitancy — and certainly with how he divulges that he knows who she is — that I think is terrifying for her, because the last person who knew who she was was Crystal, if you take the two sort of parallel storylines. I loved that, because I was excited for that to play out with Walter."
The way Ricci puts it, Misty is a bad person who's very aware of the fact that she's uniquely awful. She knows that what she's done in her past, particularly as it pertains to Crystal, is horrific and wrong, and she can't risk anyone else seeing what she's really like. This is, perhaps, one of the saddest things we've learned about Misty yet; after forming an actual, real bond with Crystal in the 1990s timeline, she feels like she can admit her black box secret... only for Crystal to completely (and reasonably) freak out.
As Ricci said, she read the script before coming to this startling understanding of Misty's psyche: "When I was reading it, I realized this also puts any new relationship with a new person in jeopardy. Because to get close to somebody might be revealing who she is and then in that case, it's going to end in tragedy."
Where do Misty and Walter go from here?
So what happens with Misty and Walter now? "Yellowjackets" is a crafty, smart series, and there's no way that the showrunners dragged Elijah Wood into the intrigue of it all only to abandon him partway through the second season, and he's also very clearly onto Misty's whole deal. As Ricci and THR noted, he says he "knows" who she is, which is definitely unsettling for somebody like Misty.
The last man who came out of nowhere and infiltrated the trust circle of the adult Yellowjackets, as it happened, was the aforementioned Adam Martin, and when his lover Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) thought he was trying to dig up dirt about that time in the woods, she flat-out stabbed and killed him. (Misty, who agreeably helped dispose of his body, obviously is in on this secret.) Fans shouldn't worry too much; the creative team behind "Yellowjackets" certainly have their act together. Whether or not Walter will meet a grisly end or beat Misty at her own game, though, is a big question — and one that will hopefully get an answer pretty soon.