Yellowjackets episode five ended with a moment many fans have been waiting for: the birth of Shauna’s baby. Her child with Jeff has been the center of celebrations, arguments, and fears among the wilderness crew. How would they keep a child alive when they were on the brink of starvation? What happens if Shauna has birth complications? They had many questions on their teenage minds, indeed. In episode six, the crew (and us, the viewers) finally get an answer to one of the show’s biggest questions. What happens to Shauna’s baby in Yellowjackets? Here’s what goes down during her labor.
Before we go into the wilderness, the show looks back a few months to their normal teenage lives. Interestingly, Shauna, Tai, Misty, Van, and Jeff are all in a health class together watching a video about pregnancy and childbirth. Jeff passes Shauna a note commenting on their, ahem, study session before she walks out of the classroom. This seems to be not too long before the plane crash, so it is very likely that Shauna is already pregnant and doesn’t know it yet.
Then, we are back to the action as everyone panics around Shauna’s labor. Shauna realizes that something feels off while Akilah tries to step into Misty’s place as the makeshift midwife. Things get very bloody and the group discovers that the placenta is coming out first but they try to keep poor Shauna calm through the process. Things go dark from Shauna’s perspective before she regains consciousness with Misty handing her a baby boy. This is interesting considering how Lottie referred to the baby as “him” in previous episodes.
We follow Shauna’s early days of motherhood as she struggles to get the baby to latch on and breastfeed, fearful that her body isn’t producing milk. She talks to her baby, saying that she cannot wait to see him grow up and saying that it is her and him against the whole world before finally breastfeeding him successfully. Things take a dark turn when she wakes up and finds that her friends are eating the baby. Thankfully, this is a dream… but it is not the only thing that isn’t real.
It turns out that everything with Shauna’s baby happened in her mind, as we see her come back into consciousness. The entire Yellowjackets team looks shaken and forlorn as they inform Shauna that her baby died at birth. She is distraught and keeps asking why no one else can hear him crying.
It is a truly sad yet not shocking fate for this child. We knew that Shauna’s daughter isn’t old enough to be the wilderness baby and she didn’t appear to have any other living children. And, with the group barely getting enough sustenance, it would have been very hard for Shauna to be able to produce breast milk to feed him. We already know that the group will not eat Shauna’s baby but they will have to bury his remains eventually. Everyone will also have to deal with this traumatic situation. It could send Shauna into a dark mental place once again or perhaps shake the faith of Lottie and her followers who believed the wilderness would protect Shauna’s baby.
This situation also brings up a question about Shauna’s diary, which Jeff has presumably read in its entirety. Did she put anything about her pregnancy in it? Does Jeff know that Shauna gave birth to their stillborn son in the wilderness? Perhaps we will learn more about this in adult Shauna’s life. For now, the wilderness group will have to process this heartbreaking loss while still trying to survive.
