Trigger Warning: This article has mentions of cannibalism.
Yellowjackets is Showtime’s Emmy-nominated thriller series centers around a group of high school soccer players, whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness while traveling for a tournament. The girls, forced to survive the harsh weather resolve to cannibalism and even after years of being rescued, are still haunted by the events of 1996. The story seems unlikely, but the series did draw inspiration from not only a book but also real events that occurred in 1972.
The harrowing events of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571
Back in 1972, a rugby team called The Old Christians Club boarded a flight from Uruguay to Chile to play a game against another team. The flight had a total of 45 passengers including the rugby team. Unfortunately due to an inexperienced pilot and some weather issues, the plane crashed into the Andes mountains, killing 11 people, including three crew members and eight passengers immediately.
The rest of the 34 passengers tried to survive the freezing cold wilderness for two months. The rescue operations for them were called off after only eight days. And they were ultimately found after 72 days by two hikers named Roberto Canessa and Nando Parrado. In the meantime, most other passengers had died of the cold or their injuries, and some of them even resorted to cannibalism to survive. Only 16 people from the original group of 45 were rescued.
Fernando Parrado, who is one of the survivors of the crash and was also part of the rugby team, wrote a bestselling book named Miracle in the Andes: The True Story of Surviving 72 Days on the Mountain Against All Odds – where he discloses that indeed the survivors, including him, were forced to cannibalize the snow-preserved corpses of the dead passengers to survive. “Hunger is the most primal fear of human beings.”- he wrote, calling the ordeal simple.
What are the similarities between the reality and the show?
Yellowjackets, which takes inspiration from this incident as well as William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. The book chronicles the story of some British boys and what happens when they try to govern themselves while stranded on an island. The show is similar in nature to both of them.
Much like the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 incident, where a group of rugby players get stuck in the mountains, in the show, a group of soccer players do the same, although they are all women. Some fans of Lord of the Flies were worried whether a group of girls will be able to portray the brutality that is done in the book by the boys, but the audience saw that it was no problem at all. Even though the narrative dances around the topic of cannibalism, much like the reality, we know the girls did it.
Unlike the reality, where the survivors were trapped in the cold for 72 days, the girls in the show are stuck there for two years, as they still carry their trauma well into adulthood. Unlike the book, Yellowjacket is led by a stellar women-centric narrative where we see the story of five survivors Misty, Taisha, Natalie, Shauna, and Travis- as their past comes back to haunt them in their adulthood.
The show is supposed to be five seasons long, and the second season came out in March of 2023. The gripping narrative of the series will continue as secrets slowly start to unfold and more characters start to make an appearance. The third season of the show is set to come out but no release date has been confirmed as of yet.
