Yellowjackets Trivia
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50 free Yellowjackets trivia questions with answers. Yellowjackets follows a New Jersey girls' soccer team stranded in the Canadian wilderness for nineteen months after a 1996 plane crash, and the damaged adults they become 25 years later. This quiz covers both timelines: the real disasters that inspired the show, the Lord of the Flies remake that lit a fire under its creators, how the team got its name, and the casting of Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and their teenage counterparts. It then works through the story: the black box Misty smashes, Laura Lee's doomed flight, the Doomcoming mushrooms, Jackie's last night, the Queen of Hearts, the cabin fire, Coach Ben's trial, the frog researchers and the satellite phone. There are production questions too, from the Vancouver locations and the theme song 'No Return' to the strikes that delayed season three, the Emmy nominations, Hilary Swank and the final-season casting. Spoilers run through season three. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the series and its episodes, and the source line appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which network did Yellowjackets premiere in November 2021?
Showtime
Showtime landed the series after HBO passed: HBO liked the pitch but already had Euphoria, another drama with teenage leads, in development.
Q 02Who created Yellowjackets?
Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson
Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who are married, pitched the show to 16 or 17 networks and came away with offers from five.
Q 03The Yellowjackets' plane crashes on the way to what?
Nationals
Nationals in Seattle were the goal: the pilot shows the team winning the game that sends them there, then boarding a plane that never arrives.
Q 04The Yellowjackets are a high school girls' team in which sport?
Soccer
Soccer it is, though the home pitch is a stand-in: the pilot's match was filmed on the field at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, the campus also seen in Grease.
Q 05The team's fictional hometown of Wiskayok is in which US state?
New Jersey
New Jersey is home turf for both creators, who hail from Belmar and Middletown, so they set the Yellowjackets' fictional town in the state they knew.
Q 06How long are the Yellowjackets survivors stranded in the wilderness?
Nineteen months
Nineteen months is the figure adult Shauna gives in the pilot, brushing off a reporter with the line that the survivors simply starved, scavenged and prayed until they were found.
Q 07Which real-life event partly inspired the premise of Yellowjackets?
The 1972 Andes flight disaster
The 1972 Andes flight disaster stranded a Uruguayan rugby team, whose survivors ate the dead to stay alive; the creators hatched the show after talking about Alive, the 1993 film of the story.
Q 08Sceptical reactions to a planned gender-swapped film of which novel helped spur the creators of Yellowjackets?
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies was getting a gender-swapped film in 2017, and one commenter scoffed that stranded girls would just 'collaborate to death'; the creators took the doubters as fuel.
Q 09The creators of Yellowjackets found the show's title by Googling what?
Sports team names
Sports team names were the search that turned it up, and the creators kept it because, as they put it, the yellowjacket is 'a small creature with a large sting'.
Q 10Which actress plays the adult Shauna in Yellowjackets?
Melanie Lynskey
Melanie Lynskey was the first person cast, in the role the creators found trickiest to fill: a woman who is still trying to figure out who she is.
Q 11Which actress plays the adult Misty in Yellowjackets?
Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci plays the adult Misty, who is more dangerous than she looks: in season one she kidnaps a snooping reporter and holds her captive in her basement.
Q 12Which actress played the adult Natalie in the first two seasons of Yellowjackets?
Juliette Lewis
Juliette Lewis was cast after her teenage counterpart: Sophie Thatcher won the part of young Natalie on a self-taped audition, leaving the creators to find an adult who could match her.
Q 13Who plays the adult Taissa Turner in Yellowjackets?
Tawny Cypress
Tawny Cypress plays the adult Taissa, who discovers that the 'lady in the tree' terrifying her young son is herself, sleepwalking at night.
Q 21Who wrote and performed 'No Return', the Yellowjackets theme song?
Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker
Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, of the 1990s bands Shudder to Think and That Dog, also score the show; the producers doubted for a long time that it would have a theme song at all.
Q 22Which singer recorded a cover of the Yellowjackets theme 'No Return' that opened episodes in season two?
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette's version surprised viewers by taking the place of the usual theme over the opening credits midway through season two, then returned for later episodes.
Q 23Which act covered No Doubt's 'Just a Girl' to promote season two of Yellowjackets?
Q 14Which actress plays Jackie in Yellowjackets?
Ella Purnell
Ella Purnell plays Jackie, which the creators called one of the hardest parts to cast: the popular girl had to show cracks early, or viewers would end up hating her.
Q 15Which two actresses joined Yellowjackets in season two as the adult Van and Lottie?
Lauren Ambrose and Simone Kessell
Lauren Ambrose and Simone Kessell were cast in August 2022, and the news was a spoiler in itself: it confirmed that Van and Lottie both make it out of the wilderness.
Q 16Elijah Wood joined Yellowjackets in season two as which character?
Walter, a citizen detective
Walter, a citizen detective, proves deadlier than he looks: in the season-two finale he fatally poisons a police investigator to shield Misty and her friends.
Q 17Steven Krueger plays Ben Scott, who holds what role with the team?
Assistant coach
Assistant coach Ben Scott survives the crash only because Misty hacks off his mangled leg and cauterises the wound, which makes the team's outcast suddenly indispensable.
Q 18Which Oscar winner joined Yellowjackets in season three as the adult Melissa?
Hilary Swank
Hilary Swank's adult Melissa was thought dead: Shauna finds her living under a new name, married to the daughter of a woman the team killed in the wilderness.
Q 19Which actor, husband of the star who plays adult Shauna, was announced as a season-two Yellowjackets guest but never appeared?
Jason Ritter
Jason Ritter was announced as a guest star in December 2022, yet he is in none of season two's nine episodes, leaving fans to guess his scenes were being saved for a bonus episode.
Q 20Where was most of Yellowjackets' first season filmed after the pilot was shot in Los Angeles?
Vancouver
Vancouver took over when filming resumed in spring 2021 after the pandemic shutdown, and a paintball park in nearby Surrey was dressed as the crash site.
Florence and the Machine
Florence and the Machine's version soundtracked the season-two trailer: a fitting pick, since No Doubt released the original in 1995, a year before the show's plane goes down.
Q 24In October 2025, which season of Yellowjackets was announced as its last?
Fourth
Fourth and final, the creators confirmed: they said they had always known a point would come when the story 'would tell us it wants to end', and that their job was to listen.
Q 25What delayed production of Yellowjackets' third season?
The 2023 Hollywood strikes
The 2023 Hollywood strikes hit almost at once: the season-three writers' room opened on 1 May 2023 and shut after a single day, and cameras did not roll until May 2024.
Q 26Which drama beat Yellowjackets to the top Emmy in both 2022 and 2023?
Succession
Succession took the top drama Emmy in both 2022 and 2023, so Yellowjackets' ten nominations across its first two seasons brought no win.
Q 27By January 2022, Yellowjackets ranked as its network's second-most-streamed series ever, behind which show?
Dexter: New Blood
Dexter: New Blood had also been its lead-in: the Yellowjackets finale, a week after the Dexter revival ended, was the first episode to air without it and still drew 1.3 million viewers.
Q 28Who directed the pilot episode of Yellowjackets?
Karyn Kusama
Karyn Kusama shot the pilot in Los Angeles in late 2019, and it stood alone for well over a year: the pandemic suspended production before a second episode was filmed.
Q 29In the Yellowjackets pilot, a reporter offers adult Shauna a seven-figure deal for what?
A book
A book deal is the bait, but the reporter is a fake: Shauna finds she works for no paper, and it later emerges that Taissa hired her to test whether the others would talk.
Q 30In the Yellowjackets pilot, teenage Taissa deliberately injures which teammate to keep her off the trip?
Allie
Allie, a freshman Taissa sees as a liability, has her leg broken in a practice tackle, so she stays home and is spared everything that follows.