Who Is Adam Really on ‘Yellowjackets’? 5 Theories

“Who the f**k are you?” That’s the last thing Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) has said to Adam (Peter Gadiot), and it’s the same question we’re wondering in the present-day timeline of Yellowjackets.

Shauna and Jeff’s (Warren Kole) marriage has been rocky, to say the least, but she seemed to have found new life (and love?) with her affair with Adam. The only problem is, he’s very, very suspicious and we don’t quite know if his plan for his friend’s cabin in the woods was to truly be honest or kill her where no one could hear her screams.

With that question at the end of Episode 8 and the season winding down (though the Showtime drama has been renewed), we’re hoping that means we’ll be getting answers soon. So while we wait, let’s take a look at what we know about Adam and who he could be.

How Shauna & Adam Met … and Kept Meeting

In Episode 2, Shauna rear-ended Adam and tried to place the blame on him at first. She didn’t appreciate his attempt to, as she called it, “be adorable,” but he didn’t want to get their insurances involved (to be nice or for some other, nefarious reason?) and even gave her the number of a body shop to fix the damage to her car. He knew a guy who owed him a favor, he said, and that guy turned out to be him. In fact, he offered to do the work for free, in exchange for dinner. (Was he sweet, interested, or too pushy?)

The following episode, Shauna followed Jeff to a hotel to confirm her suspicions he was cheating, and Adam just so happened to be there “for a drink,” he claimed. “My studio space is down the street, and this place has a classic martini.” He talked her into having a drink with him. He spoke a bit about his past — he goes where the work takes him — and we couldn’t help but wonder about his “we are what we pretend to be so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” (Is he pretending with Shauna? Or was it just a nod to how she’s pretending with everyone?) After seeing Jeff with a woman, Shauna took Adam to a hotel room.

Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME

The Affair Began

In the fourth episode, Shauna turned to Adam to join her as she made up for her misspent youth, but dodged his questions about missing out on the quintessential high school experience. (She got straight As and married young, she said.) The next episode, she joined him at a wild party (under the pretense of going to book club). It was like every other weekend at Pratt, he said. But it was at that party that Shauna ran into her daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), who became wise to the affair.

It was also Callie who scoffed when Shauna claimed that Adam didn’t know about her Yellowjackets past. “Does he know your name? Does he have the internet?” Callie asked. (The entire world knows about the crash; they just don’t know what really happened in the woods, as is being revealed in the flashbacks.)

In Episode 7, the surviving Yellowjackets dropped off the $50,000 for the person blackmailing them about their secrets, and that person fell into glitter during the subsequent chase before escaping. When Shauna returned home, Adam was waiting for her, with questions about what was really going on between them. She ended up taking him to bed … meaning that she had to have him hide in the closet when Jeff got home until he could leave without her husband seeing him.

Michael Courtney/SHOWTIME

Suspicions About Adam

But in Episode 8, Callie again questioned Shauna about Adam after trying to find him online; as an artist, shouldn’t he have a website, an Instagram, something? “Everything is on the internet, except for your boyfriend,” Callie argued. “What if he’s conning you, Mom? Sleeping with a Yellowjacket so he can turn around and sell the story. Who knows what he f**king wants?”

Though Shauna defended him, she did dig into him and found that he didn’t actually go to Pratt like he claimed. He admitted that he’d just wanted to impress her, but “the rest of it, us, it’s real.” He offered to take her away for a weekend at a friend’s cabin and be an open book. But then once home, Shauna finds glitter — like the blackmailer had fallen into — in her closet, where she’d had Adam hide. And the safe was empty. That was when she confronted him with “Who the f**k are you?”

Who Is Adam Really?

Hopefully, Adam’s about to tell Shauna (and us) the truth when Episode 9 picks up. But for now, let’s speculate.

SHOWTIME

Is Adam the blackmailer? That glitter is awfully suspicious, and the number of people who could have picked up that money and then dropped the glitter in Shauna’s closet seems to be four: Shauna, Jeff, Callie, and Adam. But is it too obvious for it to be Adam? Should Shauna instead be wondering who else might have gained access to her house?

Is Adam a reporter, trying to get the scoop on the Yellowjackets? As Callie pointed out, everything’s on the internet. Maybe he took advantage of the fact that one of the women rear-ended him — or somehow manufactured that incident himself — and that’s why he’s been somewhat pushy with Shauna.

Is Adam connected to the Yellowjackets somehow? Could he be Javi (Luciano Leroux), since we haven’t seen him as an adult yet? A flashback with a conversation between Shauna and Javi in Episode 4 did lead into Shauna remembering having sex with Adam. Could he know one of the Yellowjackets, whether it’s someone who did or didn’t survive what happened in the wilderness?

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Or maybe Adam is just a normal guy who got rear-ended by the wrong woman and caught up in all this craziness, and this is the end of any romantic encounters for him and Shauna.

Yellowjackets, Sundays, 10/9c, Showtime