What’s Going to Happen to Shauna’s Baby on ‘Yellowjackets’? 3 Theories

It’s a time-honored staple of survival shows: If there’s a group of people in a high-stakes situation during which a pregnancy would be remarkably inconvenient — if not downright deadly — someone’s pregnant. Examples include Claire (Emilie De Ravin) on LOST, Evelyn (Emily Blunt) in A Quiet Place, Sharon Agathon (Grace Park) on Battlestar Galactica, and so on. On Yellowjackets, Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) winds up the bearer of the “pregnant survivor” trope.

However, this being Yellowjackets, we’re wondering how this familiar story might be flipped on its head… perhaps through supernatural-wilderness means. We know Teen Shauna grows up to become Melanie Lynskey, so she won’t die in childbirth. But what happened to that baby? Munch with us on these three potential theories.

Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME

Theory #1: Shauna Loses the Baby

On the surface, this seems the most likely route for the show to take. To say Shauna’s had a stressful pregnancy would be sugarcoating of the highest order. Poor Shauna has survived a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness, has been traumatized by losing her best friend (and maybe her mind, just a little, from grief), has suffered a slow starvation, and recently took her first bites of human flesh courtesy of said dead best friend. The girl’s been through a lot. She’s obviously not had the luxury of having regular check-ups with a doctor or taking prenatal vitamins, and it’s doubtful she’s been able to take in the nutrients she’d need to deliver a healthy baby. With all that considered, we’d be shocked if Shauna had the baby and it was just fine. As heartbreaking as it is, with realism considered, that shouldn’t happen.

Another point in support of this theory is that Adult Shauna’s daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), isn’t the right age to be the child with whom she was pregnant in the wilderness. It’s been 25 years since the Yellowjackets were stranded, meaning that baby would now be in their mid-twenties, not in high school.

Theory #2: The Baby Survives, But —

Since “wilderness baby” hasn’t been explicitly stated to have made it out of the wilderness, there has to be a “but” somewhere along the line. If Shauna’s baby survives and is delivered in health, that’ll raise an entirely new set of questions for the survivors. How can they feed it and keep it alive? Yellowjackets is dark, but we doubt it’ll go so dark as to show a baby slowly dying of malnutrition. And on that subject, we also doubt the team would slip so far from reality as to kill and eat a baby — that’d be a little too disturbing, even for a show on which people are chased into spike-pits and then cooked and consumed.

It’s not entirely unfathomable that Shauna could deliver a healthy baby, so the possibility must be considered. If the girls meet another group of survivors in the wilderness, maybe someone from that group takes Shauna’s baby? Maybe there’s some kind of supernatural element that requires the baby to stay behind so that the rest of the survivors can go free — a sort of sacrifice?

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Theory #3: Something Truly Wild Happens

And on that subject, we present Theory 3: something really, really weird and completely unforeseeable goes down. This is a show that has seen bears bow before humans and present themselves as sacrifices for slaughter, where rivers randomly run red, and where symbols appear carved on trees for a sleepwalker to find. It isn’t afraid to go off the rails, so something truly unexpected might happen with Shauna’s pregnancy. Maybe the wilderness claims the child as a twisted blood sacrifice. Maybe Lottie (Courtney Eaton) does something that ties the unborn child to her cult or somehow accidentally uses its life force to benefit the survivors, thus resulting in a stillbirth? Who knows? It’s Yellowjackets. In that forest, anything can happen.

Yellowjackets, Sundays, 9/8c, Showtime