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SPOILERS: This post contains details about the Yellowjackets, Season 3 episode ‘How the Story Ends’
With one week to go until what’s sure to be a jaw-dropping Season 3 finale of Yellowjackets, the Showtime series has claimed another fan-favorite.
This week’s episode ‘How the Story Ends’ features the devastating death of Lauren Ambrose‘s Adult Van, who meets her fate at the hands of her former teammate Melissa (Hilary Swank), following an emotionally fraught season for the character as she struggled to enjoy what life she had left with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
In the Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson-created show’s morbid tradition, Van’s death is marked with a subconscious scene of Ambrose on the plummeting plane with Liv Hewson, who plays the character’s younger counterpart.
“I consider myself very lucky to have been able to have that experience, because Lauren’s such an amazing actor and this character is so special to me,” Hewson previously told Deadline. “It was significant to get to get to work with Lauren and to get to have a moment of this character sitting with herself in the final moments of her life.”
The episode is punctuated with Hewson’s Van visiting Ambrose’s Van in some foreboding dream sequences, which Hewson noted “came out of a conversation the two of us had” and a desire to work together more before Ambrose’s departure.
After the previous episode ended with Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) attempting to feed Swank’s Melissa a piece of her own flesh as payback for allegedly blackmailing them, the latter escapes, only for her car to run out of gas.
Driving by on their way to find Shauna, Van, Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Misty (Christina Ricci) happen upon an injured Melissa, dragging her back to the scene, where Shauna and the group ties her up while deciding what to do with her. But Melissa outwits them all and knocks everyone out by closing the fireplace flue.
Having rescued everyone, Van holds Melissa at knifepoint after Tai convinced her that making a sacrifice might allow her to survive her cancer. “Why can’t I be that?” Van cries in a heartbreaking performance from Ambrose.
“You don’t want to be,” says Melissa, as Van drops the knife and agrees, “No, I don’t.”
The pair shares a deep and intense look of understanding before Melissa turns the knife on Van. “But I do,” she says after plunging the knife into Van’s chest, setting off a collective fan gasp one could hear at approximately 12:52am PT when the moment was available to stream on Paramount+ with Showtime.
Watching her own death scene from the metaphysical crashing plane with young Van, Ambrose exclaims, “I die? I’m dead?” Our sentiments exactly, Lauren.
It’s not quite the peaceful ending Claire Fisher had when Six Feet Under aired that iconic finale in 2001, but Lauren Ambrose’s tragic run as Van Palmer on Yellowjackets is sure to leave just as big of a mark.
