‘Yellowjackets’: Sophie Nélisse deserves a taste of Emmy love for her heartrending work in ‘Qui’

Luca Giliberti
·6 min read
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After receiving an Emmy bid for her turn as adult Shauna in Season 1 of “Yellowjackets,” Melanie Lynskey is likely to score another nomination for Season 2. And deservedly so. But if voters do the right thing, they will also pay their respects to the person portraying the teenage version of Shauna, Sophie Nélisse, who serves up a devastating, if not series-best, performance in “Qui,” the sixth episode of the Showtime hit’s second season.

Directed by Emmy winner Liz Garbus, and written by Karen Joseph Adcock and Ameni Rozsa, “Qui” answers the long-simmering question about the fate of Shauna’s baby, delivering the outcome that many fans had forecasted: The newborn doesn’t survive childbirth. But the episode, which aired on linear Showtime on May 7, pulls a trick on viewers by initially leading them to believe the opposite. After Shauna passes out in the throes of labor, she awakens to her fellow Yellowjackets greeting her with a sea of smiles and Misty (Samantha Hanratty) approaching her with her seemingly healthy newborn — a boy, as Lottie (Courtney Eaton) correctly predicted. As Shauna holds her son for the first time, her entire face lights up with joy.

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But that moment of happiness is short-lived, as the following days see the new mother, under- and malnourished, struggling to breastfeed her son and becoming increasingly concerned about Lottie’s attempts to seize control of him. Nélisse embodies her character’s uneasiness with striking precision, conveying through her eyes — seemingly sore from exhaustion — both the growing frustration over her weakened body and the crippling fear that her baby boy will soon succumb to starvation if he doesn’t latch onto her breast.

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Despite these hardships, though, Shauna is able to share a moment of intimacy with her son when she promises to tell him about his complicated origin story once he’s older. “I can’t wait to see who you become, where’ll you go, what you’ll do,” she, on the verge of tears, whispers to him. “But it all depends on us figuring this out. It’s you and me, kid — it’s you and me against the whole world.” It’s thereafter that the newborn finally takes to his mother’s breast, prompting Shauna to be overcome with relief. It’s a touching scene that underscores the love and excitement she feels for him — and makes what follows all the more tragic.

After Shauna is woken by ominous humming one night and walks out to the Yellowjackets feasting on her newborn, she awakens in the real world to discover that everything after she passed out was a hallucination and her baby was in fact stillborn. Still in shock from the horrific sight of her son being devoured by her teammates, she is in disbelief, repeatedly beseeching her fellow survivors to tell her where her baby is and recounting to them her vision — that she held him, that she fed him, that he started crying, that he was real. Even after she takes a look at her baby’s dead body, she turns to the others for affirmation that he is alive. “Don’t you hear him crying?! Can’t you hear him crying?!” she asks with a whimpering voice and tears rushing down her face. As the camera slowly pans to the side and the screen begins to fade to black, she breaks the fourth wall, now also pleading with viewers to hear her son’s cries. “Why can’t you hear him cry?” she weeps over and over again, her voice becoming fainter with each new plea.

In these final moments of the episode, Nélisse manages to combine denial, paranoia, isolation, heartbreak and, above all, insurmountable grief into one unforgettable expression that has had fans of “Yellowjackets” clamoring, in tweet after tweet, for the Canadian actor to be recognized with an Emmy nomination. But will members of the TV academy respond to the buzz?

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At the moment, Nélisse is in 12th place in our combined drama actress odds. But, to be fair, she was a later addition to the category, since it wasn’t disclosed until March 30 that she would be defecting to the lead actress race after competing in supporting for Season 1, and a lot of people probably haven’t updated their predictions since Sunday’s episode. The best news for the 23-year-old might be, believe it or not, Lynskey’s presumed strong standing in the derby. If the New Zealander is as formidable as we think she is — she has been the odds-on favorite since we launched the predictions center in February — it’s not inconceivable for her to carry Nélisse to a bid, as voters may not want to vote for one over the other now that they’re competing in the same category. While Nélisse will also have to get past two of her other co-stars, Juliette Lewis (No. 10) and Tawny Cypress (No. 14), she might have enough individual passion on the heels of her acclaimed turn in “Qui” to have the edge over them on a restricted ballot.

What also helps is that “Yellowjackets” — which earned seven Emmy citations, including one for Best Drama Series and two for acting, with the other being for Christina Ricci in supporting, for Season 1 — is now an established show that could enjoy an uptick in nominations for Season 2, as so many series have for their second installments in the past. If it does, let’s hope that Nélisse gets a taste of the love this time around.

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