From the 1996 crash and nineteen months in the wilderness to the present-day reckoning.
A championship high-school soccer team boards a charter flight.
The Wiskayok High Yellowjackets, one of the best girls' soccer teams in the state, board a private charter to nationals in Seattle — with coaches, a couple of siblings, and their whole futures ahead of them.
Flight down in the northern wilderness — and the first choices about survival.
The plane crashes in a remote northern wilderness. Several die on impact or soon after; the survivors realize rescue is not coming quickly, and a symbol is already carved into a nearby tree.
Laura Lee repairs the wrecked plane and takes off to find rescue; it explodes shortly after takeoff, killing her as the team watches — the wilderness's first statement.
Nineteen months of hunger, ritual, the hunt, and the thing in the woods.
A drug-fueled homecoming ritual spirals toward the group's first attempt to hunt one of their own, previewing the horror to come.
After a fight with Shauna, team captain Jackie is locked out of the cabin and freezes in the snow — the death that ends the old hierarchy.
Snowed in and starving, the team consumes Jackie's body — the first act of cannibalism, and the crossing of a line there is no coming back from.
Javi, long missing, reappears alive — having survived in a hidden, symbol-marked cave. The group reads his survival as a sign the wilderness is guiding them.
The starving group formalizes the hunt — drawing cards to "let the wilderness choose." The ritual drives Javi onto thin ice; he drowns and is eaten.
The team "chooses" Natalie as leader, crowning her with antlers. Coach Ben, unable to accept the new order, sets fire to the cabin and flees into the wilderness.
The girls capture, try, and execute Coach Ben, then cannibalize him. Outsiders — a research party — begin to close in on the camp.
A research trio stumbles onto the Yellowjackets. Lottie kills Edwin with an axe; Hannah stabs the guide Kodi to prove her loyalty and joins the group; her DAT tape records it all.
A card-draw hunt runs Mari onto Travis's stakes in the pit — she is Pit Girl. Shauna orders Natalie to prepare the body and takes the antler crown, becoming the Antler Queen. Akilah is revealed to have staged the "sign" that triggered the hunt.
Twenty-five years later, the survivors and the secret they buried.
Twenty-five years later, the adult survivors — Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, Misty and others — are pulled back together by a blackmailer (revealed to be Jeff) and by Travis's mysterious death.
As the present-day group fractures, adult Natalie is killed by an accidental injection — the wilderness's reach extending decades past the woods.
Callie confesses she pushed Lottie down the stairs. Hilary Swank's character is revealed as a very-much-alive Melissa, who killed adult Van and left the DAT tape. Natalie reaches a satellite phone in the woods — the first thread toward rescue.
Shauna reigns as the Antler Queen, rescue is finally in reach, and the survivors' secret is unraveling in the present. Season 4 is the confirmed final season and premieres November 20, 2026 — everything past here is prediction.