Yellowjackets Cast and Showrunner on Shauna's Birthing Nightmare in Harrowing Episode 6

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Yellowjackets Episode 6. Read at your own risk!]

Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 6 is here, and with it comes the event that fans have beed dreading: Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) going into labor. The delivery technically started in Episode 5, but this new episode is almost entirely focused on the teen girl giving birth and getting a traumatic taste of motherhood. And it's a panic-inducing hour. There are clearly no doctors in the bunch, and Shauna also hasn't had the most nutritious diet in the wilderness (in fact, she and her teammates have been starving — and resorted to eating their former captain Jackie (Ella Purnell) not too long ago). By the end, our worst fears are realized: The baby doesn't survive childbirth. But before that happens, much of the first half of Episode 6 shows a screaming Shauna trying to deliver her child.

"It was actually quite physical," Nélisse told TV Guide of filming the scene. "The biggest issue was mainly keeping my voice intact because day one, it's full-on screams. And I was just sipping on this Throat Coat tea." The actor recalled her nerves heading into the episode, which co-showrunner Ashley Lyle remembered, too. 

"[Sophie] came to us at one point, said, 'I'm just so nervous, I don't know if I can do this,'" Lyle shared. "And we said, 'Sophie, if we didn't think you could do this, we wouldn't ask you to do it.'" The writers' confidence in Nélisse's proved right. "She is so expressive and brings such a heartbreaking authenticity to that experience," Lyle continued. 

Jasmin Savoy Brown, whose character Taissa stayed by Shauna's side during the entire scene, also discussed encouraging Nélisse while filming. "Sophie was so scared. Every take she'd be like, 'I'm so bad,'" Brown recalled. "And we're like, 'Shut up, you're amazing!'"

Nélisse credited part of her performance to Liz Garbus, the director of Yellowjackets Episode 6. "She sent me a bunch of references to watch before about birthing scenes, and brought such a calm and nurturing energy on set," she said. Her co-stars, who crowded around Nélisse as her character went into labor, were also a great source of strength. "They were all surrounding me and Samantha [Hanratty] was touching my feet, massaging me," she said. "It literally felt like I was truly giving birth and they were all supporting me."

"I am like, let me massage you, let me make you feel comfortable," said Hanratty, who plays Misty. "When you've been taken care of, especially on set, you know that that feels nice and you want to do that for others."

Hanratty shared her concerns around filming the childbirth scene. "I was honestly very worried about going in," she said. "You don't know what our crew has been through, what other actors have been through." For the actor, it was paramount to approach the shoot with sensitivity. 

And when Shauna learned that her baby did not survive, it was a harrowing moment on set. "I was fully crying with her," Hanratty said. "A lot of the tears during when the baby is gone were fully real."

But in a painful hallucination, Shauna gets to experience motherhood. During childbirth, Shauna loses consciousness and viewers are taken to an alternate reality where the baby was born healthy and Shauna has some precious bonding moments with her child, including when the baby latches onto her breast for feeding. But the happy time turns to a nightmare when she later imagines that her teammates have seemingly eaten her child, jarring her back into consciousness in the same delivery position. The nightmare has followed her into reality: She learns that the baby never survived.

"One of the things that we always want to do as much as possible is to give the audience a window into the subjective experience of what's going on with the character," co-showrunner Bart Nickerson said of the dream. "The loss of the baby for Shauna obviously is this sort of core trauma of her time in the wilderness. And so how to speak to that is to show a bit of what she lost." The writers wanted to depict Shauna beginning to form a relationship with her child so that viewers could experience more of the character's emotions. 

"You could really feel it being ripped away from the audience the same way that it's ripped away from Shauna, [that] was the intent," Nickerson said. 

Yellowjackets Season 2 is available to stream on Showtime.