What Happened To Javi In Yellowjackets

Content Warning: This article discusses themes and subject matter that some readers may find triggering, including a discussion of sexual assault and cannibalism.

Nobody is ever truly safe on “Yellowjackets,” the dual-timeline drama series that became a major hit for Showtime when it started airing in 2021. In the present-day timeline, we meet Shauna Sadecki (Melanie Lynskey), Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress), Misty Quigley (Christina Ricci), and Natalie Scatorccio (Juliette Lewis) as the adult survivors of a plane crash that stranded a high school girls’ soccer team called the Yellowjackets who were traveling from New Jersey to Seattle for an important game. Back in the 1996 timeline, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of the crash, those same characters — played by Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Samantha Hanratty, and Sophie Thatcher, respectively — have to work with their teammates and other passengers to figure out how to survive in the woods, and the lengths they go to in order to stay alive are pretty dark.

Alongside the titular Yellowjackets, the team’s coach is on board the plane along with his sons Travis and Javi Martinez, played by Kevin Alves and Luciano Leroux. While the coach dies in the crash, the two boys survive. So what happens to Travis and Javi? Well, Travis, along with most of the girls, is still trying to brave the dangerous woods, but Javi meets a truly tragic end as season 2 of “Yellowjackets” draws to a close. So what’s Javi’s story, and what happens to him?

After Travis and Javi lose their dad at the beginning of “Yellowjackets,” they cautiously assimilate into the group of girls alongside the team’s assistant coach, Ben (Stephen Krueger), who loses his leg in the crash. Before any cannibalism happens, everything seems more or less fine, but in the first season’s penultimate episode “Doomcoming,” the girls end up taking a whole bunch of hallucinogenic mushrooms and chasing Travis through the woods and nearly sexually assault him; instead, they nearly kill him before the effect of the mushrooms subsides. In the chaos, Javi disappears into the woods.

Even though Natalie and Travis embark on a search for Javi, he’s nowhere to be found — and as the season ends, the only food available to Travis, Ben, and the girls is a bear killed by Lottie (Courtney Eaton as a teen and Simone Kessell as an adult), who may or may not have any supernatural powers. Why is the food thing relevant to Javi? You’ll understand in a minute and maybe wish that you didn’t.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

Two months after the finale of season 1 of “Yellowjackets,” Javi is still missing — and a major tragedy has the camp still reeling. During that season 1 finale, Shauna and her best friend — the team’s captain Jackie Taylor, played by “Fallout” and “Sweetpea” star Ella Purnell — have a massive, blowout fight that culminates in Jackie storming out of a cabin where the entire team is hiding out from the bitter cold; the next morning, Shauna wakes up to realize it snowed overnight and finds Jackie outside, realizing she died from exposure to the elements during the storm.

As season 2 begins, Natalie and Travis are trying and failing to accomplish two goals — find Javi and successfully hunt for food — when Shauna, who is clearly starting to lose her entire mind and is keeping Jackie’s frozen body in a hiding spot and talking to it, snacks on her dead best friend’s ear in a moment of desperation. Before long, the girls decide to feast on Jackie’s body after they try to burn it on a funeral pyre and end up barbecuing her corpse instead. In that same episode — titled “Edible Complex” – Natalie, who wants Travis to stop looking for Javi and move on (only because she assumes the boy is dead), so she takes a pair of Javi’s shorts, smears blood on them, and plants them in the woods to convince Travis that his brother is gone. Javi is still alive, and before long, he resurfaces.

In the fourth episode of the second season of “Yellowjackets” titled “Old Wounds,” Taissa and her teammate-turned-girlfriend Van (Liv Hewson as a teen and Lauren Ambrose as an adult) decide to try and follow all of the mysterious markings and symbols surrounding their makeshift camp in the woods (specifically, the crudely drawn symbol that appears to be a girl impaled on some sort of weapon). When they do, they end up finding a totally freaked-out Javi, but when they ask him where he’s been and how he survived, he … says absolutely nothing. In fact, when he returns to camp, Javi just remains silent, refusing to speak to any of the girls on the team.

Javi does talk to Ben, though, and tells him that “she” told Javi not to return to camp; when Ben asks who that is, Javi simply says it’s his “friend.” Meanwhile, Travis is understandably furious with Natalie now that he realizes she tried to trick him into thinking his younger brother was dead, and Javi, who’s already traumatized, bears witness as Shauna gives birth to a baby boy who dies shortly afterward… as well as Shauna’s savage beating of Lottie, whom she considers responsible for the baby’s death. Things only get worse for Javi (and everyone else, honestly) in the season’s penultimate episode “It Chooses.”

In “It Chooses,” Ben realizes that Javi was hiding out in a cave during his departure from the camp … but that’s not the biggest thing that happens in this episode as far as Javi is concerned. Despite Lottie’s serious injuries, the girls aren’t willing to sacrifice her just yet, so they draw cards to see who will be killed (and presumably serve as a food source for the camp). Natalie draws the doomed card and is chased through the woods by the group of starving, deranged teenagers after Shauna tries to kill her on the spot and is tackled by Travis; as Natalie tries to escape, Javi confronts her and tells her he can bring her somewhere safe, presumably referring to the cave where he was living for months.

On the way to the cave, Javi and Natalie try to cross a frozen lake … but Javi falls through the ice and the rest of the girls hold Natalie back and let him drown, saving her life and sacrificing Javi. Then, in the season 2 finale “Storytelling,” the team gathers Javi’s body from the lake and returns him to the camp before dismembering him and cooking his body. Poor Javi is the second person who dies in the wilderness and is summarily consumed on “Yellowjackets,” and based on the way the 1996 timeline is going, he won’t be the last.

“Yellowjackets” returns for its third season on February 14, and the first two seasons are available on Paramount+ with Showtime.