William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies has always had this reputation as one of those books teachers hand kids when they want to quietly destroy whatever joy they still have left in English class. I read it in the 8th grade, which was a very long time ago (don’t ask), and I remember liking Flowers For Algernon, which I had to read in the same grade, a whole lot more. That one wrecked me emotionally. Lord Of The Flies mostly just made me uncomfortable, which I guess means Golding did his job.

For anyone who somehow skipped it, the story follows a group of British schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash, where their attempts at creating order slowly collapse into fear, tribalism, violence, and absolute chaos. Golding famously wrote it as a response to those older adventure stories where stranded boys create little utopias together. After working with children himself, he basically called bullshit on that idea and figured the bullies would rise to power instead. Unfortunately, he was probably right.

Netflix’s new adaptation, developed by Jack Thorne, one of the creators behind Adolescence, sticks pretty close to the bones of the novel. The series is split into four episodes, each centered around one of the main boys, Ralph, Piggy, Jack, and Simon. It’s a smart structure honestly, even if the show itself never fully comes together the way I wanted it to. I leaned positive on it overall, mostly because the young cast is genuinely excellent. Ralph (Winston Sawyers) and Piggy (David McKenna) especially carry a huge amount of emotional weight here. McKenna in particular gives Piggy this exhausting desperation to be heard, like he knows he’s the smartest person on the island and also knows nobody is ever going to listen to him. Sawyers plays Ralph with the kind of misplaced confidence that actually feels age appropriate. He’s trying to be a leader while still very clearly being a child. Both performances are really strong.

Jack (Lox Pratt), meanwhile, is exactly the kind of kid you’d hate within ten minutes of meeting him. It is admittedly funny that Jack is the leader of the choir boys considering choir kids today are probably getting bullied instead of becoming fascist warlords on an island. Pratt is very good though, and I can absolutely see why he got cast as Draco Malfoy in the new Harry Potter series, even if he already feels a tiny bit old for the role.

The weird thing about this adaptation though is how oddly optimistic it feels at first. These kids just survived a horrific plane crash. Every adult is dead. They’re stranded on an island with no idea if rescue is coming. Yet almost immediately everybody is functioning surprisingly well. There’s barely any fear early on. Barely any panic. Nobody seems physically injured. Nobody appears to be mourning anybody they lost. It feels bizarrely clean for a story about trauma and survival. Like, every single kid walked away from this crash without so much as a limp? Really? If I was adapting this, I’d at least have one of the lesser boys wondering what happened to some kid, like not everyone is accounted for. There are plane parts scattered, and I truly don’t know how these kids aren’t burying at least a few classmates. I know that’s more of a book problem, but if William Golding wants to go super dark, then actually go dark. Don’t just dance at dusk and call it a night.

And maybe that faithfulness to the text is intentional, but it made the opening episodes feel emotionally disconnected for me. Fear drives the entire plot eventually, but it should’ve been there from minute one. Kids would be terrified. They’d be crying. Somebody would be catatonic. Somebody would probably be in shock. Instead everyone adapts with this almost summer camp energy for a while.

There are also moments where the practicality of survival starts to lose the thread a little under scrutiny. At one point the boys are processing wild boar meat, and I kept thinking, how exactly do these British schoolboys know how to butcher a pig? I’m pretty sure these posh prep school kids ahve no discernible skill sets, other than stealing Piggy’s glasses all the time. Is he seriously the only kid with glasses? Really? That’s convenientt.

Still, once the paranoia and violence really start creeping in, the show gets much stronger. The Simon episode especially has an eerie quality to it that I liked a lot, and the score throughout the series is beautiful. Honestly one of the best things about the whole production. The music gives the show a sense of sadness and inevitability it sometimes struggles to create on its own.

What surprised me most though is that by the end, I realized I was more interested in what happens after the rescue than the actual island story itself. What happens to these kids afterward? How do they process what they did? How do you go back to school after hunting your classmates through the jungle?

And then I realized that’s basically why Yellowjackets works so well. People are fascinated by survival stories, sure, but we’re even more fascinated by survivors. We want to know what horrific things follow people home.

One thing that absolutely hurt my enjoyment unfortunately was Netflix’s audio description track, which was rough. The recording quality sounded noticeably lower than the rest of the mix, almost older somehow, and the audio ducking constantly flattened scenes in a way that made it feel weirdly close to low grade TTS narration. Accessibility matters, obviously, but a poorly mixed AD track can really impact the experience, and this one did for me. And what pissed me off even more, is that through a combination of reasons, I never heard who made the track. I love to throw shade when earned, and someone deserves it. I just don’t know who.

Ultimately, this version of Lord Of The Flies feels like a swing that almost connects. There’s a lot to admire here. The performances are terrific. The structure is clever. The score is fantastic. But Adolescence remains the much stronger work from Thorne. This adaptation never fully captures the terror and instability that should define these kids from the beginning, and because of that, the descent into savagery doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could have.

Still, I can’t deny it kept me watching, and honestly, for a story I barely remembered outside of Piggy’s fate, it felt surprisingly fresh again. Which maybe says something about how timeless Goulding’s book actually is.

Kids aren’t tiny angels. Sometimes they’re just smaller adults with worse impulse control and access to sharpened sticks.

Fresh: 6.3/10