Van Palmer, You Mean the World to Us

Following the announcement of the final season of Paramount’s Yellowjackets, Francesca Langley writes an ode to the character of Van Palmer.

Crash-landing onto our screens in 2021, Paramount’s Yellowjackets tells the story of an all-girl soccer team whose plane goes down in the Canadian wilderness, leaving them stranded for two years. Split between those lost years in 1996 and the lives of the survivors in 2021, the cast is an impressive ensemble, combining up-and-coming talent and household names of the 90s: Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci. With the stakes of the show being sky-high, it was anyone’s guess as to who would survive in the next episode.              

The 1996 timeline introduces the character of Vanessa ‘Van’ Palmer, played by the phenomenal Liv Hewson. Van is the Yellowjackets’ goalie, quick with a quip and an infinite knowledge of 90’s pop culture. When Season 1 aired, all signs were pointing towards Van meeting a tragic end, which would’ve been even more heartbreaking as we saw the development of Van and Taissa’s (portrayed by Jasmin Savoy Brown) burgeoning relationship. Upon catching up with adult Taissa (Tawny Cypress) with a wife who isn’t Van, all signs were pointing to Van meeting her end in the wilderness.

Lauren Ambrose later joins the cast as adult Van, introduced in season 2 episode 4, which was revealed to Hewson at the GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) awards after-party after winning an ‘Outstanding Media Award’, alongside their castmate Jasmin Savoy Brown in 2024. 

Creators of the show, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, have stated that it wasn’t their intention to have Van survive Season 1. Hewson was originally brought on as a guest star but soon won over the team and fans, managing to evade character death.

Season 3 Episode 9 had Ambrose take her final bow as Van.  Ambrose and Hewson have provided deeply insightful reflections of their feelings towards Van’s death and Ambrose’s consequent exit from the show. Hewson recalls Ambrose telling them, “I’m just giving her back to you”. This meta-narrative of both Liv and Van evading death made the episode even more heartbreaking. The two performers collaborated up until Van’s last breath, with Ambrose inviting Hewson to join her in the room during the filming of the final scene, which gives Van’s eleventh hour an added layer of grief. 

To see this young queer person who had endured so much not only just survive but live as their true self, uncompromisingly authentic, struck a chord with the show’s fanbase. Fans celebrated Taissa and Van’s love, and the actors that gave us to them, by dedicating a week to creating fanfiction, edits and artwork to the couple. In a show which delves into the deepest fissures of the human psyche, through its supernatural overtones and zany, Lynchian dream sequences, Van’s ability to bolster her teammates provides the levity that is key to the team’s survival. Hewson’s improvisational skills expertly harmonise with their castmates’ performances.  

Van is unapologetically herself, a social outlier bound to resonate with those who never had the choice of being closeted – the ones who are easily ‘clockable’, thrust into an unaccepting, binary world. Van Palmer is the type of character that the next generation of the LGBTQ+ community is incredibly fortunate to have. A young, awkward me would’ve loved a Van Palmer of my own. 

Hewson is an outspoken advocate for the community, winning a Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award in 2020 and often engaging in discourse with other queer artists about their journey of self-acceptance in their sexuality and gender identity. Representation remains to be so important, not just for the newly-out viewers but those who have lived through hardships and have come out the other side; seeing Ambrose’s Van as an older queer person, unabashedly loving and being loved evokes a huge sense of catharsis. Hewson has expressed a deep interest in Van’s journey taking place in the 90s and how that landscape would look for a young queer woman whose facial scarring makes her easy tabloid fodder, stating that it’s “fascinating, and I’m strangely looking forward to it”.  

The fourth and final season of Yellowjackets was announced on October 10^th, shocking both the creative team and audience as showrunners had initially planned a five-season run. This begs the question; will these complex characters receive an ending they deserve? 

Despite ongoing online discourse, it is undeniable that Van has had a deeply positive impact on the queer community – a credit to the performances of Ambrose, Hewson, Brown and Cypress.

They cared, therefore so do we, and we have been given a beautiful love story that proves in the face of adversity love perseveres.  

Words by Francesca Langley