'Yellowjackets' coshowrunner defends Shauna's gruesome decision to eat Jackie's roasted corpse

• "Yellowjackets" coshowrunner Jonathan Lisco defended Shauna's decision to eat Jackie's corpse during a recent panel.
• "What better way to dominate a friend... than actually ingest her?" Lisco said at PaleyFest.

Fans of "Yellowjackets" have always known that its stranded teenage characters, stuck in the wilderness after a plane crash, would eventually resort to cannibalism — and in the second episode of season two, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) finally takes the plunge into eating human flesh along with the rest of her soccer team.

Coshowrunner Jonathan Lisco spoke about the decision to have Shauna lead the cannibalism charge during a recent panel at PaleyFest.

In the episode, which aired Friday, a heavily pregnant teen Shauna and the Yellowjackets devour the charred corpse of Shauna's best friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell), who died at the end of season one, after their attempts to burn her body in a funeral pyre are thwarted by snow.

Shauna, Lisco said, "was in a toxic friendship with her best friend."

"You adore this person, you can't imagine living without her, but you've also lived so long in her shadow that it's corrosive," Lisco said of Shauna and Jackie's difficult friendship. "Shauna, in this case she wanted to dignify her friend but she also wanted to dominate her friend."

"What better way to dominate a friend who you live in the shadow of than actually ingest her?" the coshowrunner added.

Lisco also mentioned the physical toll that being stranded in the woods would have on a person, especially one who's pregnant like Shauna — even though she might be "using the baby as a pretext" to eat Jackie's body.

"She is starving... we didn't want to shy away from the humanistic aspects of this," Lisco said. "They're hungry. This isn't a moral act, I would argue, no."

The second season of the critically-acclaimed Showtime drama sees teen Shauna grapple with the consequences of Jackie's death while also trying to survive the harsh winter. In the present, adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) struggles to separate herself from the death of her lover Adam in season one.

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" premiere Fridays on Showtime.