SPOILERS: This post contains details about the Yellowjackets, Season 3 episode ‘Croak’

Yellowjackets fans can finally stop theorizing about three guest stars after their pivotal characters were revealed.

Ahead of this week’s episode ‘Croak’, Yellowjackets creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson told Deadline about working with Joel McHale, Nelson Franklin and Ashley Sutton to bring their “frog scientist vision” to life after it was included in their original show pitch.

“All three of them are amazing,” raved Lyle. “We could not have gotten luckier. Joel was so much fun to work with. He’s exactly as funny as you think he’s going to be. He’s just delightful, and Ashley Sutton is incredible. She brought so much of what we need. Hanna is a really difficult part, because she’s an outsider and she is older than these girls, but she’s not so far removed to not understand the dynamics that are at play. I think that she is, by design, sort of the most prepared of the three of them to walk into this situation, and has to play her cards very, very carefully. And we feel like Ashley really nailed that aspect of the role.”

Following last week’s episode ‘Thanksgiving (Canada)’, which ended with the trio stumbling upon the team’s cannibalistic dinner party with Coach Ben Scott’s (Steven Krueger) head on a plate, ‘Croak’ sees Lottie (Courtney Eaton) unexpectedly taking an ax to Edwin’s (Franklin) head.

“And then, Nelson, who we’ve been huge fans of, we watched him in Veep and we saw him in New Girl, and we just loved him forever, we got to work with him briefly, but it was a bright shining brief moment before we put that ax in his head,” Lyle said with a laugh. “We’re like, do we have to kill him? No, we have to kill him. That’s the whole point.”

Indeed, Edwin’s death was necessary as Nickerson previously revealed that the episode was “something that we pitched on like 50 years ago when we were doing the pitch of the show.”

Before learning of Edwin’s unfortunate fate, audiences get to see his and Hanna’s (Sutton) backstory as scientists who fell in love over their mutual fascination with frogs. While studying a rare species whose mating call appears to be the frightening shrieks the team has been hearing in the woods, the pair hired Kodiak (McHale) as their guide.

“Yeah, I remember when we were pitching it — the process is that you pitch to your studio and then you take it out to the networks and hope that somebody is gonna buy it and actually make it,” Lyle explained. “And so, the original pitch to the studio was a little bit shorter. And then we had a big meeting after they had bought it and we started laying out the rest of the series, and I remember the moment we said, ‘And then the frog scientists—.’ And they were like ‘The what? Hold on a second!’”

Lyle continued with a laugh, “And so, to have something that we’ve been thinking about and wanting to do since 2018, seven years ago, and to be able to finally do it when, as Bart said, when you’re in those first stages, the odds are stacked against so you probably will never get to do this. And so to have finally gotten there and get to introduce the world to our frog scientist vision is very satisfying.”

With Lottie putting an ax in the team’s shot at getting home, Hanna and Kodiak’s fate hangs in the balance, giving audiences an intriguing new twist that begins connecting the dots of what the present-day Yellowjackets have been so determined to hide.