Dead cabin guy and his technicolor dreamcoat have haunted me since the wardrobe reveal in season two, and today im going to make it everyone's problem.
Travis wears the coat first. He and Natalie take the blessing and go out to look for Javi. Travis hallucinates (prophesies?) that Javi is dead and buried beneath the snow, but Natalie shows him it's only a fox. Travis finds the strange, mossy tree stump. The next day Travis has strong feelings about which direction is best to search for Javi in, and we don't see more of him until Nat reveals the bloody pants. Not that weird, all things considered. New season, new wardrobe additions. Hiking on a caloric deficit with PTSD, you'll probably hallucinate. Pretty standard stuff.
Then Nat wears the coat. She takes it to lay Jackie's bones to rest at the crash site, and while she wears it she sees (hallucinates? prophesies? I'm not sure!) the white moose that they'll later lose to the lake (ergo the hunt, ergo Javi dies for real but more on that later).
We get to Old Wounds, the hunting competition, and Lottie wears the coat now. You see where I'm going with this but just to be thorough: she enters the realm of death dreams, talks with Laura Lee, almost freezes to death.
Episode five. Melissa wears the coat. Maybe that's not important! Maybe it's just to show that they all share the wardrobe, and that the side characters are as equally All In This Together as the main characters are. Or it could mean something that a peripheral character, wearing important wardrobe, framed in antlers (not unlike Travis in 2.01), has the line "maybe he did die, and that's his ghost." It's a little suspicious, and at this point starts to feel like a pattern.
Who wears it next, who wore it best!? That's right baby, it's Paul! For his dreamworld drifter, hallucination hunk Coach Ben Scott. Nicholas Urfe himself. Ben spends almost all of his time in a dream, until *drumroll please* Paul, very pointedly, takes the coat and walks out the door. "Where do you think you are, Ben?" he puts the coat on. "You had to have known you couldn't stay here forever. [...] What matters now is that you aren't welcome here anymore." Following Paul means committing to death (to dream), and until interruption that's the choice Ben makes. Because letting Paul (and the coat) go would mean committing entirely to reality.
Of course, the pièce de résistance is something I didn't even notice until I went looking for it. The first dozen times I watched, I thought that after Lottie's beating Shauna brought her a blanket. "Lottie's cold." But she doesn't. She brings her the coat. Lottie is laying with it when, in a fever dream, she witnesses/hallucinates/prophesies parts of the hunt.
It's there again (on the back of the chair) when she sits by the fire and speaks for the wilderness, appointing Nat their queen. Ben watches, having woken from the dream himself, as they all bow to Natalie and leave reality behind for good.
Of course, there are a lot of times when characters hallucinate strange things in the cabin while not wearing the coat, because they're all starving to death and traumatized. Mari. Shauna. Akilah. But in addition to that, it seems like a pattern worth noting that in each instance where a character wears the technicolor coat, the line between the real and the imagined seems to blur with more ease. Does dead cabin guy's technicolor dreamcoat help the Yellowjackets connect to the dream realm?
I'll be brief here with the biblical parallel: blah blah Joseph is the favorite son (you were always its favorite), his father gives him a technicolor coat (they're nothing special, they don't change color in the cold or anything). blah blah Joseph starts having prophetic dreams etc etc his jealous brothers throw Joseph down a pit (the wilderness chose) and bring his bloodstained coat back as false proof of his death (hanging on a branch. a couple miles back). You get my drift.
Does it mean anything? Who knows. But in a series where wardrobe is such an integral part of the storytelling, it felt worth paying attention to.
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I love all Yellowjackets relationships so much like they are beyond romance. Nat and misty are an old sick master and her devoted guard dog, still pulling her stumbling master along by the leash and attacking anyone who walks by. Shauna is Jackie’s well loved cat who is locked in the apartment with her corpse, destroying everything before (literally) eating her face. I mean that before Jackie even died in the show, and that Jackie died the second Shauna voted to go to the lake. Jeff is Shaunas organ donor; he keeps giving and she keeps taking, both of them desperately trying to sustain her the way she is but her body keeps rejecting the parts. Shauna also thinks she’s Jeff’s prisoner, but in reality she chained herself to him and holds the key in one hand while she gnaws at the skin around the restraint. Callie ran away or hid when she caught Shauna staring at her, until she realized Shauna wasn’t seeing her but at her first baby and Jackie. Now Callie is tearing herself to shreds to become something that will gain her mothers attention. Van is mania for a bipolar Taissa; Tai has to keep order and structure, keep herself sober, keep a strict sleep schedule, and just dull herself, because as soon as her mental health wavers, she slips right back to Van and whatever irrational and dangerous decision she convinces Tai to do. Adult Lottie and Van are like some sort of insects in heat; Van can function without her, but her body will fail her over time. Lottie gives off a pheromone that makes Van erratic and obsessive and devoted so that Lottie can tear her head off at the point of climax. Shauna and Taissa are two sisters that survived an abusive household, having increasingly complicated and painful relationships with those around them, so that in comparison their own relationship is simple and pure. They have little in common besides sneaking into each others rooms at night to clean each others wounds and hiding under the blankets to block out the screaming downstairs. Ben and Natalie are survivors of the zombie apocalypse, until they’ve finally reached the bunker and he notices the bite she had been hiding from him. Good show
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