Spoilers below for Yellowjackets up to the current installment, “Old Wounds,” so be warned if you haven’t yet watched on Showtime or with a Paramount+ subscription!
Is it truly a Yellowjackets episode if it doesn’t spark at least three new avenues of speculation about the past and current lives of the most harrowed TV survivors who didn’t experience a global apocalypse? Season 2’s fourth episode offered up two of the biggest WTF moments so far just in its final few minutes — Javi being found, and the reveal of Lauren Ambrose’s Adult Van — to say nothing of the 50+ minutes that came before. The episode featured the latest instance of Mari asking about the cabin’s unidentified dripping sounds, and while no direct answer was given, I have a theory about what it could be, and how it could help explain how Javi survived, among other things.
What Is The Mysterious Dripping In The Cabin?
So you know those weird trees with the gross-but-plentiful moss growing on them? Yellowjackets has made it quite clear that this moss is impervious to most weather events, and its properties somehow keep it from freezing up like all the other plantlife in the area. Which brings us to this theory trifecta:
- Theory #1: The moss is sentient (or the wood producing the moss is, but I like sentient moss more).
- Theory #2: The moss aims to protect as much as it aims to thwart escape.
- Theory #3: Part of the cabin was built using moss-affected wood.
To address that third point first: either when the cabin was first built, or perhaps during a repair phase, someone used moss-forming wood somewhere within the frame, and so the dripping sound that Mari hears is likely melted snow continuously falling off of the moss. Which quite possibly means that the moss is technically part of the cabin, so to speak.
Viewers know that there's some form of intentional fuckery happening with the teen survivors and Coach Ben, from Laura Lee's sudden plane explosion to Tai's sleepwalking excursions to the powerful effect blood has on...whatever Final Destination-adjacent force is present. But for all the negative effects that could be attributed to the moss-theorized force, it seems to be in a more protective survival-friendly mode whenever blood is offered up. Which would explain post-mauling Van seemingly coming back from the dead only after she bled onto the wood of her would-be funeral pyre (with both that and her accident happening outside of the cabin in the first place).
So what if the mossy cabin wood is actually helping keep all of the characters alive while they're within its walls? Nothing physically threatening seems to happen inside, outside of Shauna's sudden nosebleed, and I cannot be the only viewer who doesn't freely think this many teenagers could survive inside a non-insulated cabin in the dregs of an unpredicted winter freeze, on little to no incoming nutrients, without the help of magical moss...or some other powerful entity capable of keeping humans alive by means other than those we're already aware of.
How Does Sentient Moss Explain Javi Still Being Alive?
For this part to make the most sense, one probably needs to double-back on one of Javi's most significant moments in Season 1: when Shauna caught him digging through her stuff. His excuse at the time was that he was looking for a knife for artful purposes, but what if he himself was already in the process of experimenting with offering blood to the moss? I admittedly can't recall any clues about him possibly bloodletting before he went missing, but I don't think it's out there to suspect he could have been doing meaningful stuff when no one was paying attention. (Even beyond "going missing for two months," which feels like a big one.) As the youngest of anyone, and one who'd dealt with direct tragedy in the form of his dead dad, Javi would likely want to do anything under the sun if it meant even the slightest chance to get out of that predicament.
But whether or not Javi had indeed developed a prior blood-based connection with the moss, I think it's still safe to assume the below:
- Theory #4: The moss kept Javi alive, even if through unnatural means.
I don't necessarily think this situation needs to be anything more complicated than a makeshift lean-to, or even just a pile of fallen trees with just enough room for Javi to squeeze beneath. Whatever the case would be, I believe that the moss prolonged the teen boy's survival in the same way it's been keeping everyone up and at 'em in the cabin. But because Javi was all alone in the wilderness without food and drink rations to subsist on, he may have had to resort to eating the moss itself, or other substandard forms of body fuel, with the supernatural force providing him the means to not just fall apart from the lack of proper nutrition.
There's not a science specifically devoted to this, but I think being kept alive by otherworldly plantlife for months on end would be enough to render Javi all but insane by the time Van and Tai found him. He probably lost a lot of brain skills during that stretch, regardless of how well or terrible his diet was, so fans probably shouldn't expect him to start explaining everything as soon as Episode 205 arrives.
We could also go one step further and speculate that Javi tried to kill himself in the woods, and accidentally bled onto the moss that reversed his suicide attempt. If he would have been medically brain dead for any stretch of that time, that could obviously also play into his current fugue state, especially if it would have been for an extended stretch.
Now, the theory that the moss kept Javi alive doesn't explain why he wouldn't have been able to just find his way back to camp at some point, but it'd make sense that he couldn't have made his way anywhere if he was dead for part of the time.
The idea that the moss is a protection-based force, and one that may be selfish in nature, is obviously a perfect one, and doesn't explain everything that we've seen in the show so far. (I don't even know how it would directly play into Shauna's unresolved pregnancy But there are definitely ways to go deeper down the rabbit hole to approach other mysteries with "sentient moss" as a slimy guiding light, going all the way back/forward to the big Pit Girl mystery.
Now while waiting for the next episode to hit Showtime, let's all sit back and think about how much we should be reading into the Rosemary's Baby poster and the UFO imagery inside Van's video store. Satan, aliens, or sentient moss?
