Save Me Too – Nelly's yellow puffer explained
Save Me spoilers below.
Think of Save Me and you see yellow – a bright, dizzying hue that hits you right between the eyes. Punchy. Unmissable.
Nelly's yellow puffer instantly became the Sky series' most striking visual, like Walter White's Heisenberg porkpie hat or Eleven's nose bleeds.
Hold up a photo of that coat in a pub quiz and the answer couldn't be anything else.
In the first episode of Save Me, before we find out that Nelly's daughter Jody is missing, we see him in a dark leather jacket.
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But that sartorial choice is short-lived after the police take away his belongings for examination, leaving him with that yellow puffer and little else, pulled from a bin bag full of clothes at Zita's flat.
It's all he's got, and it quickly becomes his uniform – unmistakably Nelly darting across the grey London cityscape in search of his kid.
He doesn't find Jody at the end of Save Me season 1. Instead, he stumbles across Grace, another teenager who has been sex trafficked.
He finds her chained up in a caravan, waiting to be collected by the man who had outbid Nelly at the auction.
It was, by no means, an end-point, and we've been gifted with another season of the remarkable series, aptly named Save Me Too, with Nelly, once again, donning his trusty yellow coat.
But why that particular puffer? What significance does it hold?
Save Me is the result of painstaking attention to detail, where characters and events, costume and colour, all mean something. There is no bland reasoning of "just because"or "we felt like it" here.
There's a method to the madness.
Chatting to Digital Spy and other press, Lennie James explained why that jacket has become so integral to his protagonist: "Even though he hasn't found Jody, this yellow puffer is lucky, and he will, as he says to Stace, keep wearing it until he finds her."
For Nelly, taking off that coat and discarding it would be to admit defeat.
It's never said, but that brilliant yellow is a lighthouse in the dark, and he never stops hoping that his daughter will see it and know, leading her back to him.
But we'd very nearly seen the last of it.
James, who also picked up the pen for Save Me, revealed that the yellow puffer was almost replaced in the show's second season.
"The first draft of the first episode of the second series, he [Nelly] opened it [his birthday present] and pulled out a red puffer," he said. "And literally the first note I got back from Sky, from World [productions], got back from anybody who read it was like, 'Are you an idiot? What, are you nuts?'"
But the yellow puffer prevailed, as you'll see in the show.
"Bin the old one," says Zita. "Put it on Nelly," requests Stacey.
"I'm gonna give this one one more night, you know," he replies, his voice tinged with melancholy. "A proper goodbye."
Save Me Too airs on Wednesdays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic. The full series is now available on Sky on Demand and NOW TV.
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