Skins: Season Three, "Everyone" and "Cook"

Series Three, Episode One, “Everyone”

The ability of reinvention is Skins’ greatest gift. Things that may have felt fresh in the first season began to feel uninspired in the second season. The show’s greatest ability to reinvent comes in the series's decision to scrap its entire cast after two seasons. As much as I might miss some of the first generation’s characters, I was hesitantly excited about what a fresh start might look like, especially if the show were to take full advantage of the conceit. 

The first time I watched the premiere of the third season, I was looking for parallels between the two generations. Part of me suspected that Skins would simply do variations on the same stories. While to a degree, the show does tend to lean on certain types of stories, it doesn’t fall back on familiar characters. There are comparable character traits here, but not so much so that it feels like these are straight carbon copies of the characters who came before. 

Effy and Pandora’s relationship has shades of Tony and Sid, but it’s a healthier relationship. Pandora is a very different person from Sid (a happy-go-lucky, wide-eyed goofball), and Effy feels protective of her (as opposed to being intentionally manipulative). Effy may be a mischievous savant, but she’s more transparent than Tony ever was. She also recognizes good, put-upon people and sympathizes with them (i.e. Pandora, Emily). The love triangle is in place, but it’s a more earnest take on the trope. Effy has feelings for both Freddy and Cook. But she’s also too self-destructive to not let this play out (More on that later). 

There’s also other stories here without clear precedents. The story of the twins Emily and Katie is the first. The other is that of the self-righteous Naomi. While the show doesn’t have the greatest handle on what it’s doing with Naomi yet, it does with Emily and Katie. Emily and Katie is the trope of twins who are very different individuals. A trope the show is going to get a lot of mileage in both playing to and upending. The show also does great work into turning Emily into another of its great tragic figures. Katie has her so thoroughly under her thumb that it seems that Emily scarcely has a spine. “So you’re the door mat?” Effy asks her. Emily doesn’t bother denying it: “I guess so”. 

The transition between the second season and third season has brought with it a new confidence. The show feels like it’s learned a lesson or two from telling its first generation stories and is willing to use them to improve its stories going forward. The filmmaking is more assured, and the writing is consistently subtler. That might seem strange to say about an episode where a centerpiece features several far jokes. But Skins has gotten better about tamping down on its worst tendencies. The ludicrous and truly dumb are minimal or at least well-integrated into telling episodic and long-term narratives in a way they rarely were in the first two seasons. 

Compare “Everyone” to the season one premiere “Tony” and you’ll get a clearer sense of what I’m referring to. “Everyone” is a much better constructed episode. It spends its time introducing all the main characters and establishing conflicts for them that will drive the season going forward. It splits its time amongst them fairly equally, and it only occasionally feels like it’s dragging its feet or that it’s uncertain of how to manage all its moving parts. 

This isn’t Skins finest hour, but it is a necessary one.

Grade: B+

Series Three, Episode Two, “Cook”

“Cook” is less easily defensible than the premiere. Jack O’Connell is terrific as Cook. What the show is aiming for with that character is truly, incredibly sad. Yet the story used to deliver this is silly and puzzling.

Cook is celebrating his birthday. He invites everyone at school, but practically no one shows (in one pathetically sad note of many, he sends away a group of male classmates because he only wants girls for a potential hookup). When the handful of arrivals complain that the gathering is lame, Cook convinces Freddy to let them crash a party his sister is attending. 

And this is where it goes wrong. See, the party is for an infamous mobster who’s marrying off his daughter to settle a dispute to rival gangs. Cook proceeds to stir up troubles that leads to what amounts to a gangland war. 

After this disaster and all-around rejections from his female party-goers to sleep with him (the best having to be from an indignant Katie; even she has standards), Cook heads to a brothel. Thus ridiculous, senseless plot point #2 arrives. 

But the episode can’t be dismissed wholesale. What underlies much of this is a painful sense of sadness. Freddy confronts Cook about his self-destructive streak (a trait he has in common with multiple characters from this season, including Effy) and he tries to play it off as just birthday shenanigans. But drinking at five in the morning isn’t the behavior of someone celebrating their birthday. The sex, drugs and drinking are symptomatic of something deeper. Skins delineates here between the partying of the other characters, which is an occasional fun activity, and the partying of Cook, which comes off more like a chronic disease. 

Cook has his excuses. He’s been abandoned by his parents, and while his uncle genuinely has affection for him, he’s not a suitable guardian. He encourages Cook’s bad behavior, which only exacerbates his worst tendencies. The working class background to the character comes through strongly. Even Cook’s attitude towards women and sex feels conservative and narrow-minded in ways defined as much by economic struggles as adolescent ignorance. 

Cook is another instance of a character who’s much better in performance than writing. This is primarily a messy episode. Its mid-stretch is full of moments of implausible nonsense that distracts from the more well-observed character and emotional work. And yet, O’Connell is an actor that I could watch do just about anything. He’s probably the most expressive actor of the second generation’s cast. There’s subtle work being done in the margins here (Kathryn Prescott is doing lovely, understated work, especially for those who know where that story is headed), but O’Connell is able to liven up this early going when the show still feels uncertain of the direction the season is headed in. 

Grade: B-

Stray Observations:

-The opening scene to the premiere brings about the grandeur of the melodrama the show is aiming for. The moment when Effy first appears is over-the-top, star-crossed lover romanticism. The scene is also an effective deployment of the show’s off-brand sense of humor. 

-I appreciate just how extensively the writers are willing to break from the previous generation. Besides an overly cute moment where Cook becomes the proud owner of Sid’s former locker, the show avoids drawing connections between this generation and the last one. The exception being Effy, which is unavoidable since she’s related to one of those characters and we’ve already spent extended time with her.

-Freddy, to some degree, slots into the Jal role for this generation. He’s a solid, dependable, generally “normal” guy with more outsized personalities surrounding him. 

-Katie tries to befriend Effy because Effy has already gained some popularity (due to her brother Tony), and Katie is desperate to be cool. This along with Katie’s dismissal of Naomi for apparently being gay demonstrate just how desperate Katie is to appear “cool” (Although, homophobia isn’t really an appealing look in my book). She also does drugs in the second episode to impress Effy.

-Katie’s boyfriend is also way too old for her. That’s not me moralizing or anything. She’s in the equivalent of high school and dating someone in like his thirties. It’s strange. 

-Also strange: Emily and Katie’s young brother peeping on them while in the bathroom. Puberty creates an interest in the opposite sex, but not like this. 

-Notice just how clear of a sense of all the major characters we have by the end of the first episode. With the exception of Naomi (who feels oddly shoehorned in, especially considering how important she’ll end up being), we’re given introductory moments that crystallize who every character is. 

-It’s worth noting that anything that Naomi does that resembles “bitchiness” is an intentional facade. This will become more apparent in later episodes. 

-Part of the reason the storytelling works more in the third season is because the core group of characters weren’t already close friends like the first generation. That gives more room for character interactions and stories to develop. But it also creates instances where it doesn’t make much sense as to why they’re hanging out. Case in point: Cook’s birthday party. Most of these people don’t know each other, or even like each other. 

-JJ choosing to make out rather than have sex at the brothel is an on-point character moment and simultaneously sweet and sad (and oh-so weird). 

-JJ has Asperger’s, a characteristic the show is completely open and sympathetic about (which is pretty unusual for a show to do). Freddy and Cook may be occasionally dismissive of JJ, but they also possess a sincere feeling of brotherly protectiveness over him. Along with Pandora and Emily, JJ is on the side of the character ledger of mild-mannered, essentially decent, non-self-destructive individuals who are brought into the all-consuming crossfire of their toxic friends. 

-JJ’s crush on Effy feels just a tiny bit cruel, especially because the show doesn’t take it seriously. 

-Freddy disowning Cook is a major conflict for the season going forward. The show backpedaling on the rupture between them feels a little like a cop-out because of just how believable Freddy’s dismissal was. It works though because it feels like brothers, or even fatalistic lovers, whose lives are so intertwined that they can’t extricate themselves.  

Skins: Season Two, Episode Ten, "Final Goodbyes"

Series Two, Episode Ten, “Final Goodbyes”

Skins is bad at finales. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not spectacularly bad at them, but it definitely struggles with them.

Why is this?

Well, Skins struggles with its big picture narratives. Its deep-dive stories are its bread-and-butter, and having to tell the stories of all its characters at once slightly forces its hand. 

I should probably backpedal here a little bit. This isn’t a terrible episode, even by Skins’ standards. It’s solid and mostly dependable, but it feels unsure of itself and it dawdles on subplots of little value (See that story of Tony and Sid stealing Chris’s casket) 

There’s a steady, powerful through-line provided by Chris’s death and his impending funeral. There’s even a good conflict created by Chris’s father shutting out the characters from the funeral. It’s just that that conflict feels unnecessary and the drama it stirs up fails to focus on the crucial emotional element here. 

See Skins is telling a story about the loss of innocence. Cassie witnessed Chris’s death not just because of her questionable emotional state, but because Skins has always seen her as an innocent (It’s not a coincidence that her season seven reunion episode is called “Pure”). And Chris was the closest the show had to a wounded heart, which only served to make his death all the more tragic. 

This might seem slightly strange for a group of sexed-up, drug-addled scalawags. But it should be clear by now that the partying-lifestyle is a bunch of bluster for a group of scared, confused teens who have no idea what they’re doing.

Most of the sendoffs here are ellipses, not periods. Maxxie and Anwar go off to London and have no clue what the future holds. Tony and Michelle are uncertain of where their relationship, and their future in general, stands. Sid may or may not find Cassie. It’s the bitter uncertainty of adulthood that they’ve begun to taste. 

That’s all great thematically, but it plays less well in the actual telling. There are terrific moments here: Jal’s speech at the funeral is powerful stuff. Tony saying goodbye to Sid is the most human that character has ever seemed. Michelle and Jal’s conversation at the aquarium is beautiful and moving, while losing none of the show’s off-kilter sense of humor. Even Anwar gets a nice little story arc about him failing his exams and having no clue what to do with his future (It’s the most substantial story Anwar has had in ages).

There’s also less terrific stuff. I could have done without the Sketch scenes. Chris’s dad’s scenes are also far more extensive than they ought to be considering this is the finale. The car chase is ridiculous. And because Cassie is in New York, we don’t get nearly enough time with that character. 

Skins biggest problem is not its goofy antics or its unnecessary flights of fancy, but its inability to earn a lot of its dramatic moments (This is, for instance, why Jal’s episodes have failed to land). I like what’s going on with Anwar but have been given no reason to care because we’ve spent so little time focusing on Anwar. This similarly makes it hard to get invested in Maxxie’s big trip to London. By contrast, we’ve spent a lot of time dealing with Tony and Michelle and I feel nothing for their ambiguous future. Their story just was not interesting enough this season, and the writers didn’t quite seem to pick up on that. 

This was an uneven season. There were some standout moments but the show lacked the vivacity of its first season. Skins’ second seasons have the quality of “our heart just wasn’t in it” to them. The show is good at beginnings and ungainly at endings. Its ability to reboot is a blessing. I’m not sure I could have dealt with another season of the stories of this set of characters. 

Grade: B

Skins: Season Two, "Jal" and "Cassie"

Series Two, Episode Eight, “Jal”

In every generation of Skins, there’s one or two characters who aren’t particularly well-serviced. For Skins, Jal is by-and-large one of those characters. Anwar and Maxxie are even worse offenders of this, but Jal feels like an even more disappointing instance of this because she actually has far more untapped potential. She’s a straight-laced band geek overshadowed in her personal and familial life who then gets burdened with an impossible life choice (namely that unwanted pregnancy). The pregnancy feels like a cheap plot device until you realize what Skins (admittedly haphazardly) is trying to use it for: to push a nebbish character to be bold and decisive for once in her life. And yet, she resists even this.

That’s all great on paper, but I’m not sure Skins knows how to tell this story. It’s glib about the pregnancy, and it’s equally glib about its treatment of race, a central fixture of Jal’s episode. It’s even facile in in the reintroduction of Jal’s long-missing mother. Its reductiveness is all the more startling when one remembers that she’s asking Jal to abort her child when she also abandoned Jal. It’s not like this narrative point isn’t apparent, but it all feels rushed and careless. 

Skins is many things, but a consistently written show is not one of them. Even its best efforts feel like the writers stumbled upon them accidentally. I love those better moments because a slew of them would never make it in almost any other show. That’s because Skins more frequently aims from its gut rather than its brain. It’s more interested in making you feel something (whether that’s puerile giggles or bone-aching sadness). 

It’s not like “Jal” doesn’t attempt this (and occasionally succeeds beautifully, as in the scene where her brothers comfort her). But it feels jumbled and overstuffed, and only rarely does it cohere into something more than the sum of its parts. (This is a big picture problem for the show as well, but more on that when I discuss the finale). 

Grade: B

Series Two, Episode Nine, “Cassie”

By contrast, in every generation there are a handful of such vividly realized, singularly original characters that even the lowest storytelling points for those characters are beside the point. Cassie is one of them. She’s a legacy character. By which I mean, she’s one of those characters that will endlessly generate goodwill for the show because it’s such a daring character and story to tackle. 

Cassie is a volatile character and the penultimate episode takes her perspective because even though the dust has settled on most of the major narratives, Cassie is sneakily dissatisfied. That’s because Cassie will never be truly content. She got the boy. She escaped her lousy parents and she’s about to pass her exams with good grades (although at a specially designed make-up session).

Cassie, however, always assumes the worst is just around the corner. The decline and fall of Rome is inevitable. It’s only a matter of when. She’s looking for excuses to ensure that this will take place (and Chris’s death acts as the trigger, but only serves as a very compelling, albeit devastating, excuse). 

Cassie’s behavior only becomes understandable when seen this way. Otherwise, she seems to be stirring shit up just for the sake of it. But that ignores the mental and personal problems Cassie faces. In one way or another, she’ll always be dealing with them. 

Her solution is to run away from her problems (drastically so, all the way to a very underwhelmingly conceived New York City). That’s the behavior of someone with unresolved psychological issues. It should be a bracing development but the series plays it for whimsy and humor. That is until the final, heartbreaking moments where Cassie break down crying. Running away hasn’t solved anything. She thought location was the determinant of her unhappiness, but we all carry our burdens with us wherever we go. 

Grade: B+

Skins: Season Two, "Tony" and "Effy"

Series Two, Episode Six, “Tony”

Your mileage will vary on how much you get out of “Tony”. It amounts to an episode about how Tony got his mojo back. 

This is not necessarily a narrative a certain corner of Skins’s audience (myself included) is particularly interested in. After all, this is a fairly awful human being and his redemptive arc has tried far too hard to create sympathy for a character that really hasn’t earned it. The show hinted at character progression towards the end of the first season and that felt mostly natural (if not also a little rushed). But the show had to use an external development to create an internal shift. And it hasn’t proven nearly as effective has intended. It also doesn’t help that we get glimmers of the Old Tony, the shitty, sadistically clever bastard who messes with people out of a deep sense of insecurity. 

We see this Tony in the opening and closing scenes of the episode, the only scenes that can be said to have happened in a literal reality. Because the other element that makes “Tony” a hard to take episode is that it’s a bizarre blend of Freudian and Jungian symbolism played with absolute sincerity. Let’s ignore for the moment whether this works, and take a moment to remember that the show has never told its narrative in this manner before. I’m not saying that it’s not allowed to. But Skins has at least had some consistency as to how it tells its stories and the ways it’s capable of telling them. Even when it gets semi-adventurous, it’s usually in a manner of perspective or tone, not necessarily in fundamental storytelling genetics. 

So besides the questionable choice of storytelling, how good is it at actually telling this type of story? The results are mixed. It’s a tiny bit sexy but mostly it’s obtuse and obscure. The scenes with the burn-victim soldier/professor don’t feel like they’re of a piece with everything else. Too much of what the show is trying to say is incredibly obvious, while other elements are so thoroughly enigmatic as to be incomprehensible.

If you’re able to embrace the story and accept what it’s going for, there’s certainly a mysterious allure to the episode (For one thing, it’s one of the best directed episodes of the series). But the real question is whether Tony’s trip of self-discovery had to take place in such a cryptic and abstract way (or, for that matter, at all). 

Grade: B

 

Series Two, Episode Seven, “Effy” 

Skins has a Second Season Problem (one not isolated to this generation of characters). The writers burn through all the story they have to tell with a group of characters and then scramble to create drama and say meaningful things in the following season. The Tony-Michelle-Sid-Cassie story is a darker, more toxic take on what already occurred last season. 

The series’ second seasons aren’t devoid of value. After all, this is a narratively more adventurous season that’s pushing its characters into interesting emotional territory. Even if it’s not always successfully doing what it’s attempting, I appreciate that it is reaching for it in the first place. 

But we can already see that the show is exhausting its potential with this group of characters.

This is an episode designed to essentially act as a back-door pilot for the next season. Effy is going to be the character that bridges the two generations of characters. She’s young enough that she doesn’t have to be written off just yet, and the writers are exploring how she’ll act as her own force of drama in the seasons to come. If we have doubts about the long-term shelf life of the show, the writers are attempting to assure us that they can still find stories about new characters. 

And that bodes well. Frankly, Effy already appears to be a more intriguing center of conflict than her brother. There’s a gleeful wheeling-dealing quality to her manipulations and she does them in the name of doing something good (even if that’s very low on the list of reasons she does it). She’s playing the mind-games that Tony was known for in the first season, but in a different vein informed by her gender and her different personality. 

There’s a meta quality here. Effy derisively refers to the love rhombus drama as a “bad soap opera” and intervenes to end the tedium of it. At this stage, Effy sort of knows she’s a television character (this won’t remain true for later seasons). By the end of the episode, everyone is coupled up, and Effy has proven herself a character worthy of our ongoing interest. She’s incredibly perceptive of human behavior, and yet (dramatic irony alert) she barely understands herself (The possibilities! *he said sarcastically*) 

This is a smart use of this character without detracting from the larger, on-going narrative. It integrates her in, while hinting at a life beyond the typical stories we’ve been getting from the rest of the first generation (including the introduction of other future second generation alum daffy Pandora)

Grade: B

Skins: Season Two, "Michelle" and "Chris"

Series Two, Episode Four, “Michelle”

It’s hard to buy Michelle and Sid’s anguished feelings over their current relationships with Tony. It requires us to ignore a lot of dark personal history from last season. The show is using the bus accident to wipe the slate clean with the character. 

And even if we do accept it, Michelle and Sid’s behavior (and that of the rest of the characters more broadly) has been overly insensitive. We’re supposed to read this as the narcissism and selfishness of adolescence (We know that Michelle, in particular, is a an incredibly selfish character, but a lot of this is due to faux-superficiality). But it still rings a little bit falsely. It feels too much like the writers trying to goose up drama where it no longer exists.

After all, the show already resolved the tension arising from Sid’s feelings towards Michelle. Pushing the two characters together feels like insincere backtracking. The relationship looks desperate, a sad coping mechanism rather than a worthwhile partnership. But, on some level, the show wants us to take this relationship seriously. It’s doomed to fail out of narrative necessity but there’s real emotion there. 

Of course, that’s just a very small portion of “Michelle”, an episode that feels like a back-to-basics story after the early, somewhat adventurous outings of the beginning of the season (Along with the last episode “Sid”, although that was surprisingly more dramatic than typical Skins-fare). It’s back to the wacky comedy and searing pathos that the show does best, and not the structural gambits of the first two episodes. 

The episode is the closest Skins could get to doing a sitcom episode without becoming a full-on sitcom. Even the central conflict between Michelle and her new step-sister and its “We’re not so different you and I” resolution feels like something from a TGIF comedy (a lot of the business at the beach especially the camping-related mishaps reads like this). Michelle’s step-sister does serve as a nice (if especially obvious) foil to Michelle. She’s, as Michelle assesses, “not really a bitch”, but pretending to be one because she believes she needs to be and everyone has come to anticipate that from her. Michelle (by design) might as well be talking about herself.

Grade: B

Series Two, Episode Five, “Chris”

Trying to manage the balance between the persona we project and the inner person that hides is a theme that continues into this episode. This is true of the episode’s focal point Chris, but also of his foil and partner-in-crime Jal, as well as Cassie. The two relationships the episode establishes between Chris and Jal, and Chris and Cassie are important for the season going forward and simply two of the more effective, well-realized character pairings. 

Chris is expelled from school and kicked out of the on-school housing. This should be devastating news. But, in his typical carefree way, Chris shrugs it off as if it’s no big deal. The story that follows really isn’t that strong. Chris uses career services to get a job selling houses, but this comedic business is broad and silly. 

What is strong is Chris’s budding romance with Jal. Jal and Chris are such polar-opposites that they bring out the best of both characters and actors. It helps that Joseph Dempsie and Larissa Wilson have enormous chemistry. They light up in eachother’s presence.

It also helps that the characters aren’t burdened with the star-crossed lover narratives of Sid, Cassie, Michelle and Tony (particularly Sid and Cassie). Their relationship is natural and believable and builds off previous character development and interactions. It’s also a healthy relationship, which contrasts starkly with all the other relationships. The two push the other to be the best possible version of themselves, which is the ultimate purpose of a good relationship. 

They’re also well-paired for reasons that might not have been immediately obvious but that the episode plainly spells out. Both have been abandoned by parents. However, how they’ve reacted to this trauma has been vastly different. Chris has taken a self-destructive path, while Jal has steeled herself. As Jal points out, lots of people have experienced what Chris has; that doesn’t give him an excuse to constantly fuck-up (as he severely does here by hooking up with *sigh* Angie – I thought we were done with her too). 

The episode doesn’t go into this but Cassie suffers from similar past trauma. Her parents have been so neglectful as to be essentially a non-presence. Her self-destructive streak isn’t all that different from Chris’s, as she copes by sleeping around and doing drugs. We like to believe our problems are unique and special but that frequently isn’t the case. That doesn’t diminish the importance of them, but it also doesn’t excuse bad behavior and a lousy attitude.  

Grade: B+

Stray Observations:

-The final scenes on the beach are pretty gorgeous, especially Sid and Michelle silhouetted against the sunrise. 

-The broken watch is an obvious symbol even by Skins's standards.

-I love Jal interrogating Tony, Sid, Maxxie, and Chris in the bar. The normal friend having to put up with the ridiculous drama of her outsized friends. 

-Cassie’s toxic behavior would be despicable if the show hadn’t already done so much work already to make her a sympathetic and tragic figure. 

-I’m not sure how being a real estate agent works over in England, but I have to imagine it requires having a license to perform. 

-Jal buys Chris’s argument to win her back a little too easily. Yes, she is pregnant with his child, but that doesn’t excuse his terrible behavior.

-I’m assuming that’s Larissa Wilson’s actual tattoo that we see here because I don’t really buy the character of Jal getting a tattoo like that.

Skins: Season Two, "Sketch" and "Sid"

Series Two, Episode Two, “Sketch”

The first two episodes of this season are doing very few favors for Skins. Before we get into the structural and character choices here that don’t work, I think we can all agree we need to deal with the obvious. A musical that’s essentially “9/11: The Musical” is in incredibly poor taste. Not that Skins isn’t aware of this. The show is intentionally being flippant and darkly comical about it. And no matter how politically incorrect it may be (the answer: incredibly so), it’s still hilarious because it’s so shocking and unexpected. But why do it at all in the first place? 

Because it can.

This is a mindset that also explains the focus on Sketch (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), a character who is stalking and obsessed with Maxxie. The show is striking a delicate balance. It wants us to be disgusted by Sketch’s actions and yet sympathize with her all the same. Because Sketch is a pitiable character, and the episode goes extensively out of its way to underline this. Sketch’s home-life is devastatingly sad. She lives with her disabled mother, who is incapable of doing just about anything without the help of her daughter. Sketch is stuck due to her mother’s dependence on her, and thus she’s desperate to escape her circumstances. This is why she projects onto Maxxie all these things just aren’t true or realistic. 

None of this hard to comprehend, and it’s largely well-handled. However, it also feels unnecessary. Why did the series require a new character? More importantly, why did it require this character? It’s a weirdly specific story and character to invest so much time in, especially considering this cast of characters only has one season left before they’re written out of the show. 

For instance, Anwar doesn’t a get a standalone episode this season. Instead, Sketch preys on Anwar’s vulnerability and desire for sex and companionship. Anwar becomes essentially comic relief to prop the story of a character we’ve just met and have been given little reason to care about. 

Grade: B-

Series Two, Episode Three, “Sid”

This is more like it.

After two uneven, uncertain efforts, Skins gets back on track. It does this by reemphasizing the balance that finds the series at its best: the combination of the mundane and the exceptional. Take the family dinner, which is an incredibly well-observed commonplace moment (if not a little forgivably clichéd). The episode is filled with several ordinary, everyday moments before it’s pierced with singular tragedy and shifts gears. 

On some level, Skins is about how our identities are formed partly by our complicated relationship with our parents. The way Anwar’s mother smothers him has made him into a doofy mama’s boy. The neglectful upbringing of Tony and Effy turned them into ungrateful wretches, while Cassie’s similar poor parentage caused her to become a basketcase. Jal fears she’ll end up like the mother who walked out on her family, while Chris buries his feelings about his own abandonment by his parents. 

“Sid” draws this theme out further by having Sid’s grandfather visit, demonstrating how the effects of upbringing have a ripple effect, passed down from generation to generation. Sid acts the way he does partly out of fear that his dad sees him as a fuckup, but it’s more complicated than that. His dad fears for his son because he himself was seen as failure in the eyes of his own father. 

Sid finally gets validation from his father, only for his father to suddenly die. Sid acts like nothing has happened, but he’s burying his grief because his father was one of the few constants in his life. This is especially true after he breaks up with Cassie after misinterpreting events witnessed over a webcam (in one of the sillier moments in the episode, which is slightly made up for by the breakup itself which is heartbreaking). 

Sid goes to a party, hoping to distract himself from his grief, but it only serves to isolate him further. He wants to be comforted by his friend Tony, but Tony has been so out of commission as of late that it seems like a hopeless cause. 

Then comes the signature moment of the episode. All of the sound on the soundtrack drops out except for the blaring of the song by the Crystal Castles and wordlessly the episode finds Sid collapsing into the arms of Tony. They’re surrounded by the dancing crowd, but it all sort of fades out as we hone in on this harrowing, intimate moment. 

The second season of Skins is, in part, about the loss of innocence. It’s about how we come to accept that eventually we’re going to have learn to live in this world on our own. It’s about how we learn about the impermanence of things in this world and this life. This recognition starts here and will become more pronounced in the back-half of the season.

Grade: A-

Stray Observations:

-Jal is part of the pit band for the musical and looks oh-so-enthused about it. Those skyscraper-shaped hats are the epitome of dorky.

-Sketch’s treatment of her mother in order to perform in the play is horrifying. The season has an incredibly difficult time engendering any sympathy for Sketch.

-The specificity of Sketch’s story makes it clear that this is a story that the writers intentionally set out to tell this season. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. 

-Sid breaks up with Cassie after seeing his father’s treatment by his mother. Despite the general absence of parents in the series, it should be noted that one of the show's consistent psychological and thematic interests is the way people fear they'll end up just like their parents.

-Chris’s reaction to the play is priceless. More please!

Skins: Season Two, "Tony and Maxxie"

Oh Skins and your weird structural problems. Skins’s second season is one of the more poorly structured seasons on both a micro and macro level. “Tony and Maxxie” seems like the weird Faustian bargain of writers who wanted to tell more of Maxxie’s story but didn’t have enough episodes to do a standalone episode. Since, after all, they also needed to deal with the aftermath of Tony surviving the accident from last season’s finale. And Tony gets an episode later because his prominence to the larger season narrative is a far more pressing than Maxxie’s.

Don’t get me wrong. Maxxie is a big part of the season long narrative, but in narratively strange and confusing ways (but we’ll get to that in more detail in the review of the next episode). I’m all for expanding this underwritten character, but he doesn’t seem to have a real personality. He likes dancing and he wants to pursue it as a career. But that’s about it. 

What’s far more revealing is Maxxie’s interactions with his father (Mitch Hewer). Maxxie’s fights with his father over choosing his own path in life feel real. What’s more, neither of them is entirely right or wrong; they each have a perspective and are simply trying to do what’s best. Skins is at its best when it’s validating multiple perspectives then having them clash. 

But the episode’s interests lie far more squarely with Tony’s circumstances. The show is trying to pull off a tricky balance. Tony’s accident is intended as a humbling situation. But it’s also meant to inspire sympathy for a character who for all of last season could barely register empathy from us. Tony is certainly far more sympathetic here, but the narrative context required to achieve this is so extreme that it still remains hard to buy. This version of Tony doesn’t really align strongly enough with what we’ve previously seen of the character. This might be the point entirely. But it still doesn’t entirely work (It’ll prove more effective in later episodes as we get acclimated to the shift) 

Another new dynamic that proves hard to believe is the character shifts seen in Sid and Michelle. It feels like a regression for the character progress of both of them. It would be fine for them to feel upset over Tony’s injury. But they should also have mixed feelings. Tony, after all, was a cruel dick to both of them, and being disabled doesn’t suddenly even the score. 

The reset on these characters and their relationships feels like an easy way for the writers to wring drama out of a largely played out story. The love rhombus served its purpose last season, but it feels like an unnecessary repetition in some respects here. The story that would best reward what came before might have had Tony recovering his memory and in the process coming to terms with his past actions. But the series wants to treat them as if they’re a moot point.

Grade: B