Skins: Season One, "Michelle" and "Effy"

Series One, Episode Seven, “Michelle”

Skins has an incredible ability to recover. Its episodic structuring is both a blessing and a curse. The series is experimental, playing around with genre, tone and narrative week-to-week. But sometimes the writers aren’t particularly adept at handling one type of story versus another. Yet whenever it falls flat on its face (rarely as spectacularly as “The Russian Episode”), it can always get back up and wholly reinvent itself. 

“Michelle”, for all its shortcomings (for instance, the stuff with Michelle’s mother is broad and obvious, and Tony’s manipulations rid Michelle of agency), is a breath of fresh air after the disaster of the previous episode. The show moves on like hardly anything ever happened. A few plot points carry over, but they exist entirely outside of the context of the episode they took place in. While “Michelle” isn’t the best thing the show has done, its strengths are heightened by being placed directly after “Maxxie and Anwar”.

So let’s highlight those. Must notably, there is Michelle (April Pearson) as an active as opposed to a passive character. Michelle is a frustrating character. This is partly by design. She’s bought into her image as popular, attractive princess, and she’s doing everything to maintain that image. But accepting this means overlooking the excessive bad behavior of Tony. Her conception of a relationship seems stuck back in the 1950’s. 

But Michelle finally stands up for herself, and that make her infinitely more appealing. The best moments of the episode are the beginning and end scenes. Skins is at its best when it simply watches a character think and allows us to process where they’re at psychologically. Crosscutting between Michelle and a carefree Tony isn’t even necessary. We’ve been with these characters for six episodes and we know enough about what’s taking place to understand what Michelle must be feeling. 

And then Michelle punches Tony. It’s awesome and deserved. While it’s certainly the cooler moment, the more important moment comes later when Michelle rejects Tony. The episode gives us just the hint that Michelle is considering accepting it. But it would be dishonest, and it would work against all the character work the rest of the episode lays for Michelle.

Grade: B+

Series One, Episode Eight, “Effy”

“Effy” is a problematic episode. The character this episode is ostensibly about is sidelined. As a result, the episode essentially becomes another episode about Tony, a character the show is trying desperately to create sympathy for after being the absolute worst since day one. Making Tony the focus in an episode about Effy (Kaya Scodelario) isn’t entirely unreasonable. After all, Effy is Tony’s sister and so his presence makes sense, but it feels unfortunate to turn Effy into a damsel-in-distress in order to humanize Tony. 

Effy will become a fully-formed character in later seasons. In time, she’ll become essentially the lynchpin for the series. That isn’t apparent here though (It’s hard to say just how much of what came to happen after the first generation was planned out, but it does appear to be very little). Effy is a cipher by design. That would have made digging into her character interesting, but a lot of what takes place here is vague and underdeveloped. And then halfway through things shift to a complete emphasis on Tony. 

The character work here on Tony is arguably necessary. Tony has been another enigma. Here and in the last episode, we witness Tony unravel, and it’s fascinating. Tony has been so thoroughly in control that it’s surprising to see him be so unconvincing and a frayed-wired mess. I don’t know if I entirely buy all of this, but it’s such a welcome change of pace that it almost doesn’t matter. 

Tony has long deserved some comeuppance. I’m just not sure it needed to come in the form that the episode chooses (or, not to get into too much detail, the season finale chooses). The character of Josh is inconsistent with what we learned from last episode (even if Tony’s actions towards him could be seen to have caused this shift in personality). Similarly, Effy’s actions here don’t seem to fit with what we know. Effy is reckless and burdened with ennui, but she’s not stupid. Taking “heroin” just doesn’t fit her MO (although, perhaps I'm reading into this a little too much with foreknowledge). 

This is part of a larger problem regarding how the writers handle the relationship of Tony with Sid and Michelle. It’s easier to overlook this in the first season but it will become more glaring in the following season. On some level, the writers want us to like Tony, and they want us to root for his relationships with Michelle and Sid, even though they’re incredibly toxic.

Grade: B-

Stray Observations:

-The opening sequence of "Michelle" is one of the best directed moments of the entire series. It's psychologically fraught and real, it's melodramatic, it's tense, it's funny. It's all the elements of the show at its best with a visual thoughtfulness and dynamism to match.

-Michelle is actually a pretty delightful character underneath all the entitled pretty girl posturing. She’s knowingly funny, and she’s culturally literate. Look at her quoting the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and To Have Not.

-I think “Michelle” makes the line of connection between Michelle’s mother’s behavior and her own a little too finely. Usually the series is a little more oblique regarding this sort of thing.

-Tony’s actions in “Michelle” are as appalling as they’ve ever been (his manipulation of Abigail to screw over Josh is just disgusting), but they’re more complicated because the show seems like it’s trying to inspire sympathy for the frazzled Tony. It’s also more troubling because it takes time out from what is Michelle’s episode to wallow in Tony’s terribleness. And it makes the episode ultimately about Tony and Michelle’s relationship, even though the episode is really about Michelle accepting her need to be her own person. 

-Michelle and Jal’s relationship is an underused one. It brings out nice notes in both characters. 

-Jal’s casual listing of Tony’s conquests to Michelle is played comically but it’s also more than a little alarming. As is the justification, “It’s only Tony, right?” There’s a whole lot about social conditioning and gender packed into that small moment. 

-Josh is almost too perfect as presented in “Michelle”. Although the following episode does a complete, not entirely plausible, one-eighty.

-Michelle and Sid’s character arcs are ultimately about learning some level of self-respect, which makes it fitting that they choose not to sleep together. 

-The hang out at Chris’s dorm room is far more reflective of what it’s like to hang with friends in high school (or sixth form school, as it were). Again, I think we tend to overlook these details in favor of the lewder elements of the series. Also, Chris’s fish tank is pretty sweet. 

-Sid and Cassie’s relationship doesn’t get nearly the amount of story time it deserves. It’s far more interesting and nuanced than anything between Tony and Michelle. But it keeps getting pushed to the margins. 

-Sid accurately diagnoses why Tony has been manipulating everyone. Tony is bored and toying people for his own private amusement.