Skins Redux – Fire: Was It Worth The Wait?

Skins series seven consists of six episodes, and is divided into three two-episode arcs each focusing on a beloved character: Effy from generation two (‘Skins Fire’), Cassie from generation one (‘Skins Pure’), and Cook from gen two (‘Skins Rise’). First up is Effy, whose second episode aired this week.

This is a recap — there will be spoilers.

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When we left Effy and co. three years ago, this is where they were at: Eff’s boyfriend had just been offed by her nutcase therapist (Was he in love with her? Was that what we were meant to take away from that? I don’t remember, or don’t care, or both. I love Skins, but that storyline was dumb as balls), and she was this weird, drugged-out, broken-down hot mess. Naomily finally sorted itself out and became Endgame, and everyone else was… well, I think Pandora went to Harvard?

Which brings us to now.

When the first episode of the Skins Fire arc starts, you almost forget you’re watching an episode of Skins — “Where are all the teenagers in fluorescent clothing drinking vodka in public?” you might wonder. “What is this?!””

That is, until approximately five minutes twenty seconds into the episode, when Effy tells her co-worker (and possibly friend; it’s hard to tell with Effy) that, “you look like a horse when you laugh down your nose like that”.

And then it begins to click. Because of course Effy is some sort of share-trading genius. Of course she has some sort of freaky mind for maths. It just sort of fits, in this beautifully unexpected way. And Naomi’s foray into stand-up comedy, which at first it seemed like the dumbest and most out-of-character idea ever, actually makes sense when she’s on stage. Because she’s good, but she’s not doing anything — and slowly you realise that everything Naomi’s ever said has been some sort of stand-up routine.

So, after going off the walls in high school (pardon me, “college”), Effy has somehow found herself as an assistant at some sort of stockholding/share trading place. And she’s super into it. Like, expensive clothes and decorating her entire bedroom with reports and graphs. And she’s really good at it, too. Effy’s calculating way of analysing a situation has always been pretty freakishly accurate, and it makes sense that that would carry over to facts and figures.

I’m not sure how she got where she is now – it’s a miracle she even made it to adulthood – but it’s working for her. You get the sense that she’s burying herself in her work to curtail the crazy; she’s figured out how to stand in one place, and maybe if she doesn’t let herself look up from her desk, she can’t mess up again. (Sure, she still sneaks out to go clubbing and drop a teensy bit of coke before work, but duh. This is Skins we’re watching.)

(Meanwhile, am I the only one who thinks that Effy’s boss guy/sex buddy looks scarily like a grown up, kinda Greek, really built and chiselled version of Freddie? And her boss lady looks suspiciously like an older Effy? Is this deliberate? Am I going crazy? Can we talk about this?)

While the arc is purportedly about Effy, any reasonable person will tell you it’s really about Naomily and can we please stop pretending otherwise. When we meet Naomi this time, she’s a bit of a stoner layabout. My gut reaction is to recoil, because of all the things I thought Naomi would be, lazy was not one of them.

In “college” you got the sense that Naomi was stuck. She, more than any other character, was enslaved by the trappings of adolescence. She had bigger and better things to worry about than whatever it was her friends were doing; she had better places to be than school or her Mum’s place, but she was a kid, and she didn’t have a choice. She was smarter and more interesting than everyone else, but when you’re 16 or 17 everyone’s on equal ground. Seeing passionate, political and idealistic Naomi now, lying around mooching off Effy, feels like a kick to the guts. Didn’t she sneak off to go to that Uni Open Day in Series 4? What does Emily, now making it in the Big Apple, think of her girlfriend’s personality transplant?

And what happens next makes it seem so much worse that she never ended up where we thought she would.

I just don’t know what to think about Naomi’s cancer. In a way, I’m glad they didn’t bring these two back just to fart around with relationship troubles again. At the end of series four, you knew Naomily was forever, and the writers didn’t try to mess with that. Naomi and Emily, in the brief time they were on screen together, were as on the mark as ever, and having them back felt like Christmas.

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Skins Fire is beautifully shot, and the trademark way the show is able to seamlessly slide secondary character arcs into the narrative works just as well as it ever did. But what Skins does well, it knows it does well, and that’s the problem the show’s had since series four: it’s refused to stop trying to recreate the magic.

Since the shocking and beautiful storyline that was Chris’s death in series two, the Skins writers have killed off a character in each generation since. Freddie’s ridiculously badly-written murder at the end of series four left the audience feeling as though they were being played; the writers were trying to milk shock value by flogging a dead horse, and they expected us not to notice. It was hard for me to trust them enough after that to bother even tuning in for series five, and when they killed off Grace at the very start of series six, I was done. Except I wasn’t.

It was naïve of me, perhaps, to think that they’d move past their same old box of tricks, but I did — and they didn’t.

As always with post-Gen 1 Skins, I feel ripped off and satisfied all at once. Skins Pure, come at me. Writers, do your worst.

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Sian Campbell is a Brisbane-bred freelance writer, literature student at The University of Melbourne and co-founding editor of online lit journal Scum Mag. She blogs and tweets and still plays Neopets.