Skins Redux: Pure – Will The Real Cassie Ainsworth Please Stand Up?
The second part of the three-part series hones in on fan-favourite Cassie. Except she's not really Cassie anymore. What gives?
Warning: this is a recap — there will be spoilers. Also, Skins Redux: Pure includes a storyline that romanticises abuse to women, in this case in the form of stalking and privacy breach.
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Series seven of Skins consists of six episodes divided into three two-episode arcs, each focusing on a beloved character from the past. Two weeks ago we looked at Skins: Fire, which revolved around Effy from generation two. This week, it was Cassie from generation one, whose second episode aired this week.
If there’s one thing almost all Skins fans will agree on, it’s Cassie. She’s long been a fan favourite, and, in character, Hannah Murray is as beautiful as ever. But watching her in Pure, it feels like you’re just watching Hannah Murray; for some reason, everything that’s Cassie about her seems to have evaporated into thin air.
For a start, she doesn’t really dress much like the Cassie we know. Between series two and now, Cassie’s mother has died and she’s broken up with Sid — perhaps that accounts for her new boring wardrobe? Secondly — perhaps most disappointingly — there’s not a “wow” to be found. (There’s a moment in the second episode of the arc where you think she might have muttered the trademark catchphrase — but it might also have been a ‘well’ or a ‘woah’.)
It’s as though we’ve been given a whole new person; the closest thing to character continuity is a lot of pretty shots of park benches.
Cassie and park benches go way back.
When we meet Cassie this time around in London, five years after we left her in New York, she’s a waitress in a poky sort of café, living in what seems to be a share house — although it may as well be a hostel. Random backpacker types seem to come and go, and everyone’s a bit sketchy and high as a kite.
The writers are quick to let us know where everything now stands: in an early conversation with her flatmate, Maddie, Cassie reveals that she and Sid travelled around America for a bit after the end of Series Two, and that she left him because if she didn’t, she would have stayed with him forever.
This, of course, is exactly what every Skins fan has wanted to happen since 2007 — so right from the start, Pure sets itself up as a disappointment.
Cassie is perpetually on the outside; at the café, at the share house, in her own family. In this way at least it’s the old Cassie: she always worked best when she was observing, not participating. She’s fallen out of contact with the old gang, and doesn’t appear to have any friends except for Maddie, who’s well-intentioned but distracted, and mostly unavailable.
Cassie has a one night stand with one of her co-workers at the café, Yaniv, but there’s nothing much to it. Cassie is lonely.
Cassie’s always been a bit passive. But when we find out that Jakob, the socially awkward young cook at her work, is camping out in an abandoned office floor across the road from her place, taking creepy photos of her in her bedroom and publishing them online, she should probably leap into action. Passivity has a time and place. When you are being photographed in your underwear without your knowledge? Neither that time, nor that place.
Creep should not get rewarded.
Sure, she freaks out a little at first — roughs him up and takes his camera — but when Maddie points out that it’s actually quite cute and flattering that someone is interested enough in Cassie to invade her privacy and autonomy against her will, Cassie swiftly recommences Doing Absolutely Nothing.
Oh, except she does do something. She rushes back to Jakob, hands him back his camera, and gets her top off for him.
Creep gets rewarded.
It’s here that the writers of Skins cross a line that the show has always straddled. The series has always happily dabbled in illegal activity — dangerous and unconventional relationships; perplexing scenarios that bear little resemblance to reality — but never has it felt so irresponsible in the messages it sends. (I’m not going to give any young readers a sermon about all the reasons it is NOT flattering when a man shows a woman the wrong sort of attention, without their consent; just Google “twilight feminism angry” — something will pop up.)
Apart from everything else, it’s just lazy writing: isn’t this exactly what happened with Sketch in Series Two, only much creepier?
And that’s to say nothing of the whole Cassie-becomes-a-fashion-model-and-giggles-a-lot moment that happens out of the blue in the second part of the arc. It’s just BAD. And weird. If I wanted to watch an episode of The Carrie Diaries, I would.
The highlight of Skins Pure is undoubtedly the relationship Cassie has with her family. Since we left them in Series Two, her mum has died, and her father – who was always more in love with Cassie’s mother than he was interested in their children – has been left in charge of her brother, Reuben, who was only a baby when we last saw him.
As a depressed alcoholic, her dad is pretty hopeless at parenting, and it mostly falls to Cassie to sort everyone’s lives out; kind of what was happening before, only now it’s heaps more sad. Cassie’s still trying to break away and establish herself as a young woman, and yet she continues to be pulled back.
Overall, Skins Pure suffers the same problems as Skins Fire: it’s beautifully shot, and it’s nice to catch up with these characters — but when it’s not well-executed, we feel ripped off, flung through the emotional ringer for nothing. But at least with Fire, Effy still felt like Effy; here it’s hard to remember who Cassie even is, and why we even care.
Considering the way the Redux is going, and considering how we last left Cook at the end of Series Four, his arc in Skins Rise better really bring it.
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Sian Campbell is a Brisbane-bred freelance writer, a 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.
You can follow Skins with her here.