SKINS S2E3: Party On, Pain

I don’t know what kind of audience expectations Skins had when it first aired. It comes with this first-sentence Wikipedia vibe of like “the crazy party show with lots of kids fucking” which is weird because the kids almost never party and almost never fuck. Mostly, they undergo serious trauma. WOOOOO! YEAHHHH!

But that must have been the reputation Skins had, given the way it seems to so aggressively fight against it, week after week. This episode, for instance, traps us in Sid’s house for an extended period of time, following only the members of Sid's extended family, and when we finally do return to our old gang we’re seeing them dully, through the lens of Sid’s grief. (This show does a wonderful job of CONSTANTLY recalibrating your expectations and is a master class in tone.) And a party scene, featuring a cameo from a real band (Crystal Castles), which should be exactly the kind of scene you’d want were Skins the kind of show it is perceived to be, is not fun at all but actually where Sid finally breaks down, weeping hysterically in Tony’s arms while the incongruous music blares.

So yeah, this is a wonderful episode, the first one that I’ve found truly moving. We’re at Chez Sid for the first 30 minutes, without a break. His father’s father is visiting, and so Sid’s dad (Mark, played by Peter Capaldi) has convinced his estranged mother to return and pretend to be his wife for the sake of, well, not for the sake of pleasing his father; I guess for the sake of keeping the dude’s displeasure at a minimum. Because when you see what Sid’s family is like, you can really tell what an intergenerational victory Mark has scored by raising his son into a reasonably decent guy. There’s a bunch of animals—or, to paraphrase Mark: fucking Scottish cunts.

This is Capaldi’s show, and the actor weathers Mark’s victories and humiliations with a certain kind of gruff charm. The Sid/Mark relationship is one of the better son/father relationships I’ve seen, and it’s all the better for being articulated subtly. No Cat Stevens on the soundtrack here, in other words.

Sid is mostly a passive bystander to the drama between his elders, but also is fuming over the mistaken impression that Cassie’s cheating on him while away in Scotland. But all of that gets pushed aside when, the night after briefly reuniting with his wife and finally telling off his father, Mark dies.

Sid, alone in the house with his father's body, goes numb. He goes to class, doesn't talk to anyone, and barely notices that 1. someone has declared a fatwa on their college for their 9/11 play (ha ha ha) and 2. Angie has left the school, and Chris, for good. (More on all that later, maybe?) Tony finds Sid still sitting silently in the darkened classroom hours later, and takes him to a concert. Tony’s still in pretty bad shape physically and verbally (later there’s a wonderfully tension-breaking joke where Tony reacts to Mark’s dead body by saying “Ficking hell!” and Sid gently corrects him) but he seems to sense that everything is not all right with his friend. Sid wanders off in a daze, Tony finds him in the crowd, and Sid finally manages to tell someone what happened. And that’s where I totally lost it, you guys. It was an embarrassing show of human emotion and I am glad none of you were there to see it.


The coda to the episode is a goofy little O’Henry thing, where Sid and Cassie turn out to both be on trains going to see each other. I like that it pushes us even further afield from the dark, dusty house where we spent most of the episode—we’re there, we’re there, we’re there and then we slingshot away—but other than that it’s kind of silly. Unless we’re headed for a few episodes of “Sid’s adventures in Scotland!” That’d be OK. I <3 U, Sid.

So yeah, we're back to talking about Skins, okay? Did you guys watch this episode? What did you think?