"...life can always start up anew..."

Do you remember the first time we saw the second cast of Skins? That wonderful sequence where Freddie hops on his skateboard at the top of Park Street and dodges his way past all the obstacles on the way down, before meeting up with Cook & JJ. Cook already on, what, his third or fourth pint of the day and they'd not yet started their first day at college. And Effie's dad crashing the car, and Cook pretending he'd crashed in to him, and the old granny sticking up for him, and Effy looking call in the car. And as she walked away all three of them were in love with her...

...it seems like such a long time ago now.

Of course, then it was a really brave thing. Axing, essentially, the whole cast (bar Effy, obviously), and replacing them with completely new characters. It was like Grange Hill on an epic scale; there there was always the turnover of characters, as each year left the school, there was another new year waiting in the wings. But as that was set in a secondary school and sixth form college, each character could be there for up to seven years, so even if some left, there was always a core of characters from the previous series there. Not so, with Skins. Such a wholesale change of cast shouldn't have worked; but it did.

Whilst it's true the old cast were missed, we soon grew to love the new one. We became as invested in this mob's lives as we were in the previous.

Now, we're going to have to go through it all again, as Seasons 5 & 6 (already confirmed as definitely happening by E4) will again have a completely new set of characters (no word on if there's an "Effy" as yet, but if there is, the smart money's on Karen...). This last Thursday we bade farewell to Cook and company with an episode that managed to be both inspired genius, and a massive disappointment at the same time...

Most episodes of a TV show have to do just one thing; be a damn good episode. That's all. There's no denying that was what we got. However, there are a couple of exceptions whereby an episode has to do more. One of these is the first episode of a show, which has to get you hooked on the show's premise and characters; the other is a finale.

The Skins season 4 finale was a damn good episode, but it failed as a finale.

Now, I'm not saying I expect every loose end to be tied up, every question answered, or that kind of thing; just that there should be some kind of satisfactory ending to the characters. It doesn't even have to be a definite ending. Take for example, the end of Skins season 2, which was the finale for the first set of characters. That was an episode that did indeed work perfectly as a finale. You could have ended Skins right there and it would have been seen as a coherent whole.

That whole episode was all about moving on. You had Chris, who had just died, and the rest of the gang coming to terms with his death (the coffin stealing sequence was just brilliant; as was the scene on the beach), and you had the characters moving on to the next stage in their lives. There was the moment when Maxxie was heading to London, with Anwar feeling left alone; until he makes a spur of the moment decision to go with him, changing his life completely. There was Sketch with her totally screwed up existence. Jal's eulogy to Chris. The scene with Tony & Michelle in the car at the airport when they break up. Sid searching for Cassie in New York, and coming so close to finding her... even with the cut away before we see if he notices her or heads off it doesn't seem like a cheat... and that last shot, of Effy in the bed, smiling a cheeky smile that (at least to my mind) brought back echoes of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. It worked.

Whereas the gen-2 cast's finale, mostly, really didn't. There were too many characters whose "resolutions" just came from out of nowhere. Thomas's sudden Harvard Scholarship, and Pandora's extra exams she'd taken being the most obvious examples.

But. As I said earlier, this was not a bad episode. It was a damn good one, as there was so much in it to love. Naomi's declaration of love for Emily was beautiful. Wonderful writing. Brilliantly acted. Also, I actually ended up liking Cook by the end of it (see previous Skins entries in this blog). I do really, really love the show; it's probably the best contemporary drama series around at the moment. I just found this last episode, when judged as a finale, to be so very frustrating.

Which is a shame.

I get the feeling that the show suffered from its cut from 10 to 8 episodes. I wonder how much of the season had been scripted by the time this cut came through, and whether they tried as best they could to cram the ten episodes in to 8, by cutting various elements, and whether these elements would have ensured there was a more finale-esque feeling to that last episode, and that things that appeared to come from nowhere had been seeded beforehand.

I'm still wondering exactly what the point of Freddie's death was. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those loons that's going "oh, noes, Fred's dead, I'm never going to watch again" or anything; I just cannot see why you bother with as shocking a climax as episode 7 had, and to more or less completely ignore it in the finale. I mean, it's not like these characters are ever coming back or anything. In Season 2, Chris's death had a massive impact on the characters, and it became the centre piece around which that season's finale was built. So, I guess they figured that they'd done the whole grief and moving on thing with the show then. But this was a different death. A murder. And there's a whole range of things they could have done.

Instead, he's barely mentioned all the episode, and only Karen seems worried he's not around. They just seem to think he's run away or something. Really, it strikes me that the only reason for having Freddie killed off is in order to get a scene like the very last one with Cook. And even that came from nowhere. With hardly any time left in the episode, Cook notices a figure watching them, follows, finds Freddie's blood stained clothes and twigs he's dead. The phrase "deus ex machina" is somewhat overused in many circles, but seems to apply here perfectly... that last confrontation, however, was great... where it cut off was not.

'Cos you just know that at some point early in Season 5 there'll be some offhand comment whereby they'll be talking about a court case or something, and it'll either be Freddie's murder, or Freddie and Cook's murder, or the Doctor's murder, as it'll have been in the news or something, or gossip around the college and it'll be just like Grange Hill when Jonah left to go to another school... I hated that kind of thing then, and I still hate it now. Little info dumps telling you all about the stuff that's happened off screen that you, really, should have seen on the screen.

The really odd thing is that had that been the very last episode of Skins, ever, with no more to come, I would have liked that ending more. It's that knowing that we'll almost certainly get comments about it next season that sours it. As the last ever shot, it would have worked. But it'll just be relegated to a footnote in a random scene in season 5. It deserves more