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“Skins” recap (4.05): Freddie McClair and the Beautiful Bomb

What do you reckon – bleakest episode of television ever?

I used to liken Skins to Gossip Girl because of the teenage drunkenness and the shagging and the handsome but absent parents and, you know, Dinosaur Jr and Temper Trap. After Chuck’s dad died on GG, he went on this opium/hooker binge and almost jumped off a building, and it was kind of scary and kind of sad, but compared to Freddie’s episode of Skins, Chuck’s meltdown looks like a Saturday morning cartoon. When Cook’s jailbreak is the brightest spot in a million moments, you know you’re operating under a cloak of darkness.

Here’s what’s going to happen: I am going to briefly recap this episode because of no Naomily anywhere. After the brief recap, we’re going to look at the photos of Emily and Naomi’s deleted scene from last week and break that down because we need a little light. And by light, I mean we need to see Lily Loveless smile.

So, Freddie and Effy are high on just about everything, including drugs and one another, but Freddie has to come down because he has a disciplinary hearing at school. Thomas and JJ take the piss when he shows up, and JJ even suggests he plead obsessive-compulsive sex as the reason he’s so behind on his coursework. The counselor informs Freddy that he has a week to catch up on everything or he’ll be following Cook down the well-trodden path of Roundview Expulsion.

Back home, Freddie finds Effy in her mum’s room, cutting out some insane photos of, like, crucifixions and nuclear explosions and illustrations from middle age plagues. (Seriously, what kind of magazines does Effy’s mum subscribe to?) Effy calls it her porn stash and tells Freddie she’s making the collage of doom and destruction so it will be easier for him to accept the end. He’s like, “And what f–king end is that?” And she says – kind of angrily, like she’s sort of disgusted at him for not knowing – “Mine, Freddie.”

Effy passes out. Freddie traces a scar on her forehead because of how he loves her imperfections, and then heads downstairs to tackle his homework, have a smoke, and do some coke, which is – I guess – to help him stay awake and concentrate. Red Bull is a safer (and cheaper) alternative, but I can’t really claim to know much about that either, because (speaking of scars on foreheads) the last time I had an energy drink was to stay up and read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I’m still kind of blaming (spoiler alert!) Dumbledore’s death on the caffeine.

After Freddie is finished studying and mopping the floor and cleaning out the refrigerator and repainting the walls and installing new light fixtures and building a new table with his bare hands, he takes Effy some breakfast. She prefers vodka to milk on her cereal, and I’m pretty sure it’s right then that Freddie finally sees the red flags that have been flapping in his face since at least JJ’s episode last series.

See, Effy is self-medicating because muting her entire existence is the only way to keep her demons at bay. She’s trying to live without color on purpose. It’s not Freddie, of course. Freddie’s not the demon, or even the portal for the demons. It’s a chemical thing, a brain thing, but Effy feels it like monsters clawing at her soul. And the only way she knows to deaden the terror is pills and booze and powder.

The flip side of bipolar disorder is magic. It not sustainable. It’s not even reality. But everyone wants in on the euphoria. Cook. Freddie. Sometimes Panda. Always Katie. They wanted to ride it with her.

Freddie tells her to cut out the dark shit, and she tells him to get out, so he does. He immediately diagnoses her with psychotic depression, not from some checklist or mental health awareness commercial, but because his mum suffered the same thing. She killed herself because of it. Freddie blames his dad for turning her over to a hospital, for not caring enough to save her himself. So now he’s got to be the exact opposite of him and save Effy, and in the tangled part of his mind he’s also got to save his mum.

Effy has called everyone (except Naomi and Emily?) over for a party that is way out of hand, and when Freddie finds her, she is curled into fetal position on the floor of her mum’s room. He reaches under the bed, and so does she, and he touches her fingers and tells her he’ll take care of her. Then he busts up the party by smashing a stereo into the wall and shouting and generally making every possible noise to frazzle the thin thread Effy’s hanging onto.

(This episode is my second-favorite directing in this series behind Emily’s episode. The scene under the bed, and Freddie riding his bike at the beginning with the sun, and the scene in the park in a few minutes: intense and really just gorgeous.)

After the party, Freddie is holding Effy on the stairs when they hear some clanging going on in the kitchen and – oh hey, you! – it’s Cook. He is, of course, on the lam. Before Freddie kicks him out, Cook says Effy looks like “that girl from The Ring” which is super inappropriate and also kind of hilarious because Cook wins the gold medal in always saying the exact wrong thing.

Things go from bad to brutal when Effy expands her death collage and Freddie tries to take her out for some fresh air on a rickshaw. There’s the surreal park scene I was talking about and then Freddie chases away some picnic-ers like they’re zombies. Then somehow they end up at this … parade?

(You guys, I know I am just blatantly American. I mean, I write like an American and I talk like an American, but I’ve been to the UK four times in my young life, and backpacked all around even into Scotland and Wales, and I could draw The Tube map – Zones 1 and 2, at least – from memory right this second if you asked me to. I minored in British history in college! I’m not culturally inept! But then Cook starts speaking Bristol-code or there’s some kind of mid-day Mardis Gras going down on a random side street and I feel like a fool. What is happening here? What is this costume party?)

Anyway, the main thing is that Katie is dressed like an angel and Cook is dressed like the devil and they combine their unnatural powers to hoist Effy and Freddie out of the madness. (Cook and Katie – I think I want to get on that ship. Do you think they would kill each other?)

Katie ends up with Freddie and Effy at Freddie’s grandpa’s retirement home. He suggests a nice cup of tea, but Effy locks herself in the bathroom and slits her wrist because – man, it’s just a war in that girl’s head.

OK, and here’s the most important thing you ever need to know about Effy. And it makes sense, even in reverse, and it makes me scared for her and for Freddie, who is too young to know that the first rule of life-guarding is: a drowning person will drown you too. Not on purpose or anything, but because everyone panics when they can’t breathe.

Before she hit the world, she was this flame, heating every bit of me. So intense, it burned. I think I knew even then that she was going to be remarkable. And then – oh, when I held for the first time, it was like holding this beautiful … bomb. The energy was just, you know – even then it scared me. So I think I’m prepared for this, whatever this is. She’s going to need us, to help rebuild her again.

Freddie says no, that she’s going to need her mum, not him. And then he runs off into the rain and sets fire to Effy’s collage of doom and destruction, and out of the ashes – ’cause he’s a phoenix, you guys – rises Cook to not say the wrong thing, or anything at all. They probably both knew Effy was a beautiful bomb. And they would probably both hold the tick-tick-ticking in their hands again. I think they will.

You know what else I think? I think Naomi and Emily need to spend 45 minutes in front of the telly watching this episode so they can analyze their issues in the proper context of heartbreak!

So, what about that deleted scene from last week?

Because they’ve both showered and that’s the shirt Emily is wearing in last week’s final scene, I’m guessing this is post-barbecue, pre-Fitch pizza party. At first I thought Naomi was getting on with some coursework. But then I decided she was writing Emily a letter, like from Austen’s Persuasion. But then I decided Naomi would punch every one of Austen’s leading ladies in the mouth, especially those Musgroves. So I finally concluded she was reading poetry, like a balm probably. Just something to hope on.

As I walked out one evening

Walking down to Bristol Street

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat

And down the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under the arch of a railway:

“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.”

Yeah, I just quoted W.H. Auden about a TV show. I’m a shipper’s recapper; what can I say?

Next week: You’re not prepared for the adorableness JJ is going to bring. And Emily’s not prepared for the truth he’s going to lay down.

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