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“Skins” recap (4.06): JJ Jones and the Final Frontier

If I ever meet the Skins music director – I think his name is Kyle – I am going to kidnap him and extract his magic powers because the music on this show is just a whole other story. It’s the same story, actually, but different. You know what I’m saying. And they’re both so good. JJ always gets the most eclectic mix, which suits him of course. (And anyway, I’m still holding onto my Temper Trap theory about Naomi and Emily.)

So, JJ and Thomas have both gotten jobs at Bristol StuffMart, and JJ is in love. The object of his affection is Lara, and as he assists a grandmotherly customer, she reads it all over his face and tells him to get in there. Back during the war, her brother fell in love, but by the time he plucked up the courage to do something about it, a bomb had blown off his face.

Every night, JJ records his thoughts in his Captain’s Log. He’s an alien here, and it’s cold in the day and the night. Lara is the most beautiful creature on this (or any known) planet, and he promises himself every night that tomorrow is the day she’ll smile at him.

Luckily, JJ’s got Thomas because Lara doesn’t even know his name. On their break, she’s sneezing all over the place, and JJ remembers something about the only time he ever got a girl to sleep with him and he drops a tab of vitamin C in her water. She’s rightly weary because of the ubiquitous MDMA floating around Bristol like horny fairy dust, but JJ explains that it will help her cold and keep her bowel movements regular.

When she leaves, Thomas says that if JJ doesn’t ask her out in ten seconds, he’s going to do it, so JJ chases Lara through StuffMart and asks her out over the loudspeaker. She’s like, “Yeah? Sure?”

At home, JJ kind of panics, but not as much as he should be, because just as he’s really working up a good pace, Freddie shows up with a smoking bag of James “Jimmy” Cook.

JJ explains the many reasons Cook can’t stay at his house, including the fact that he is, at that exact moment, shaving his balls with JJ’s mum’s razor, but he relents when Cook tells him the only three things a person needs to to know about women: 1) Be cool. 2) Touch her so she doesn’t think she’s ugly. 3) Check to see if her pupils are dilated, because then you’ll know if she wants to shag you.

JJ takes Cook’s advice on his date, to which he shows up two hours early, but that’s OK because that gives him time to meet Lara’s baby, Albert. JJ is freaked out for a second, but then he discovers that unlike his friends, babies like magic tricks. Also, boy babies will pee right in your face when you’re changing their diapers. Oh, and Liam, Al’s dad, is kind of a wanker.

Lara and JJ go to a pub where he tries to order some kind of cocktail involving a Capri Sun, which frankly sounds delicious, but makes him seem terribly uncool.

He covertly consults his palm notes for the tenth time, and well, well, well – what have we here? It’s Emily Fitch, the other girl who fell for JJ’s vitamin C trick, and she’s got a giant not-Naomi in tow.

JJ calls out, “Emily?” And Emily turns around like she’s busted, because she is.

JJ can’t quite figure out how to introduce Lara, so she’s like, “I’m your friend, JJ,” and Emily piggy-backs right off that explanation and introduces not-Naomi as her “…friend, Mandy.” Giant not-Naomi – who is wearing a giant pair of not-Naomi earrings and a giant not-Naomi necklace – gives a half-hearted not-Naomi smile, crosses her giant not-Naomi arms and sighs a not-Naomi sigh. And I’ll tell you what else: I like Lara, but her face says she’s not so impressed with Emily Fitch.

(I guess, unlike you, Lara won’t be voting for Kat Prescott in this year’s AfterEllen Hot 100, huh?)

Emily says they were “just going,” and giant not-Naomi says, “But we just got here!” But she follows Emily anyway, pausing on the way out to say, “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” in a kind of possessive way that I do not like one bit, which is why I said, out loud to the TV, “Yes, she is, and keep your giant damn hands off of her.”

JJ calls it odd, even though it’s not really, given the circumstances, but it is sad because what it means is that Emily is trying to fill the Naomi-shaped hole in her heart. I guess that’s why she picked the hugest teenage lesbian she could find; Mandy takes up some space.

After they leave, JJ gets even more nervous – if you can believe it – and spits Lara’s drink in her face, then tries to make a break out of the window. But oh, he’s in the ladies’. He covers by saying he’s just buying her some tampons, which she doesn’t believe for some reason. She splits and he chases after her, winning her over for good by telling her she’s a ten and he’s a three. She says yeah, except he flirts with old ladies.

It’s cute and true, but I mean, it really gets Lara going, so they have a two-day shag-fest, and finally JJ rides home on the back of a milk truck, completely satisfied. How’s that cold milk, J? Well, no matter what, it’s better than what Cook’s been forced to drink in JJ’s two-day absence.

At Psycho(logical) Support, JJ’s mum says she’s worried because of the lies and the porn, and the doctor explains that: a) he shouldn’t be looking at porn, but b) it’s probably OK because someone with his “condition” can’t maintain a healthy relationship. JJ flips out and says that he can, and in fact does, maintain a healthy relationship. And by healthy he means he is having sex every day.

JJ’s mom goes, “Secrets!” And instead of asking the important thing about is he being safe, she wants to know if JJ’s friends have met his girlfriend.

He can’t introduce her to his two best friends, of course, on account of one of them is still busy cleaning his girlfriend’s collage of doom and destruction off the wall, and the other is up to who knows what all, drinking piss and playing the ukulele with his d–k. But he’s on the lam, is the important thing. So JJ chooses Naomi and Emily – because they’re fun.

Noami: So, Laura …

JJ: Lara.

Naomi: Yeah. Isn’t that what I just – so, how old is it?

Lara: He’s nine months. Um, would you mind not, you know, smoking a spliff?

Naomi: Oh, s–t. Sorry. I’m such a tit.

Emily: Tell me about it.

Right, yeah. Fun.

JJ: Anyway, after we ran into Emily the other day, I thought, why not just come on down.

Naomi: … have you already met?

Emily: Yeah. It was a coincidence.

JJ: Right, you were with that nice gi-

Emily: JJ, will you, um, will you go over my, um, politics coursework?

JJ: I don’t do politics.

Emily: Yeah. Just come look, OK?

Naomi’s face is just like – how many more ways can she break, you know? The physical distance, the emotional absence, the caustic remarks, the kissing that girl at the barbecue. There was never a time when Emily didn’t stand in front of her, palms open, offering everything. And now there’s some nice girl?

JJ follows Emily to the bedroom where there isn’t any politics coursework. Emotional insight may not be his thing, but it doesn’t even take intuition to know that Emily is making her rope shorter and shorter with knots that may never come undone. She protests that nothing is going on. Three times she says it, with increasing desperation: “Nothing. Nothing. NOTHING, OK?”

She says she just likes Mandy, and nothing has happened. JJ tells her good, because that would be bad, and Emily is halfway to tears again when she says, “You think I want to get into another relationship? Relationships suck. They really f–king suck.”

We’ve never really talked about how Emily slept with JJ last year. I mean, you’ve talked about it and I’ve talked about it, but we’ve never really talked about it together. Let’s do that now; it’s important, especially since Mandy is the new JJ.

So, Naomi is just this … prism in Emily’s world, right? She holds it up to the sun and – splash! – color everywhere. From the first moment they spot each other across the gymnasium at Roundview until they hold hands and walk off together at the Love Ball, Naomi is Emily’s difference between monochrome and the rainbow. But do you even understand how a prism works? No, and neither does Emily. All she knows is it’s so complicated, the spectrum, the way you hold it, how you turn it. It’s fragile, like she said. It’s a cacophony of color, and it burns. It lights her on fire.

Last year she slept with Naomi, that day by the lake, but then Naomi bolted on her – again. And yes, they held hands that night, through the front door, but for reasons Emily didn’t understand, Naomi still didn’t want her. If color is complicated, the opposite must be black-and-white, and that’s where Emily goes, on purpose, when Naomi’s flame scorches her. That’s her literal reasoning: Complicated burns. I’ll do the opposite. Something simple.

She slept with JJ because he wanted it a lot, and because she liked him. She could be close to him without having to feel the flame (even if that meant see couldn’t see the color). And now here she is telling JJ that she likes Mandy and she doesn’t want to get into another relationship because relationships suck, but she doesn’t even mean relationships. She means Naomi, and the prism she doesn’t understand, and the flame she cannot control. Mandy is simple. The opposite of the flame.

Monochrome won’t make you feel alive. But it won’t kill you either.

JJ tells Emily his relationship doesn’t suck, and he’s right because so far his relationship has consisted of: one very awkward date, three solid days of shagging, and now a visit to The House of Fun. Emily tells him to get out before Lara “kicks the s–t out of him,” and he says that Lara isn’t Naomi. And that right this second he is “75 percent trust” and Emily is “running on empty.”

He tells her to remember who she can rely on, and then goes to check on the baby, to make sure Naomi’s not teaching it to shoot-up or anything.

And if you think that meeting went poorly, wait until Lara meets JJ’s parents. But first: “Your friends are weird,” she says. (Remember last year, what JJ said to Freds when he found him shagging Katie? “I’m the normal one!”)

And maybe he is. And maybe so is Lara. And maybe JJ’s mum could have liked her. She liked Emily, after all, that morning with the toast. But the baby throws her, and even JJ’s dad looks up from his newspaper. They both kind of accidentally call Lara a slut, so she leaves to change the baby, but can’t get into the toilet because the Hairless Bandit is in there shaving his chest.

Lara bounces, and JJ’s mum is like, “James, aren’t you supposed to be in prison?”

The second best love story on this show has always been Freddie/JJ/Cook. It’s something we never get to see on TV, guys just adoring each other and sacrificing for each other and taking care of each other. Yeah, they all fell under Effy’s Dark Magic and that cracked things up for a long time, but even so, they always loved each other best.

Cook is wearing JJ’s pajama pants, the ones with the bears on them.

Cook: You’re a man, aren’t ya, Screaming J? A man of flesh and blood and fight – spunk. hair. fists. J, you find this Liam twat and you have it out with him, man-to-man.

JJ: Like you and Freddie did with Effy? A lot of good it did. She went mad.

Touche, JJ.

Cook packs up and leaves for The House of Fun, and JJ takes his advice and goes to StuffMart to beat the crap out of Liam. Shockingly, Lara doesn’t find this attractive in the least.

Back at home, JJ’s dad gives him a pep talk that’s slightly better than Cook’s, but Cook’s speech apparently included some excellent shagging tips, so we’ll call it a wash. Michael Jackson sings a little about starting with the man in the mirror, which wakes JJ’s dad out of his decades-long slumber, and JJ radios home: “Let’s refuel this g-d d–n ship!”

Apparently JJ’s mothership is the headquarters of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. They heed his call and come to his aid, and outside Lara’s window late that night, they perform a pretty excellent rendition of Spandau Ballet’s “True,” which is not only the single greatest song of the ’80s, but is 100 percent guaranteed to get you laid if you put it on a mix CD.

Lara is annoyed, impressed, moved, and she runs out into the street and kisses JJ good and long. They hurry upstairs and crawl all over each other all over the bed. Emily told JJ he never asked for things, and so he did. He finally, finally did. Some things he didn’t get. (They still ruffle his hair. Effy didn’t leave them alone.) But some things he did. Sex with a lesbian? Check. Sex in outer space? Check. Captain’s log: This is the sound of my soul. This is the sound.

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