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“Skins” Retro Recap (3.05): “Freddie”

Have you read Rophy’s “Freddie” recap yet? If not, drop what you’re doing and run to it! Run like Freddie! Run like the wind!

Hamlet is English literature’s favorite puzzle. People have been tearing it apart and putting it back together in different shapes and sizes before Shakespeare’s quill even dried over “The End,” and every time we run out of ways to interpret and analyze it, someone goes and invents an entirely new form of literary criticism.

Have we talked about the vanilla stuff like the mystery of death and the complexity of action/inaction? Yep. Have we talked about God being a micro-manager? Yep. Have we talked about how truth is less black-and-white and more like a pallet of infinite watercolors? Yep. Have we analyzed the space between the letters between the words between the lines to make sure we didn’t miss any weird sex stuff? Have you met Sigmund Freud?

[Rophy says: Old Sigmund would have a lot to say about Naomi’s banana-crunching in 306. In fact, I think maybe he will have a lot to say … in macro form.]

And so Skins is going to tell it a little bit, too, with Freddie, whose similarities to the Prince of Denmark line up thus: a) Dead parent. b) Inability to make a simple decision because c) Sometimes you’re just f-cked if you be and f-cked if you not to be, because: d) Your friends might be your real family. Or e) They might just want to kill you. (There are days when Skins, just like Shakespeare, is a choose-your-own pirate-adventure story.)

[Rophy says: And then there are days when Freddie gets offed via the means of bat because he packed a bag.]

There’s other Hamlet/Freddie business I can’t get into because, frankly, my eye is on the prize of the next episode.

And anyway, Naomi is going to explain it so sexily in a few minutes that I do not know how Emily doesn’t jump her desk, flip the script, and drag Naomi out into the hall for a mad pash up against the lockers because if I can’t stand it (And I can’t. I can’t. Jesus.), I honestly do not understand how Emily doesn’t just explode.

(You know how Sonic the Hedgehog shatters into a dozen adorable baby animals from the forest and, like, a shower of gumdrops and lollipops and cupcake sprinkles? That’s what would happen if Emily exploded, I think.)

[Rophy says: Ah, Emily Fitch. Still Cutest Human Ever, even in pieces.]

Anyway. Slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune: After a day of skateboarding around Bristol, Freddie returns home to find Karen camped out in front of the telly watching herself on Search for the Next Sexxbomb. Before she starts gyrating and dropping lyrics like “I’m juicing down tonight / I’m gonna make him moan / I’m juicing down tonight / I’m gonna take him to the zone” Karen dedicates her performance to her dead mum – because everyone needs a story to win a show like this, which is gross. And entirely accurate.

Freddie wants to know why she’s watching the performance again, because she knows she won, and it’s funny but also it’s another glaring difference between Freds and Cook, who is probably at this very moment at home self-Googling: “james cook giant knob” and “bristol boner cook.” Karen adopts that special sibling tattle voice and shouts to her dad that Freddie says she’s ugly, and her dad insists that Freddie tell Karen she’s sexy. (Incest. There’s another Hamlet theme for you.)

[Rophy says: Damn Hamlet. So illegal.]

Freddie storms out to his shed, but in the magical woodland behind his house sits a magical creature called Effy Stonem, and the camera sees her through the frondescence, the same way Freddie sees her – the same way everyone sees her, really – and … I love this show. I am ruined for all other TV forever. Have you ever noticed how Effy never comes at a person straight-on? She’s always sliiiiiding up into the chair beside you or resting in The Shire behind your house. When she tells JJ everyone loves her, she’s not kidding. She’s knocked over enough people with her accidental enchantment to know what kind of power she has.

Effy tells Freddie she’s there to see his “marvelous” shed that is “marveled at,” and I don’t even want to correct her for ending her sentence with a preposition. I just want to scoop them both up and whisk them away to a land where there are no demons or baseball bats, and only the kind of early morning and late afternoon sunlight that makes them even more gorgeous together than they are apart. Freddie lets her into the shed – and into his thirsty, thirsty heart – and she offers him a spliff before winding him right up to the line below his combustion point.

They barely have time to let their awkward adorableness rub up against each other before Cook and JJ bust in, and Cook, hopped up on who knows what, starts bashing the punching bag talking about some kid he beat the shit out of earlier in the day, I guess. Freddie’s face is like “of f-cking course” and Effy looks kind of terrified, not because she’s caught in Freddie’s shed, I don’t think, but because she’s caught with her guard down, which is what Freddie does to her. Cook is smashing the bag and it’s just the reminder Effy needs to button herself up and play the part of Effy Stonem, the mysterious, aloof girl with whom everyone unwittingly falls in love.

When Cook finally notices Effy, he walks over to Freddie and snatches the joint out of his hand because that’s what he does, and I’ll go ahead and share with you my unpopular opinion that this Freddie/Cook/Effy triangle has everything to do with the way Freddie and Cook intersect, and nothing to do with an actual shared love of Effy – because Freddie and JJ are Cook’s only family and when it becomes obvious that Freddie is going to force Effy into the geometry of their lives, Cook just goes ahead and takes her, not because he wants her, but because he doesn’t want to lose Freddie.

Cook drapes himself possessively around Effy and asks her right in front of everyone if she’s ready to leave for a shag. When she tells him she knows exactly where his “Crayola dick” has been (in Pandora’s box), he tells her to get out. And she goes. And Freddie tries to go after her, but Cook emasculates both him and JJ to keep him there: “I’d say even J’s got a better chance than you. I mean, when was the last time you breathed fire?”

Everything Cook does in this episode, everything he sabotages, is about preserving his family. It’s the kind of thing that makes absolutely no sense, and every kind of perfect sense, especially if you’ve ever been abandoned. Control and power.

At dinner, Freddie’s dad insists that he come home tomorrow for Karen’s interview for the SexxBomb finale. He says he washes Freddie’s clothes and cooks Freddie’s dinner and accepts Freddie’s drug abuse, and so the least Freddie can do is rip open his heart for a camera and talk about how he misses his mum, and how the only thing she ever wanted was to see her only daughter act like a prostitute in front of a live studio audience.

Which, Mr. McLair: a) Freddie’s clothes never look clean. b) That soup on the table looks like Dickensian gruel. And c) While tolerating your kid’s drug habit isn’t as ridiculous as filming yourself making monkey with your next door neighbor, it’s not going to win you any Parent of the Year awards.

Freddie’s response is to … get stoned some more. But only after he breaks my heart by apologizing and caressing a photo of his mum.

At Roundview, Josie and the Skins Cats are discussing Hamlet. Or, well, Emily is gazing at Naomi, and Josie is explaining via her hand-puppet, Gerald, that: “Through the fog of his grief, Hamlet is struggling to choose between action and inaction. And through this struggle, he encounters existential forces illuminating the path to death, which is, in itself, life.”

That’s valid. And everyone’s faces are kind of priceless.

Katie’s like, “Is she for real? Also, it seems like red plaid would clash with my hair, but this shirt looks awesome on me.”

And Panda, looking adorable, is trying to decide decide if Voldemort of Claudius would win in a fisticuffs.

And Naomi and Emily are, you know, just being Naomily.

Freddie walks in late and receives a reprimand from Gerald, and he can either sit with Cook or he can sit with Effy, and he chooses Effy. Cook laughs and makes a mental note to shag Effy later today, and then one of the best scenes ever on TV happens. Just ever, ever, ever.

Carla Bruni’s “Le Ciel Dans Une Chambre” is ethereal in concept and execution, and as amazing here as it ever will be.

Josie’s voice fades away as she talks about the themes of Hamlet/Freddie’s life being action and inaction, madness, death …

Freddie notices that he is almost, but not quite, touching Effy. He gulps and looks at her and she closes her eyes because he does the same thing to her that she does to him, which is brand new in her world. She makes a small, careful movement and strokes the back of his hand with one of her fingers, and Freddie’s skin is literally the only thing keeping him from going everywhere at once. Naomi leans up, looks, smiles tenderly, and winks at him because she gets it. She knows what it’s like when the room doesn’t have any walls and the sky is leaning into you. She’s been in the place where you’re too scared to move, too scared to breathe, because the only thing worse than the touch not ending is the touch ending.

Josie wants to know if anyone else has something to say, and Naomi has kept quiet the whole time even though she’s smarter than everyone in the room including the professor, but maybe she can push Freddie toward the action she is too terrified to take: “Hamlet is basically a teenage boy. He’s got all these desires, but he hasn’t got the bottle to reach out for them. So, he goes mad and wanks off about Ophelia and ends up so boring somebody has to kill him.”

She keeps her head propped on her hand the whole time, not bothered to move to prove her point, because she knows she’s right, and when Josie says that there’s no wanking in Hamlet, Naomi just turns her eyes back and says, deliciously: “Mmm, yeah there is. Loads. Only they call it ‘soliloquizing.'”

And I don’t know if it’s the guitar or her half-wistful/half-smug face or the impossibly sexy way Loveless delivers the line, but I’m going to need a minute. (Cook, I love you, but shut the f-ck up.)

Again.

And again.

I think my next project after these recaps is to make a Hot 100 list of Naomily screencaps. That sounds like a job for Operation Ropher.

[Sophy says: Don’t let Rin near this project. It’ll be a top 763 before you know it.]

After class, Cook tackles JJ in the hall and tries to convince Freddie to come to the pub with them, but he refuses because he’s kind of still buzzed on Effy and he has to go home and exploit the memory of his dead mother so Karen can get paid to thrust. He’s completely uncooperative in the interview, which earns him no points from anyone, and when he retires to his shed, he finds the breadcrumbs Effy left behind for him. He follows them immediately to her house.

[Rophy says: Oh ffs. Rophy forgot to include something in their recap of this episode, but HH? You have swooped in and saved us with the perfect opportunity.

In Rophyland, Karen is squealing “Girls, girls, girls!” whilst shimmying, whether it makes sense or not.

The Stonems are on Round 52 of Divorce, and are so desensitized to their galactic horribleness that they’re just letting their teenage daughter sit at the table and smoke while they abuse the shit out of each other. Freddie rings the doorbell and Effy lets him in; they sit together silently while Effy’s mum and dad rip each other apart like wildebeests, and it’s just … these are the voices in Effy’s head always, with the turmoil and the shouting and the destruction, and Freddie can’t hear anything but the beating of his heart, so he says, “We’d be good together. Don’t you think?” Effy says that no, she’d break his heart, and he stupidly, perfectly suggests that maybe he’d break hers instead. She wonders why she’d want that, but the exact opposite is true: Effy’s heart is already broken. She doesn’t want Freddie to put it back together.

Freddie skateboards some more and is all alone. He crashes. He bleeds. He gets high. And then he wakes up to find that his one place of solitude in the whole entire world – the only place he belongs – has been renovated to make a dance studio for Karen. He tells his dad it’s the worst thing he’s ever done to him, and it’s true because almost all the love in Freddie’s life is just memories, and his dad just painted them away.

At Naomi and Emily’s first date, Keith fires off absurd questions for quiz night and when Naomi questions the validity of them, he tells her to shush before she’s disqualified. Emily sighs and props her head on her hand like she wishes they’d get disqualified, so she could take Naomi home and get her out of her locker!smash! floral print jacket, which looks like the idea of a dream of a jacket some wrapping paper had in your grandmother’s closet one time. JJ is answering all the questions for the Three Musketeers, while also cracking a word puzzle to realize that Naomi spelled backwards is “I moan,” which is a perfect substitution for the last line of Phoebe’s shower song!

Oh God. Shampoo bottles. Have you read the Skins novel? I just remembered. Now my brain needs to be lathered and rinsed, on repeat. Forever.

Hey, quick shipper test – when I show you this photo, what do you see?

If you answered “Naomi and Emily,” you are correct. If you answered “JJ,” get out.

Three things happen in quick succession that are going to change Freddie’s life: 1) He tells Cook that his dad gave their shed to Karen. 2) Effy drags some random Shark or Jet into the pub to prove a point. 3) JJ tells Freddie that Cook shagged Karen. So Freddie gets trolleyed because that sucks, but also, Freds: Cook’s mum has serviced you by this point in the story according to series four, so, you know, pot/kettle.

Freddie goes home, calls Karen a whore, skateboards around some more, and then chases Effy to a park where she has walked on water to an island in the middle of the lake. He phones her; she doesn’t answer. He hears her phone. He turns. She holds it up. And they go crashing into the water after one another, and this scene could not be any more glorious if it was filmed by God’s own camera crew in heaven’s favorite lake.

OK, I am going to tell you something and you can take it or leave it. You can apply it to Freddie and Effy here, if you want. You can apply it to Naomi and Emily in the next episode. Or, you know, you can close your browser and shake your head and mumble about how you have had it up to here with me. All acceptable options. All thoroughly understandable.

[Rophy says: Not acceptable. Not understandable. Don’t you dare leave Heather Hogan in your beds again close your browsers.]

There are about a dozen character actions that are just full-on orgasmic for literature professors (and students of narrative deconstruction). One of those things is when a character gets soaked in water. It can be a lake or a bathtub or a stream or an ocean, but when a characters goes for full submersion – assuming they don’t drown – you can go ahead and call that a baptism. A new birth.

Loads of scholars (including Thomas Foster of How to Read Literature Like a Professor) say the rebirth thing doesn’t even have to be intentional on the part of the writer, because writers tend to subconsciously dial into collective cultural memories or texts – in this case, the pervasive story of Noah’s flood from the Biblical book of Genesis (in general) and the baptismal theology of the early Christian church in the Biblical book of Acts (specifically).

So, if you are going to apply the baptism symbolism to Effy and/or Naomi, here’s the idea: a character who purposefully submerges herself in water wants to be made new again. It’s willful submission.

In the case of Naomi, she has spent years of her life pushing Emily as hard as she can without actually breaking her. And in the next episode, she physically strips herself down on purpose, after all the other bits and pieces of her have been stripped away by other things. And so she’s standing on the bank of the lake with a choice: stay there and piece her armor together again, or jump in with the full knowledge that her life will never be the same.

For Effy it’s even more instantaneous: the fact that she can’t not jump is everything you need to know.

And, see, baptism is always about how your old self isn’t capable of attaining the deepest, most desperate desire of your heart. And so you have to become a new person. And the new self has the means or the courage to do the thing the old self never would have done. It’s not magic. It’s symbolism. In the case of both Effy and Naomi: The only thing I want more than the safety of me is to be with you.

Freddie kisses Effy and holds her face more gently than anyone ever has or will again. He says he wants to tell her something and she starts to protest, but he cuts her off and kisses her again. “Now I’ve told you, okay?” he says. “Now you know.”

Rophy tells me this line is highly ridiculed in the Skins fandom, but I think it’s perfect. Woefully inarticulate Freddie says something without words to Effy, who refuses to know things she doesn’t want to know. And this is where Freddie breaks free of Hamlet. He makes a decision to hold something very breakable in his hands and he promises not to break it. And he would have kept that promise; he never had to be a tragedy.

Freddie turns up at Karen’s SexxBomb show for support, and even though she loses, he makes it OK in the way only a big brother can make things OK. And then Cook comes over and destroys it in the way only Cook can destroy things. Karen took their shed – tried to change their family – and so Cook took her dream. Freddie smashes him and Cook tries so hard to hurt him back, but he kisses him instead and tells the truth the same way Effy did when she jumped into that lake: “I really f-cking love you, you bastard.” And then Cook hurts him in a way that is worse than anything he’s done before. He punches the photo of Freddie’s family, of Freddie’s mum, and shatters it into a million pieces.

Then Cook sleeps with Effy again because here’s the triangle: Effy doesn’t think she can live with Freddie’s love in her life. And Cook knows he can’t live without Freddie’s love in his.

If you want to flip your Shakespeare and call this a balcony scene, you will remember that Juliet hated lunar imagery. Mercutio called it Petrarchian, love by numbers. And it’s Cook in the night, always in the night. And it’s always Freddie, in every kind of perfect light.

Next time:

Don’t forget to check out RophyDoes for free Skins LOLs. Also, did you listen to their interview on Melbourne’s Joy 94.9 with the “Diff’rent Strokes” crew this morning? Because they talked about Skins and pretty girls kissing and Sophy said my middle name in her Australian accent and I swooned. And I died.

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