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“Skins” Retro Recap (3.01): “Everyone”

Remember when Skins series four ended and we had a big group hug about how life is a glorious cycle of song and we love the whole world, but then the next day we couldn’t look at one another in the eyes because of how we’d been crying all night about it being over? And you said, “Recap series three, Heather Hogan.” And I said, “I will recap series three!” Remember that?

Well, somewhere between then and this, my world got flipped, turned upside down, because I met Rophy. If you know Rophy, you love Rophy. And if you don’t know Rophy, you will love Rophy because Rophy are Rin and Sophy and they recapped series four too; only they did it for free because they love Skins like Emily loves Naomi in episode 4.02 over Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition.”

They like to caress photos of Naomi, is what I am saying.

So I’m teaming up with Rophy and we’re going to bring you The Greatest Recaps of Our Time about the Greatest Show of Our Generation. I’m going to recap here at AfterEllen.com (home of all your Naomily needs) and Rophy are going to provide screencaps, graphics and occasional commentary (because you deserve a counterpoint, someone who hates JJ).

Rophy are going to recap at RophyDoes.com. Visit them, love them, don’t drink any water while you’re reading their recaps unless you want to choke to death and die. I’m for real. (And so is Giant not-Naomi. You’ll see.)

And here we go.

All historical writing begins as an effort to answer questions about origins, happenings and consequences. In writing about history, you … formulate a thesis to say that things happened this way and not another and that the reason they happened this way was because of this, this and this! You allow for the possibility that if this or this, or that, did not happen, things could have turned out entirely differently

– A Short Guide to Writing About History, Richard Marius

Freddie Mclair (you may remember him from back when he was alive) is one helluva reckless skateboarder, with no regard for traffic laws, priests, elderly ladies, children, puppies, kittens, cars, buses, trucks, motorbikes, construction crews, ice cream cones, or his own life (foreshadow!), as evidenced by the opening moments of Skins series three (Gen Two), in which Freddie’s stuntman nearly kills several people – to the tune of Son the Father’s “F-cked Up,” naturally – before sending an officer of the law careening into the back of a garbage truck.

Freddie is in a hurry, see, because James Cook just texted to say he’d sparked Freddie’s last spliff, and obviously Freddie needs to smoke up before his first day of school. Also, according to Cook, he needs some lager, which Cook has procured at 8 o’clock in the morning. And if there’s any doubt that beer is, in fact, the breakfast of champions, Jonah Jeremiah Jones has some dietary rationale straight out of Bridget Jones’s Diary that he’d like you to consider:

Well, calorically [lager is] up there with 392 energy units, which is nothing on the Snickers I’m having, which has the additional drawback of 28 grams of fat. Although I can call upon 1.2 grams of fiber, which doesn’t feature in your lager. However, you could argue in some sense, that hops constitute one of your five a day.

I literally had this exact conversation with my brother-in-law this week when he was explaining to me that it’s perfectly acceptable to rehydrate after mountain biking with a pint or two because hops have protein and protein builds muscle and building muscle is necessary for top cyclists. So, obviously I believe what JJ is saying. [Rophy says: You would, you filthy JJ lover.]

So anyway, there they are, your Three Musketeers. Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno! Literal translation: All for one, one for Effy.

Cook says the day is pregnant with possibility and that he’s not moving from this table – with his mates and his lager and his spliff – until he receives a message from a higher being.

Across the street, a car hits the bike abandoned by the policeman who fell into the garbage truck. The car screeches across the road and slams into a safety pole near the boys’ table, and the driver jumps out and starts swearing to beat the band. On the passenger’s side, Effy Stonem lights a cigarette, looks out the window, exhales smoke, and goes, “Did someone say ‘higher being?'”

There is some discussion between JJ and Freddie about who, exactly, Effy is looking at, but before JJ can finishing extolling the virtues of the body parts he’s sure she possesses (hair, eyes, breasts, nipples), Cook has splayed ketchup across his face and is stumbling up to Mr. Stonem with a whole pantomime about how he just crashed into him on his bike.

When her dad gets distracted screaming at whatever passing pedestrians, Effy sliiiiiiides out of the car, saunters over to Cook, and tastes the ketchup on his cheek. “Sweet,” she says, and – pow! – collective Three Musketeer boner.

Guess what? They’re going to Roundview today, after all.

Across town, Emily Fitch is choosing her first day of college outfit like the kind of person who believes that snow makes everything new again, and I know I can’t shut up about Skins music, but here’s what Timothy Victor’s “Lady Belles” has to say, and it really is the most important thing.

There were always two sides to this story / It was faith that led us here / Two lady belles / We saw wings that cling and wings that fell / All our time / It’s easy to see all these changes for me / But all of these things do not compare / Not anywhere no / Near the way we do / Through all of this life there’s you.

Skins has a lot of tangled up love stories coming our way, but the three very, very best ones are Naomi and Emily; Freddie, JJ and Cook; and Katie and Emily. Their relationships are layered and tender and gut-wrenching in their authenticity, and we’ll talk about them when it’s time, of course, but we should talk about Katie and Emily right now, just for a minute.

Do you have a sister? I have a sister. She’s exactly one year younger than me, and in fact, my very first memory is the day she was born. We were automatic teammates against the rest of the world, automatic hugs when things got dark, automatic high fives, automatic roommates, automatic toy share-ers, automatic fight fights, automatic clothes thieves, automatic everything.

When my sister gave birth to my nephew, I held her hand and remembered her first Cabbage Patch Kid. When my sister finished her first marathon, I held her hand and remembered her first field day. When my sister started radiation treatment for cancer, I held her hand and remembered the first time she crashed her bike and I mopped up her blood with my t-shirt.

My sister is my very best friend in this whole entire world, and our stories intersect at so many points that it’s impossible to tell them apart sometimes. We belong to one another in a way that we’ll never belong to anyone else. My world started the day she came into it.

So this “Lady Belles” thing, this “through all this life there’s you” thing? That’s one of the deepest sentiments Skins ever expresses, but Katie and Emily have to get ripped apart to realize the truth of it, because their stories can’t grow side-by-side and flourish. They need their own sunlight.

Emily will never belong to Naomi the same way she belongs to Katie, and I think that’s what Katie means later on when she tells Naomi, “She’s mine.”

She’s not, of course. Emily is Emily’s, and she gets to choose who she belongs to, or if she wants to belong to anyone else at all. That’s half her story this season, and we don’t talk about it enough.

Why Emily has selected a leopard print skirt for the day she plans to begin exerting her independence, I will never know. My guess is that she somehow knows Naomi is going to show up later wearing the most garish floral print jacket that was ever conceived at Satan’s own atelier, and she hopes when Naomi sees the two patterns in close proximity, she will be alerted to the extradimensional horror of what she’s wearing and be like, “Emily. We need to take off these clothes immediately. Let me help you with those buttons.”

But none of that – the built-in BBF thing or the leopard print thing – matters now anyway because when Emily finally shouts Katie out of the shower, she discovers there’s no hot water left, but by the time she gets back to her room, Katie is already wearing Emily’s first day outfit. She tells Emily it looks better on her anyway, and hurry up and get ready because her boyfriend – she’s got a boyfriend, have you heard? – Danny, of the Bristol Rovers – he plays for the Bristol Rovers, did you know? – will be there to take them to school/publicly grope Katie soon. As in now.

So, Emily’s first day of college: not quite as different as she’d hoped, then.

Katie would like you to know that Danny is “well fit” and “well lush” but what I would like you to know about Danny is that he laughs just like Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean. Like at any moment, I expect him to go, “Arrgh, what fortuitous circumstances be these!” And of course he’d be talking about how he wants to get off on “the twin thing.”

The car ride to college in painfully awkward, even for me, and I’m not crunched in the back like Emily, six inches away from Danny feeling up Katie.

At Roundview, Katie is greeted like a red carpet premiere, with everyone fawning over her and touching her and saying how much they love Danny. Katie smiles all faux-coy, telling them about Danny taking her for surf and turf and shots last week. And like a psychedelic light at the end of a Wonka Factory tunnel, stands Pandora.

She asks Effy what “surf and turf” means. Effy says it’s sex, and Panda flips the switch on PandaSpeak.

Wow! We’re going to have a wizard time at this college; ain’t we, Eff? I’m definitely going to have surf and turf ASAP. Mom says boys only want one thing, and my plan is to give it to them, lots of times, and that way I’ll get good at it, be really popular. And maybe my toes will stop throbbing.

Effy is only half-listening because PandaSpeak is soothing white noise if you know her, and they’ve been friends for a while, but really Effy is watching Katie’s reception. Once Katie is through the crowd, she shouts back, “For Christ’s sake, come on, Ems, you loser! What’s wrong with you? You’re always lagging behind me! Why can’t you wear decent clothes?”

The crowd parts on “you loser!” and that’s when Effy sees Emily Fitch for the very first time – Effy’s gift is seeing people for the very first time, which is fascinating on account of she is terrified of the mirror – and Effy simply goes, “Oh.”

It’s one of my favorite moments in the entire series. Oh.

Katie keeps ranting about whatever thing, and omniscient Effy says out loud to no one: “Right. You hate her.”

Panda wants to know who she is meant to hate and Effy dials down her higher being thing and tells Panda she’ll let her know.

In the Roundview gym, Freddie and JJ are yammering on about Effy again – this time about which one of them she bestowed a smile upon when she turned around – but my interest in their plight just decreased by precisely 100 percent, because Cook is, “Blah blah blah hair on his balls,” and then it happens. Out of the darkness, Naomi Campbell’s caustic voice says, “Nice.”

Don’t look at her jacket, you guys. Just close your eyes and pretend it’s a t-shirt or something. One that fits her. She calls Cook a tosser, but also is charmed by him and, frankly, I can’t blame her. I think there was a time I hated him, too, but I can’t even remember it now. [Rophy says: It was probably during that brief, unnerving window where it looked like he might actually be going to steal the Naom out of Naomily. Just saying.]

With a few notable exceptions – the Fitches, for example; and Naomi’s mum – I think adult characters steal precious sceen time from the real reason this show is awesome, so here’s what you need to know about the Roundview opening assembly: These kids are going to get some qualifications or they will be burned at the stake/mauled by a wild pack of koala bears.

So, this timid little guidance counselor calls out the names of the students in form BD1. Cook, Freddie and JJ make the cut, preserving the integrity of the unit. Emily and Katie are together because all red-haired kids get sorted into the same house, which I learned from Harry Potter. Effy’s name is called. And then ” … Naomi Campbell?”

Everyone laughs and laughs like no one has ever shared a name with a notorious celebrity model before, and Naomi roles her eyes and raises her hand because this again? Cook asks if she has anger management issues and she says only when she talks to wankers. Nice. Cook thinks so too.

After the dust settles, Naomi takes a deep breath – I mean, it seems impossible that her thin shoulders could bear such a breath – and scowls over at Emily, as if she hates her from some place way back. But the thing is: a) Naomi knew exactly where Emily was sitting, and b) She knew Emily was staring at her, like she’s got some kind of Emily-specific lezzer-sense or something.

(Spider-Man’s spidey-sense starts in the base of his skull and alerts him to trouble with tingling in proportion to the severity of the danger. If that’s how Naomi’s lezzer-sense works, her head must be about to f-cking explode.)

“Oh, Christ,” Naomi says. “Same f-cking form.”

Emily meets Naomi’s eyes, looks away, looks back.

And, you guys, I can’t … I’m sorry, I can’t keep it inside because this is it: the beginning of a most epic romance, and I don’t even have to qualify it. I don’t have to say “lesbian romance,” because this is a time machine; only, instead of going backwards to the genesis of Naomily, we’re rocketing into to the future, where stories are stories, and longing is longing, and love is love, and two girls can find one another’s gaze in a crowded gymnasium, and it’s not subtext, and it’s not whatever poison-laced-marshmallow Sweeps story we’re doing on American network TV at the moment.

It’s panic and it’s desire and it’s anger and it’s terror and it’s sorrow and it’s impossible, impossible hope, and I’m only talking about this very second; not the whole story that extends at the same time into the past and future in ways neither Naomi or Emily or you or I can even understand yet.

I mean, who knew – really, you guys, who knew – that time I was in the bed with the flu and decided to give this Skins thing a go that one day I’d be begging the writers to treat the straight characters as awesomely as they treat the queer characters?

Doesn’t that fill you with the kind of unabashed optimism Emily Fitch wears on her face in every single episode of this series? Doesn’t it make you dream as you’ve never dreamed before? Doesn’t it make you want to borrow Panda’s insane sunglasses because the future of stories could really be just that bright?

And here’s where it starts: this look. This look where Emily says, “Naomi Campbell, I am going to peel back every single layer of the mystery of you, until you are naked and quivering before me.”

Does Naomi look outraged? Does she look indignant?

Look again. She’s already trembling.

And here’s something I don’t get about Bryan Elsley, even though I sort of universally adore everything he writes: I don’t get the toilet humor. I didn’t get it in series four’s “Everyone,” and I don’t get it here with Doug because, seriously, why? It’s such a waste of time when the themes of the entire second generation are playing out in all their saturated, nonverbal glory on the bleachers.

Witness: Cook watching Effy. Freddie watching Cook watch Effy. JJ watching Freddie watch Cook. Effy watching no one. Panda watching balls. Katie watching everyone, hoping they watch her. Emily, listening to Katie, watching Naomi. Naomi, operating outside herself, watching Emily watch her and crumbling under the weight of her unspoken promises.

That’s how good this show is. That’s literally everything you need to know.

Out in the hallway, Effy is getting acquainted with everyone. Well, mostly she’s getting acquainted with Freddie and Katie, who are both just straight out of the kennel in these scenes. Freddie is a Labrador Retriever, falling all over his too-huge feet for a chance to fetch Effy’s slippers and lick her face. And Katie is a yippy Yorkie whose number one goal is to hump the sh-t out of Effy’s leg.

Effy tells Freddie he can fetch her slippers if he can complete a checklist of debauchery before the day is out, but things are more complicated with Katie. For starters, she calls Effy’s brother “mental,” and then introduces Emily with a shrug of her shoulder, and then goes on and on about how she has a lush boyfriend and they’re the two hottest girls in school and maybe they should sit together and wear matching bows on Fridays and oh my God, just hold your leg still, won’t you?

Effy is just pulling out her water bottle to squirt Katie in the face to calm her down, when Katie catches sight of Naomi. She literally goes, “Oh no, here it comes. Total lezzer bitch!”

Katie narrows her eyes at Naomi and Naomi narrows her eyes at Emily and Effy is just like, “Awesome.” Katie finally steps out of Naomi’s way with wide, innocent eyes, and explains that Naomi tried to snog Emily in middle school. Effy stops listening and zeroes in on Emily in the background, and right then is the moment that Effy starts shipping Naomi and Emily.

Naomi pops back out into the hallway to say: “Careful, Katie. I might get confused and f-ck you with my great big strap-on by mistake.” And Effy thinks about shipping Herself/Naomi for just a second. But she decides against it; she’s out of checklists.

Emily’s face, though, watching someone she clearly adores stand up to Katie: she tries not to smile, fails; smirks from under droopy eyelashes, and it makes me feel like – What’s the best thing you can imagine? Legs dangling over a cloud, eating ice cream in the springtime sun while puppies scamper up a rainbow for a chance to cuddle with you? That’s what Emily’s face makes me feel like.

Katie’s like, “She just jumped you, didn’t she, Ems?” And Emily’s like, “Leave it, Katie.” But Katie’s not listening because she’s got to get to class and find a double desk for her and Effy. Effy asks Emily if she’s the doormat, and Emily says, “Sort of.” And in that very same “oh” way as earlier, Effy goes, “Interesting … that you just put up with it.”

Cook sets some sh-t on fire because that is his thing, and the Three Muskaters – plus Panda, who has narrowly escaped her cosmetics class – join form BD1 in Kieran’s class, where he wants them to stand up and say something about themselves.

So: JJ has an incredible aptitude for maths, but is shite at interpersonal communication. Katie has never not had a boyfriend since she was seven. Emily has never had a boyfriend. Naomi hates injustice, and people tell lies about her. Effy is pretty sure her mum is having an affair. Freddie met a girl he likes today.

(In case you missed it, here’s the first Loveless LipBite of series three.)

But anyway, that’s really boring, guys! Some of you had spliff and lager for breakfast! Rophy, why don’t you tell us what we really need to know about Gen Two.

“Hi, I’m JJ, and I’m not worthy of the love Heather Hogan so graciously bestows upon me. No, seriously, I’m just not.”

“Hi, I’m Katie F-cking Fitch and I’m helping Effy to be the gayest out of the kindness of my heart, and also because I like to mess with my sister, and also because Effy is hot stuff.”

“Hi, I’m Emily. I met a girl I like when we were twelve. She’s like … beautiful. And she says she has a great, big strap-on.”

“Hi, I’m Naomi, I hate injustice, I wish you weren’t going to try to make out with me, Kieran. And then have sex with my mother. And then shown me your bare bottom. It’s a little awkward. Especially considering I like GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!” *shimmies*

“Hi, I’m Effy and I’ll never be the gayest. I also go crazy and try to kill myself eventually. You do the maths.”

“Hi, I’m Freddie. Emily kind of stole my line, but… anyway… I’ve written a poem…”

There’s this choreography that’s happening already between Naomi and Emily, where Emily gazes openly at Naomi, and Naomi whips around to glare at her, and Emily blinks and turns her head like she’s ashamed or afraid. But we know Emily Fitch, and we know she is the exact opposite of both of those things, and so this blink and head-drop – this hesitancy – is nothing more than permission for Naomi to look away.

And in one way, it just speeds up the process, allows Emily to train her gaze back to Naomi, to get on with everything she has to learn about her. But in another way, it’s grace. Because I don’t know if you know this, but Emily and Naomi tell planet-tilting stories with their eyes, and if Emily forced it – if she made the rawness of their right-now collide – Naomi would come un-f*cking-done

They’re not ready. Neither of them, but here it is: Gaze, glare, hesitate, gaze. Gaze, glare, hesitate, gaze. Naomi can’t look. Emily can’t look away. Gaze, glare, hesitate, gaze. Naomily’s first dance.

Elsewhere, dancing the the Rumba – that vertical expression of horizontal desire – are Cook and Effy, in the nurse’s office. Sex in school, now he’s completed everything on the checklist.

So, Freddie wants Effy. Effy wants Freddie, but she grabs for Cook. Katie wants anyone, but she’s equipped for now. Panda wants to fit somewhere. JJ wants to get laid. Emily wants Naomi. Naomi wants to run. Cook wants everything. And this teacher who’s overhearing Cook and Effy going at it? She wants to go back to the hospital with the neon orange hop-along balls.

What else did we learn on our first day of college? Right. Science:

Before the Big Bang, before time itself, before matter, energy, velocity, there existed a single immeasurable state called yearning. It is the special force that, on the day before there were days, obliterated nothing into everything. It is the unseen string tying planets to stars. It is the unseen want we feel from first breath to last light.

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