a new hope

say something

This episode was so different, but I loved it. It just blew my mind and left me utterly confused, but I was so, so happy. I just loved seeing Tony get some more of who he was back and not just take everything anymore.

smoothaise

This was an odd episode. The college visit was different. And the hardcore sex. I don't know. I didn't love it. Was this also the episode where he put a kabosh on Sid/Chelle in the bathroom? If so,

a new hope

^Yep.

I didn't like this episode because it seemed like Tony was back to who he was before, but even worse. To me his development went to hell. The only thing I enjoyed in this episode were the Tony/Effy undertones.

say something

I thought the development was done perfectly. He was slowly discovering who he was, and suddenly he was able to realize the person that he had been. And I always saw it as him getting some crucial memories back. And that would obviously affect the way he acted, and he would need to sort that out, and blend it with who he became after the accident.

a new hope

I see what you're saying but I don't think he "blended", I think he went back to being the jerk he was, period Wanting to have power over people and telling people how to live their lives, manipulating...and I couldn't enjoy it like I enjoyed S1 Tony because it felt a bit tainted at that point.

say something

I think after this episode he did get better, and he wasn't trying to manipulate people so much. Really, I can't think of him trying to manipulate anyone after this episode. But I understand where you're coming from as well, and it definitely was different from S1.

Enigma

This episode was definitely different. And yeah, it was a bit confusing though I think I get it. Not my favorite episode but I really liked it.

I can see why Sid/Michelle shippers wouldn't like it. I'm not one, but yeah, I loved it. Tony was right..............they were all wrong. And the thing is I think deep down they both knew that. I loved the whole bathroom scene. To me it wasn't about power/manipulation or being a jerk or any of that old Tony stuff. I felt it was a real/genuine moment and it seemed kind of fitting for many reasons.

I also liked that Tony was the only one that could see something was up with Jal.

And I quite liked the Tony/Cassie interaction.

Artemis

what.the.eff?!?!? That was weird.

OMG, I loved the bathroom scene in the end, though. *SQUEAL* HE LOVES HER! Michelle/Tony

And Effy/Tony. Ah, I love siblings.

I'm with you, Enigma, on the bathroom scene not being manipulative. Tony loves her. He finally told her (you know, besides the second before the accident). And Jal! Yes, I loved that he noticed.

lisztomania

I love love love this episode. It was like a breathe of fresh air after all the prior episodes have gotten to be a bit too "soap opera-ish". This episode made me feel like I did when watching S1 again.

Finnegan

I just watched the first two seasons of Skins for the first time, thought it remarkably artful, but thought series 2, episode 6, "Tony," the best of it all.

"Different," you all say? Well, yes, the whole episode is Tony's dream. There's lots of impossible stuff in the episode, most conspicuously that (a) the dream-girl magically appears and disappears repeatedly, and (b) the tattoo burnt onto the dream-girl somehow appears on Tony at the end of the episode.

Tony's dream is a variation on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Effie reads to Tony at the start -- whereupon he falls asleep and dreams all the rest, regaining his virility by "going to university" and learning, in his dream, to "love properly," as Sid puts it in another s2 episode.

-- "You wanna **** your sister?" the dream girl asks Tony. Why? Because Effie's the one girl for whom Tony has demonstrated real love, back in series 1 episode 6 when he, like Orpheus, descended into a hell to save Effie. The dream-girl looks astonishingly like Effie. (She is played by a different actress -- but perhaps only because, even in the UK, naked teen-sibling sex scenes may still be thought a bit over-the-top?) And Eurydice is Orpheus' lover, not his sister. The irony of the question is: Tony must learn to use sex to express and build affection, like what to date he has felt only for his sister, in order to recover his virility. In fact, the hellish surrealism of s1e1 can be appreciated only in context of s2e6's allusion to the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice.

-- "Don't look back," the dream girl tells Tony at episode's end. Not to look back at Eurydice was the condition Orpheus had to obey in order to rescue Eurydice from hell ... but he lost her by looking back when he, but not yet she, who had to walk behind him, had climbed out of hell and back into the light of day.

-- The memorable words on the wall of the dorm room, "A short walk in the light of the world, with breaks for coffee and snacks," are a description of life in context of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The Orpheus myth is about saving love from death by loving despite our mortality (as is Skins s2 final episode), and the vivid image of the core scene, when Orpheus looks back and loses Eurydice, is the contrast between the light of the world and the gloom of the underworld. The words on the wall are a humorous but poignant reminder of the shortness of life, of how limited is our time to learn to love.

In Skins' retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice tale, Tony is the one being saved, superficially from impotence, symbolically from emotional impotence. The magical transfer of the "passion" tattoo from the dream-girl's back to Tony's, symbolises that he recovers his virility by rejecting, in the dream, his love of using sex as a tool for power games and manipulation. That is, although Tony, in S1e6, was Orpheus to Effie's Eurydice, he is now being saved from hell by a dream girl who looks astonishingly like his sister. In s2e6, Tony seems to be both Orpheus and Eurydice.

Familiar point, no? One already made by Tony's closeness to Maxxie early in series 2, after Maxxie gives the recuperating Tony more affection than any girl save Tony's sister. Also one of the points implied by Tony's conspicuously and diversely symbolic bedcover. Only by allowing his "feminine" or affectionate aspect to grow can Tony recover his virility.

But, of course, Tony, despite being the local teen sex god, was never virile. In series 2, after Michelle has slept with Sid, she tells him that he's the first guy with who ever "made [her] come." Meaning Tony never did that. Because he just never really gave a damn. The bus that hits Tony is love, and the realization that he has to be reborn into it, into a new self, totally different from his old self, relearning everything. His ostensible struggle to recover potency's physical aspect is a metaphor for his acquisition of its emotional aspect for the first time.

Late in series 2, there's a scene in which Michelle finally answers Tony's phone calls, and, without being spoken to, says merely, "I love you, too," and hangs up. That's plainly a continuation of the conversation they were having when Tony was hit by that oh-so-metaphorical bus, at which time he had just said to Michelle, for the first time, "I love you." So I wonder: On some level, might everything that happens to Tony between those two halves of that conversation, including being hit by a bus and recovering from it, all be a dream? Isn't that suggested by the plainly deliberate crudeness of "being hit by a bit" as a metaphor for feeling love for the first time? Mightn't the conspicuously dreamy quality of s2e6 be there to help us see that?

P.S.: This episode also opened the acting career of Janet Montgomery, the lead in the 2010 film, Black Swan: she played Tony's dream girl as her first role.

P.P.S.: Dawson's Creek, Skins' indebtedness to which is acknowledged explicitly near the start of series 1 episode 1, and has been discussed in an interview by Hoult, also included a relation of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice that seems as unusual in DC as it does in Skins. It's in DC 3/20, "Longest Day," aired in May 2000. It, too, introduced a dream sequence that draws on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth -- in that case, an 8-episode summer fill-in for DC called Young Americans. But that's another story.

lisztomania

great analysis. i'm not sure if the entire episode's a dream but JB did say something about how the episode was supposed to explain how everyone we meet is a reflection of ourselves or smt like that. also, i know janet was in black swan but she was in just one or two scenes. she's not the lead.

Finnegan

Excuse me, but I'm an unabashed newbie to Skins: Who's "JB"? Jamie Brittain? Is there an online site where one can find him or Bryan Elsley discussing their intent in the first two series of Skins? I've read that it started out as a novel, focusing the character of Tony, that Brittain tried to write in high school, but I've not found anything episode-specific or very detailed in any way by either of them.

Dead right, of course, sorry. The lead's Natalie Portman. How could I have blacked that out? Maybe because I loathed Black Swan, loathe the ballet on which it is based, loathe the whole late-Romanticist Liebestod motif? Could be worse, of course: could be Wagner.

I rather think that if you watch it again with that hypothesis in mind, you may find quite a bit of evidence to support it, and no other explanation that consistently makes sense. What other half-plausible alternative is there, save that it's part dream, part crazy, Tony having suffered brain damage? But can one have a brain-damaged memory of being healed from brain damage? The boundary between dreaming and craziness seems unclear, but if it's either (or both), it's not "real" in the same sense as other Skins s1 and s2 episodes. A link to a quite good whole-episode clip of it on YouTube is included in my previous post on this thread.

Another test of the "s2e6 is a dream" hypothesis is: Does anything in any later episode refer specifically to anything in s2e6? I just asked myself that as I watched the four subsequent s2 episodes, and thought that the answer was "no," but I'll have to do that again before I'm sure.

Moreover, even if there is a reference to it sometime before Michelle, answering Tony's phone call, says "I love you, too," that might merely indicate that everything about Tony between Tony's "I love you" at the end of s1 and Michelle's "I love you too" -- the whole "recovery from being hit by a bus" story-line -- could all be viewed as a dream, a scriptwriters' dream, "pure metaphor."

However, a reference, after Michelle tells Tony "I love you, too," to something that happened in s2e6, would be compelling evidence that s2e6 is not a dream, and also that it's not craziness, that it's "real." I'll have to watch s2 again to be sure, be I can't recall such a reference. Can anyone else?

lisztomania

oops, sorry. yes, JB stands for jamie brittain. no, there's no specific site where they discuss in detail things from the show but JB is known to answer fan questions on twitter once in a while.

you're right. especially about future episodes referring to anything that happened in tony's episode. i can't seem to recall anything that would suggest it.

Finnegan

(1) Jamie Brittain's favorite episode

Encouraging to learn that my favorite episode, upon first viewing, is also the creator's favorite episode. Gives me hope I might be understanding something.

From the same interview, something very much like a thought that's been fluttering around my own mind recently:

--------------------------------
(2) External evidence that s2e6 is a dream; there are no references to its events in subsequent episodes

Nia, I just finished rewatching the first two seasons, slowly, carefully, repeating or looking up anything I was aware of not understanding -- and with a specific view to verifying or falsifying a few interpretative hypotheses.

The four episodes after s2e6, "Tony," definitely contain no reference whatsoever to anything that happened in s2e6. All available evidence seems consistent with the hypothesis that everything in s2e6, after Tony falls asleep whilst Effie reads the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to him, is a dream inside Tony's head, and far less consistent with any other understanding of that episode.

-----------------------------
(3) Why "Orpheus & Eurydice"?

Why does Effie read that story to Tony, why is it what he needs to hear, how does it help him recover his virility, and, more generally, to learn to use sex for love rather than to manipulate people to relieve his boredom? I think that in part, it's Effie saying "thank you" for rescuing her from Josh Stock in s1e8, saying that Tony has loved her as well as Orpheus loved Eurydice, that Tony descended into hell to save her. The hellish special effects of that rescue in s1e8 seem consistent with that; next to s2e6, it's the most surreal of the "first gen" episodes, even more surreal than Cassie's "EAT!" messages and her chat with her cabbie-angel in s1e2. Effie's reading that story to Tony to remind her brother than he has already shown, by rescuing her, that he is capable of real love. Now he just needs to learn how to use sex for that; hence the ironic question that the dream-girl asks him: "You wanna **** your sister?" He clearly doesn't: that's what Josh Stock threatened to make him do and a condition of saving Effie, and he was utterly unwilling.

And yet, in his dream, Tony is again in some sense Orpheus-in-the-underworld. "Don't look back, Tony!" his dream-girl says to him in the last scene of his dream. Not looking back at Eurydice is, of course, the condition that Orpheus must satisfy to rescue Eurydice from the underworld - which is the last part of the tale that we hear Effie read to Tony -- as he, very symbolically, ascends a staircase visually reminiscent of the ascent from hell. But he ascends it alone. As in the dream, he is his own Eurydice, rescuing the compassionate "feminine" aspect of his character from the underworld to which he has consigned it by separating is from the erotic "masculine" aspect of his character -- the character flaw symbolised by his bed cover in the first shot of s1e1. For Tony, "looking back" is using sex inappropriately; that's underscored by parallel between the condition Josh Stark imposes on Tony for rescuing Effie in s1e8 (screwing his sister) and the condition that Hades imposes on Orpheus (not looking back at Eurydice) in the Greco-Roman myth.

Tony's dream is not a descent into the underworld and a return from it, but only a climb out of it: he's already in the underworld, having nightmares, at the start of the episode, when he calls Effie to help him. He's been there all along, of course; but only since being "hit by a bus" has he become aware of that; redemption is impossible without awareness that one needs it. As he tells Sid in the dream, his existence is "Excellent. Like hell on earth."

----------------------------
(4) QUESTIONS re allusions:

Some of the dream-allusions in s2e6 are obvious, like the "love lies limp" scrawled on the toilet stall in which Tony barfs. Others are intelligible, like the "A short walk in the light of the world, with breaks for coffee and snacks," which I've already tried to interpret on this thread. There are, however, some allusions in the dream that I don't get.

(1) What is the "School Mistress" poster on the wall of Tony's bedroom in the dream (13:00 minutes into this clip? It's not there in any of the other episodes (or "Lost Weeks" videos) in which we see the inside of Tony's bedroom, is it? Clearly, it's internal reference is to the dream-girl who will take Tony to university later in the dream. But does it have an external reference? Is it a real poster, advertising a real movie, or book, or band/album/song? If so, I can't find its reference.

(2) What is the T-shirt that Effie wears when she opens the door of her home to Michelle and Sid (about 12:45 minutes into the clip linked above). It reads "Death of the [unintelligible word]" and features a skull with bunny ears. Anyone recognize it?

-----------------------
(5) The Gavin Turk poster in s2e6

Check out the "Gavin Turk never worked here" sign on the wall of the dorm room in which Tony and the dream girl smoke dope, get tattoed and make love. It's 29:50 minutes into this whole-episode clip.

Then compare it with this:


Then read this:

The inside of Tony's head is an amusing place. No wonder Jamie Brittain enjoyed writing this episode so much.

-------------------------
(6) Dream allusion in the s2e6 soundtrack

In fact, that song is merely Broadcast's rendition, with English lyrics, of the theme song of the fantastically surreal 1970 Czech coming-of-age film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which was re-released in the West in 2006.