minkyfan

Hmm, I'll have to try it. I really want to work on making fancy gifs.

Finnegan

Series 1 episode 6 and the penultimate episode of gen 2 tell us, in two different ways, that Tony becomes a university professor (in Yank parlance, "lecturer" at least in Brit parlance).

In s2e6, the dream-episode prefaced by Effy's recitation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Tony goes to a university (Exeter, in fact) and meets a very nasty professor who clearly is what Tony will become if he doesn't learn to love.

In the penultimate episode of gen 2, Effy tells Foster that Tony is has gotten the highest grade even obtained by a first-year at Cardiff in history.

Tony's brilliant and bookish and takes intellectual matters seriously, maybe too seriously -- a guy who reads Nietzsche and Sartre and talks about the emotional relief he gets from subatomic indeterminacy as an alternative to mechanistic determinism.

Tony is an egghead because Skins is a very egg-headed drama. Skins, like most of the best teen dramas, is about learning to love well. As least in gen 1, Skin's message seems to be that one reason why "nobody loves anybody properly" (as Sid says) is that we've bought into mechanistic determinism so much that we deny our own free will, tend to see emotions including love as illlusory, and only physical things like sex as real. Tony in s1 personifies that predicament. If we see his being hit by a bus as literal -- if we think that some exernal physical shock is needed to induce emotional and moral redemption -- then we're Tony. Skins gen 1 isn't just about saving Tony. It's about saving us from a world-view that makes it hard to love well. It's remarkably serious cultural criticism.

minkyfan

I could easily see Tony as a professor. Great analysis! I hope the realities of the adult world don't cause him to slip back into his old ways.

Finnegan

Thanks, Erin.

I could write about Tony Stonem endlessly - and have, on this board. But this thread is supposed to be about Sid and Cassie.

My view, often expressed, including in my 07-27-2013 post on this thread, is that they are aspects of Tony and Michelle, Sid personifying Tony's potential for goodness, Cassie personifying the wounded part of Michelle that Tony is hurting.

More generally, I think SKINS was called "SKINS" because in Gen 1, symbolically, all the teen characters are aspects of either Toney or Michelle - the power of love to overcome our individuation is suggested by a symbolic level on which ostensibly distinct characters are all aspects of a male lead and a female lead who are lovers.

Inducing people to discuss any of that has not been easy, however.

HP-Skins

I really do like this theory and love reading your posts, and if I was more eloquent I would respond to you all the time.

Since Sid is Tony's potential for goodness and Cassie is Michelles vulnerable side why is it that Sid spends so much of both series' causing Cassie pain in your mind? To me, timings work out so that as Tony begins to access the part of him that can love, Sid realises how much he cares for Cassie. This happens both series' as in s1 Sid realises his feelings for Cassie just after Tony and Michelle break up (and his love for her in the finale when Tony also realises his love for Michelle). Then in s2 his feelings for Cassie are re-realised after Tony recovers and declares he loves Michelle.
So is it that Sid feels as Tony feels? Would love to hear your thoughts