[Enigma]

I read that. Good stuff.

[Artemis]

I started noticing Times Square, and I was going, wait, back up. Wha? And then I listened to the cabbie...no accent. So, wtf. How in the world did she end up in NYC?

I love that Cassie told Sid to change Chris' bandage, even if Chris said she already did. ROTFLMAO!

Cassie/Chris scenes were amazing. Glad for their friendship.

The love square..*sighs* I just want my Michelle/Tony.

OMG, Chris' death... *blinks* wow. *blinks*

[lisztomania]

HOMETOWN GLORY. most heartbreaking scene ever made.

[Finnegan]

I've just rewatched the last four episodes of Skins s2 with the following question in mind: To what extent is Tony's injury, his being hit by a bus, and his recovery from that injury, mentioned after Michelle tells him, by cell phone, "I love you, too," near the end of s2e7?

The answer: Never. Not once. Tony's being hit by a bus, his injury, and his physical recovery are never mentioned after that.

This seems fully consistent with the hypothesis that adult viewers are supposed to take Tony's "being hit by a bus" as pure metaphor for the emotional trauma of his feeling real love for the first time, of understanding that he loves the people he's hurt and has hurt the people he loves, that their rejection of him is deserved, and that he needs to reconstruct his character from scratch -- to "die to self" and be reborn, to use traditional parlance. Some teen viewers (the Tony Stonems) can take it that way, too; the rest will have to wait until they grow up. It's like a fairy tale: what's you'll see in Skins when you watch it with your kids will be a lot more than what you first saw in it when you were a kid.

Everything that happens to Tony between his telling Michelle by cell phone, "I love you," at the end of s1, and Michelle's response by cell phone, "I love you, too," at the end of s2e7, is metaphorical. And (as I've pointed out on this board's thread about s2e6) everything that happens to Tony in s2e6 is a dream -- a dream within a metaphor. Indeed, the conspicuously dreamy nature of s2e6 may be intended in part as a hint that everything around that episode isn't quite "real" either; it's the dream episode that helped by see the deliberately surreal nature of the drama well enough to entertain that possibility.

However, Sid and Michelle do "really" have an affair. Sid and Michelle's affair is mentioned, as a past event, twice after the end of s2e7: once by Cassie, who by mentioning it ruins the delightfully grown-up dinner party that the kids hold to celebrate Chris's survival of his hospitalisation in s2e9; and once, more briefly, in s2e10, when Sid, in the car on the way to the airport with Tony and Michelle, points out they've all seen each other naked.

Whether "real" time elapses between Tony's telling Michelle "I love you" and Michelle's telling him "I love you, too," in response seems unclear. One possibility is that Tony is emotionally traumatized and incapacitated for months, during which Sid and Michelle take up with each other. On that view, the time frame of s2 is what it seems, only the events directly involving Tony are metaphors for an emotional trauma, incapacitation, and recovery over that same time frame. The other possibility is that no "real" time elapses between Tony's telling Michelle "I love you" and her reply, "I love you, too." I suspect we may be supposed to view both possibilities as "true," the former as objectively true, the second as subjectively true for Tony, who can't bear fully to remember what he was until he is forgiven for having been that, until Michelle tells him she loves him, so that for the emotionally healed Tony, the two parts of the conversation seem temporally continuous. A multiplicity of temporal settings is disconcertingly surreal, but at least one other teen drama (Young Americans, The WB's summer 2000 fill-in for Dawson's Creek) also has that.

The last three episodes of s2 differ strikingly from all previous episodes of Skins. Nobody seriously screws up after s2e7. Suddenly, it's all astonishingly grown-up. The mate-selection is over; there's no more uncertainty about who belongs with whom. The former kids are now dealing with issues the adult issues of children (Jal's pregnancy) and death (Chris') under time pressure of revisions and exams and preparing for life after college. This abrupt change from previous episodes coincides with Michelle's telling Tony, "I love you, too," and with Tony's full recovery and return to the group. Tony is reborn as what he should be and, almost magically, everyone else is suddenly pretty much grown up, pretty much all what they should be, too.

That's the key. Tony is all of them - the other kinds are all aspects of Tony's character, and he illuminates all their characters and is what binds them all as one. The point is deeply traditional, and the core of what tradition has to say about love: the individual self is something of an illusion, our true self is a shared self, that we should, and by love can, become all members of one body -- inside different skins. Hence, perhaps, the title of the drama.