Zefiro

I wish the films were only about them. I don't care about gen 2. I dread the thought of what they could do to gen 1 and so I'd want them to just stick with them.

Gloria. She fits so much this thread,doesn't she?

heimweh

I'm with you about gen.1, as much as I'd love to see Cassie again I'm dreading it But I'd happily see the gen.2 special anything is better than what they got, so. As for gen.3, let's see how it ends first

Gloria is perfect for this thread

Dark-Zero

I love Gen 3 but its done now. Gen 3, i salute you.

Finnegan

(1) How does "gen 3" relate to gens 1 and 2?

Now that we have all of "gen 3" of Skins, how does it compare in terms of theme (not quality of writing or acting) with gens 1 and 2?

One might argue that teen drama generically tends to be about learning to love better than we do. That's no new insight. How gens 1 and 2 develop that is pretty clear. Naomi's speech in the shed at the end of gen 2 makes it pretty clear than gen 2 is as much about fear of love's power (overcome by Naomi but not, sadly, by Effy) as gen 1 is about abuse of it (overcome by Tony).

Gen 1 seems to affirm the possibility of moral choice: Sid asks Cassie whether anone ever loves anyone else properly, Cassie tells Sid "It's all your choice." That's gen 1 in a nutshell. Tony dislikes determinism from the start; he finds quantum-level randomness inspiring. He finally makes the right choice, he deliberately chooses to love, even though it's painful and involves reconstructing his whole personality. All ends happily, the other characters being more or less aspects of Tony, or of Michelle. (Chris dies, but he personifies an irresponsibility that can't outlast youth, the part of ourselves we have to kill in order to grow up; the guy with "a tube from my balls to my brain" is predestined not to survive to adulthood.)

Gen 2 seems to illustrate what happens if one doesn't believe in the efficacy of choice, it one believes that one needs some external physical trauma to change emotionally; that seems to be why Effy's insistence on taking the bus literally turns out to be key, and why "It happened but it didn't happen," repeated three times, seems to be the key line of "Gen 2." Effy fears love because she sees it as "a bus," something happening to her, not something she chooses. She believes she needs to be hit in order to feel something. Effy embraces the mechanistic world-view that Tony rejects. Believing that she's just a billiard ball, that she's powerless, drives her nuts.

What's the core theme in "gen 3," assuming that it relates to learning to love better? Does "gen 3" also seem to be pursuing the "love and power" theme?

My tentative initial impression -- one viewing is rather too few for this kind of thing -- is that the key bit of dialogue in "gen 3" may be Franky's telling Grace, in the final episode, that she's not going to do what Grace has appeared from beyond the grave to advise her to do, because doing it would only help other people love one another. That's a rather damning remark. Insofar as teen drama generically, and Skins in particular, is intended to help us learn to love one another better than we do, it's the antithesis.

Could the core theme of "gen 3" be that we don't just need to learn to love better, but to help one another do so? Grace Blood doesn't just love a guy; she helps other people love one another, even returning from beyond the grave to do that.

Many viwers have remarked on the difference in tone between s5 and s6: I would observe than in s5, we collectively have Grace, and in s6, we collectively have lost Grace.

(2) The symbolism of "Grace Blood."

One need not be steeped in Christian theology to suspect that a character named "Grace Blood" is a highly symbolic. Moreover, time and again, Grace appears after her death to provide love and sage counsel to diverse characters. The character who loves her best, and who says he still always sees her, gets a rather better ending than the others -- Rich is bound for Cambridge.

Ah, but are Grace's posthumous appearances mere illusions, all fantasies in the overheated imaginations of the other characters? Sorry, that won't wash. I'm not suggesting that Skins is suggesting that we believe in a personal afterlife; rather, I'm not suggesting we generally not take Skins literally. Grace appears too often, to too many other characters, too long after she's gone, and is too consistently good even when she appears to morally dubious and conflicted characters, for her appearances to be dismissed as mere subjective delusions. The way we tell reality from our delusions is that others don't share our delusions; shared experience is ipso facto "real." As the dead Dumbledore says in the most conspicuously religious scene of the Potter saga, just because something is happening in your head doesn't make it less real. "What should be" is not "what is;" it exists only in our heads, our dreams, our shared moral consciousness as social creatures. That doesn't make it less real, or less important.

Moreover, Grace is the daughter of the schoolmaster. In teen dramas with symbolic content, the child of the head of the school tends to personify either (a) the school, if it's a good school, e.g., Hamiton Fleming in Young Americans, or (b) what we should be learning despite the school's flaws, if it's a less-than-good school, as seems to be the case in Skins. That the schoolmaster is an ass in "gen 3" while his daughter is pretty much perfect seems to symbolize that we're not learning what we should be learning. And Grace Blood, like Hamilton Fleming, seems to personify what we should be learning: how to love well. If it's all about loving one another, then doing that well is really all that matters.

And if Grace Blood personifies what we're supposed to be learning from Skins, then whatever the core theme and message of "gen 3" of Skins may be seems likely to be most clearly articulated and dramatized in Grace's interactions with other characters. Make sense?

heimweh

Bye cast, I wish you all the best

InIrelandItRainsXx

lol reading back over this thread, so glad I wasn't posting around the time I wudda got banned prolly.
Fede ily

Series 5 I will miss youuuu Series 6 we could of had it alllllll rollin in the deeeeeeeep you had my - yeah pretty much

Forelsket

Love this cast and hope the actors get great acting jobs in the future. They deserve it

Series 5 is one of the best series in skins history in my opinion and it's what got me into the skins fandom. Fell in love with the characters instantly.

I know what you're talking about

murphyboy11

I know that most people dont like Gen 3 but I LOVED this cast. The characters were amazing and the whole cast had so much chemistry together

InIrelandItRainsXx

I loved Gen 3, hated S6

Idealist

yep, exactly this.

loved this generation and s5, but s6 can gtfo! thank you very much.

diu12

s5 was my fave Skins series

Zefiro

Irish rebel!

:'( ****,I can't think they're over for good, I'll miss them so much.

Gen 3,may 5x08 be your perfect ending.I shall never forget that glorious run through the green fields

heimweh

Ikr And they were all so happy and alive and flawless That's where they really ended for me anyway.

Dark-Zero

I may love Gen 3 but s6 was a complete disgrace to skins and should have just ended after s5.

murphyboy11

S6 was like a completely different show