Winona Ryder once said: ?Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body count,? clearly she was watching Skins where, in the opening three episodes of the season, two people have been brutally butchered from the cast list. We haven't seen one funeral.
In fact the closest we come to Richard Curtis territory is a seaside elegy and mere reference to a wedding. Obviously this is too inherently British for the residents of Bristol who are more content to wallow.
It's all getting totes emosh up in here which is no doubt why the writers this week introduced us all to a new plucky character to reconfigure the group dynamic. He's gay too, so that not-graphic-enough-sex-scene ticks another demographic box for the youth enveloping programme.
New Gay and dice man about town Alex got the spotlight this evening along with fag-hag Liv who's back on the booze and off the rails, on fine form as all of her associates decide that communication is overrated. Instead, they opt for a series of scowls, smiles, and generally fraught looks.
Alex, despite the weird face and normal name, was actually a rather good character to introduce at such a late stage. They brought him in shrouded in a smug cloud of smuggish mystery, like an amateur Derren Brown looking for work in a bowling alley, but he turned out to be a well-rounded young man who actually introduced the concept of ?see you at college? to the group.
Obviously nobody saw anyone at college because this programme is teaching us all that you don't need to learn things – you just need to know how to cheat at poker. We can recommend the DVD special features on the film 21 if you're looking for a quick guide to card counting. Or just watch The Real Hustle if you can bear it.
Anyway, it was a strangely melancholy episode for Skins. With half of the cast dead or mysteriously absent, it only left a few faces to glumly teach us the art of the awkward silence and boy did they stay stony faced in solidarity. You know when your friend dies and you just knock back a few shots and don't move on? That is exactly what happened for an hour last night on E4 – at least we had it in HD is all we're saying. Of course it wouldn't be Skins if there wasn?t time for a few parties, a quick flash of the tits and some reciting of Nietzsche.
Dead Grace would have loved the send-off, but she might have wondered where her boyfriend was. Rich, hi if you're reading this – ?please do come back and tell us you're not in a mental institution for hallucinating all those moments with the one you loved after she had been dead at least 24 hours, cheers.
Frankly nothing really happened this week and it is easily the best episode of the series so far, which is a bit backwards. This is possibly because this mundanity is what being a teenager is actually like. It’s not smuggling drugs in the desert and the like. It’s sitting around, not knowing what to say.
It won’t last though. TV won’t allow a character to languish. It’ll be bags of ket in no time, with yawning predictability.