Skins Musings, s06 e03 - Alex
Another week gone, another Monday has arrived and another episode of Skins has just finished.
I still feel like I'm mourning the loss of my ability to cry because there have been plentiful moments where I could have done so, but ahh well. I guess that's something I'll discuss with my doctor next week.
On to the Skins musings...
New characters are always going to be tricky, especially in the second series of a generation in a programme like Skins. There are already so few episodes as it is, to have one of them taken up by a story of a person we don’t know (and so haven’t had the chance to love) is a bit of a risk.
A risk that I believe was thoroughly successful.
Alex is a bit of a maverick in that he stands alone, he hasn’t had many friends and he lived his life by the roll of a dice. Some might say that’s a little insane but it’s also rather intriguing.
It must be hard having a father who won’t listen to you, or care enough to ask how you are or wish you luck on your first day of college. It must be twice as hard to be the sole carer for your grandmother who obviously has a form of dementia. It must be even harder to have your father as good as force you to contribute to shipping her off to a care home when you’d rather quit school and look after her.
It was rather sad, really, that that was the life Alex was leading.
Unlike in series five when she met Matty, I really liked how Liv befriended Alex. I’m not saying I really disliked what happened in series five but it was a whole other ball game. I was worried that, yet again, she was going to meet the random stranger and become friends with him; this time around though she did it because she wanted/needed someone new in her life.
As hard as things are for Alex, life is just as hard for the rest of the gang. It’s obvious that Liv is struggling to keep her head above water and the closest person to her won’t even talk to her, so of course she’s going to want someone else in her life that will. Mini said ‘we don’t need any more friends’ and whilst I understand where she’s coming from in that they’re grieving for Grace, so naturally she won’t want anyone coming into their friendship group and replacing her.
But I think he’s needed and the episode only proved that.
It’s hard to get out of the funk of grief and depression and where they’re all feeling that way, they’re all struggling with it and until something changed, they were all going to be stuck in that mode. Nobody really did anything, nobody really said anything…they just existed, together.
Alex put a spanner in the works, he set the wheels of grief in motion and he helped them all to move on a stage in the process. He won’t have fixed it, not even a trained therapist could fix grieving people in one episode of a television programme, but he helped push them in the right direction.
And the memorial for Grace was rather hilariously Skins. Of course a stupid-arse idiot (who I assume is student president or something) would set one up and make it as un-Grace-like as possible and not even care to discuss it with her closest friends.
The way Franky and Liv handled that moment was something I will always remember with a smile on my face and as Franky said ‘I think Grace would have liked that’.
And Doug is the new principle of the college, it’s about time. He’s the only characters who has been in every single series of the programme and that’s quite an achievement that no one else seems to have been afforded. I hope he’s in it ‘til the end.