Skins - You can't fix yourself by fixing this.

Skins: 6x09 Mini and Franky.

I think I broke something this time. 

Reaction Post - I'd like to try to make it work.

The Good Wife: 3x18 Gloves Come Off.

Skins - Whatever it is, you have to face it.

Skins: 6x08 Liv.

What is happening between Liv and Mini? It’s one of those questions that I’ve been asking myself for most of the season, and I’d never really felt like the show was actually offering an explanation for their conflict, it just seemed like another necessary thing to do if your theme is “the group is falling apart after Grace’s death”. They seemed to be okay after last year’s season finale. They were both uninvolved in the accident. Why can’t they talk about Grace’s death? Why does Mini mistrust Liv so much that she can’t tell her about the pregnancy? 

I think this episode proposes a twofold answer (if answer is the right word) to the questions: one is a fundamental point about how devastating it is when people discover irreconcilable differences in the way they deal with grief over a mutual loss, the other sort of demands a re-examination of the dynamics between Mini, Grace and Liv (and subsequently, Franky) before the traumatic event happened. That last bit is more complicated because the show never really portrayed their relationship thoroughly before Franky came in and changed it, there are only hints of it in the dialogue (and in the case of Liv and Mini, the video they shot as children and the looming sense that they used to be really close before something started to eat away at their friendship). 

Here’s my theory about Liv and Mini: they would have drifted completely apart if Grace hadn’t come in at some point before the last season. There are hints that Liv had severe difficulties dealing with the fact that Mini attracted all the attention, and Mini’s possessiveness is still very obvious now. Grace came in and provided balance – a precarious balance, because Franky doesn’t actually cause the cracks when she comes in, she just makes them visible. That’s what the first season was mainly about: Franky came in, examined their relationship, decided that the underlying foundation of it was solid and good and had potential, and proceeded to try and force them to deal with the things that didn’t work (this simplifies it, of course, because there’s another layer of Franky realizing she wants something for herself, too). 

But Grace was the first person to change the dynamic between Liv and Mini, and I think the idea here is that the conflicts that existed before Grace arrived were never actually resolved. Grace just made it possible for them to communicate and stay friends in spite of them, and now that she’s gone, they have to figure out how they can still function together. That’s what Mini’s “not without her here” when Liv begged her to talk to her was about in Alex’ episode. 

Liv blamed Mini for avoiding her, but that’s not at all what Mini’s been doing this season. She’s always been exactly where she is at the beginning of the episode, at the party in Alex’ house: on the fringe, waiting. Last episode, she was waiting for a sign that Alo was ready to step up and support her if she told him she was pregnant – and that moment never came – and now she is watching Liv for the same reason. 

I’m not entirely sure what Mini is expecting, and maybe she isn’t, either, but I think part of it also has to do with how Franky reacted, and how Franky just knew what was going on even though Mini never told her. I think in part, Mini is convinced that if other people she loves – and she definitely loves Liv – really loved her back, they would see it too, and she wouldn’t have to tell them. But Alex is never far away (“We don’t need new friends”), and that moment where she finally trusts Liv to tell her the secret never comes (instead the secret is revealed in the most devastating way possible). 

Reaction Post - It’s a bad economy for ideals.

The Good Wife: 3x17 Long Way Home. 

Skins - And it’s just not love if someone doesn’t love you back.

Skins: 6x07 Alo. 

I’ve been thinking about Mini’s “you find a way to own it” a lot lately. It’s really good advice, because whenever something horrible happens, sometimes people have this way of expecting a specific reaction, like, “this is how I would handle this”, and they measure you by their standards. The point is: everybody has a different way of coping. There’s probably objectively wrong ways to deal with a situation – awful, self-destructive ways – but there’s also just as many different individual approaches that are all valid because everybody has to figure out their own limits. You can’t suddenly become somebody else entirely in the face of a catastrophe. Or if you do, it’ll probably eventually go awry because escaping your own skin is just impossible. That’s why the rock was such a powerful symbol in Alo’s episode last season: his dad tells him that it can’t be moved, but he proves himself, he finds his own way, and it works. He’s putting in the effort, he tries, and he succeeds. He needs this moment more than any other character because he is constantly underestimated – his mother keeps his dad’s medical condition a secret from him because she doesn’t believe in his ability to cope with it. 

And I’m really not arguing that growing up and becoming an adult can be reduced to one significant moment. It’s not this ultimate threshold and once you’ve crossed it, you never look back. Maybe it for some people, I don’t know, but at least for me and in my circle of my friends, it seems to be more of a gradual shift, with loads of contradictory developments, where I feel grown-up in some respects but also kind of still like an adolescent in others. I would have never expected Alo to suddenly be the responsible, serious character simply because he has to shoulder more responsibilities than some of his friends – but this episode regressed him to a character who never lived through last year’s events, someone who is desperately clinging to his fictional role model, Peter Pan, for inspiration, and is still stuck in that stage where running away from responsibility is the first thing that occurs to him. Will Merrick does an incredible job with the material he is given, but this episode failed spectacularly because chronologically, it would have made more sense if all of this had happened last year – to the Alo who hadn’t yet proved that he could be trusted and relied upon. And again, this isn’t about characters being taught valuable lessons about life that they take to heart, because that’s not what this show has ever been about, but if the characters are no longer allowed to grow with the thing that happen to them, then nothing that happens has any meaning. If shocking, edgy stories become more important than the effect they have on the people that live through them, then I honestly can’t be bothered to care about this show anymore (except I do, I always do, that’s the problem).