Sid Never Found Cassie and We Were Still Arguing About It
I was at Berlin Tegel, waiting for a flight to Munich, when a guy sat down next to me, looked directly at my laptop screen without any attempt at subtlety, and asked how I knew Skins. We talked for the next three hours—through boarding, through the flight, through landing. Tony and Michelle’s relationship, which had the texture of a slow car accident that everyone around it could see coming except the people inside it. The death of Chris, which remained one of the more genuinely devastating things I’d seen on television up to that point. And then the new generation: Effy, Freddie, Cook, JJ—who seemed to have been born already middle-aged in their capacity for damage.
There’s something Skins understood about being young that almost nothing else did at the time: adolescence is not primarily funny or primarily romantic, but primarily exhausting. The show was set in Bristol among a group of teenagers navigating school and sex and friendship and grief, and it had the courtesy to treat all of those things as equally real. It got absurd sometimes, even magical—there were episodes that departed entirely from realism and worked precisely because of it—but the underlying emotional logic was always sound. These were people you recognized. Not aspirational projections of what teenagers are supposed to want.
Series 4 was supposed to be the dark one. The trailer made that clear—grayer, uglier, the warmth drained out and replaced with something more brittle. Effy’s love triangle was going to resolve badly, because on this show things that matter always resolve badly. Emily and Naomi’s relationship had survived against most reasonable expectations and was about to be tested in ways that made you nervous just watching the preview. A new character called Sophia had appeared in the promotional material, significance unclear—which on Skins usually meant significant.
What I was most hoping for, going into that premiere, was an answer to the one question Series 2 had left deliberately open: did Sid find Cassie in New York? The final image of him running through Manhattan had been deliberately ambiguous, the kind of ending that feels honest precisely because it refuses to resolve. I’d been arguing about it with strangers on airplanes ever since. That seems like the right relationship to have with a television series—one that sends you out into departure lounges looking for someone who has also seen it.