Skins blog: Grace

After a slight increase in quality over the past few episodes, my expectations of this series of Skins were accordingly raised. Unfortunately, ‘Grace’ was not an episode that continued the trend, as it ended up being more than a little over-the-top. This is all especially disappointing when I consider that I actually found last week’s ‘Alo’ to be the most interesting and engaging hour of series 5 so far. This week’s episode had all the right goals in mind, but for me, it completely failed at achieving them.

The episode begins with a little unexpected twist: that Grace’s father is actually David Blood, the principal of Roundview College. In a fairly contrived turn of events, her dad then threatens to remove her from school and transfer her to Mayberry's College for Young Ladies if she doesn’t achieve an A grade in her upcoming Drama exam. For said exam, Grace is directing Twelfth Night and, naturally, all her friends are playing parts in it (in fact, it features every main cast member except Nick). The story puts Grace into a position where she’s under pressure, and as a result, it reveals some truths about the character. Whilst I think that it’s interesting to examine a person who continually changes herself to suit the people that she is around, I felt like the set up and the way the plot played out were kind of... silly.

Everything about the plot of ‘Grace’ was contrived to the point of ridiculousness. The best evidence of this is probably the fact that Rich (who, we must remember, is one half of the least convincing romantic pairing that Skins has ever had) proposes to Grace at the end of the episode. Furthermore, within the episode, Grace’s family and Rich have an incredibly awkward (and, at times, simply bizarre) dinner, the motivations and actions of David Blood become more than over-the-top and, even when outside of their rehearsals, a number of the characters spend the episode persistently quoting Shakespeare. Somehow, this all stays quite predictable, only bringing entertainment when you allow yourself to be amused by the sheer implausibility of it all.

I found that one of the major disappointments of this episode was that the acting seemed to drop back down to a poor standard. Significantly, Jessica Sula’s (Grace) performance proved itself to be not decent enough to carry the episode. Both of Grace’s parents, her mother in particular (my housemate accurately pointed out that she over-acted like she was in front of a live audience), were sort of overblown and exaggerated too.

Also, this episode saw the relationship dynamics of the fifth series of Skins go from being healthily complex to completely and utterly messy. For starters, I didn’t like everyone rudely inquiring about Franky’s sexuality, it’s evident that it’s a question she wouldn’t be comfortable answering. More than that, the love triangle developing between Franky, Liv and Matty just makes me uncomfortable, we’re getting hints that Mini could possibly be a lesbian and now Grace and Rich are going to get married!? Skins, you can absolutely consider me not on board with where these stories are heading. I do have one positive note - from the use of Stars’ wonderful ‘Wasted Daylight’ onwards, the music of the episode was superb.

All in all, this was a weak offering for Skins, and it brings back my already fairly dissatisfied feeling from the early series. There’s no doubt that this show is far from what it was in series 1 and 2, but it’s already a lot more disappointing than the third series, which was, at times, a bit muddled and silly. I can only hope that next week’s finale ends the series on a high note, because it’s all been a little too disheartening so far.

The final episode in the current series of Skins airs next Thursday at 10pm on E4.

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