Unfortunately, Skins does not seem to be moving towards the strong finish I had hoped for. Now, with only two episodes left in the season, this week’s “Daisy” was yet another thoroughly uninteresting episode in a season full of uninteresting episodes, a few atrocious ones and only a couple of brilliant moments.
There were two main conflicts in this week’s episode. The first affected all the main cast members. “All this shit going down,” Abbud says to Daisy at the beginning of the episode. “Tony does Michelle. Tony does Tea. Michelle does Stanley. Everyone’s got the clap. And I’m asking myself what went wrong … Everything is screwed up. Nobody’s talking. So, we’ve come to see you so you can fix everything.”
The second conflict stemmed from Daisy’s home life. Her father is a hard man. He works for the postal service to make ends meet for his two daughters after his wife abandons them. Daisy’s parents were both musicians at one time, but the struggle to live on an artist’s wages drove her away. Since then, he hasn’t allowed music in their house, posing a problem for both Daisy, who aspires to be a funk/jazz trumpet player, and her younger sister, who fancies herself a hip-hop MC.
Daisy’s personal story was a little more interesting than the gang’s troubles, but not much. I’m not sure if it’s the bad acting, the poor treatment of the characters in the writing or a combination of the two, but I just have a really hard time feeling for these characters. I can’t seem to take any of them seriously.
I did think some of the changes from the U.K. version were a little interesting. In the original, the conflict over music comes from the fact that Daisy’s U.K. counterpart Jal has a passion for classical clarinet, but her father, a successful hip-hop producer, doesn’t support the “rooty-tooty music” she plays, saying she is “dancing for whitey.” The change in the MTV version allowed for music to be the connection point between Daisy, her mother leaving and the estrangement between Daisy and her father, providing one of the more touching scenes in the episode when Daisy’s father sits down at his absent wife’s piano for the first time in who knows how long. I wouldn’t necessarily say this made for a more entertaining storyline, but it was a nice touch.