Skins Ex Machina

Spoilers here for series 1-2 of the teen soap opera, Skins. I try to avoid these types of analysis, less because of the spoilers themselves, more that it's harder to follow if you're not familiar with the plot. I really wanted to write this one, though.

Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus
That a god not intervene, unless a knot show up that be worthy of such an untangler
- Horace, Ars Poetica

'horse' is not an emotion.

In s2e7, Effy's episode does that thing western writers have been warned to avoid for millenia: it pulls a Deus Ex Machina. And it somehow works beautifully, without feeling cheap or contrived. Fans never complained about it. In fact it's so sneaky, that no one even marked it on the show's TV Tropes page!

I think DXM is the only way to describe the episode. Effy was already written unusually in series 1; she's a supporting character in a few scenes who never speaks, until it turns out she's much more important than anyone realized. She was the X-factor. She gets more lines in series 2, but she's still not really involved with the plot. By this point, Tony and Sid's relationships are at their lowest point. They talk to each other and both agree they want to fix everything back to how it was before.... they just have no idea how to do it.

Then Sid makes an ominous deal with Effy, and she launches a mysterious plan to untangle all the drama and make everyone happy again. She does the thing with Tony's watch so he can talk with Michelle again. Though with Sid it's more like she winds him up and points him in the right direction, so he can finally speak honestly with Cassie. And that's how two romantic arcs are resolved by a meddling outsider.

The episode ends on a shot of Effy looking directly into the camera and smiling, as if she's fully self-aware that she's a character in a TV show, and she knows she's a plot device. It's clever, but that irony isn't the reason that average viewers happily accepted the episode.

I think there's some underappreciated truth to the way the Greeks used Deus Ex Machina in their stories. Natural events like earthquakes or the movement of the sun were credited to gods, not only due to lack of scientific knowledge, but because of how uncontrollable they were. And this extended even to the affairs of humans in their stories, where no matter how much they struggle, eventually it becomes so tangled that they lose control over their own fates. It's up to the whims of gods, the uncontrollable forces of destiny. "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

The show Skins is at its best when it makes gritty teen drama glow with a mythic quality. To a teenager these struggles are everything important, and maybe when they get really complicated there doesn't seem to be any logical way out. Maybe the turning point comes not from rational decisions, but from uncontrollable forces sorting everything out. Not a nosy god who solves your problems for you, but maybe from getting so angsted-out that you finally confront your girlfriend and pour out your emotions, no longer afraid of a negative outcome. Then who knows what might happen?

In fact I think there's something even weirder about common approaches to romantic stories, which sometimes try to treat relationships as a chess puzzle to be solved. Cue in the wise supporting character who gives the main character a lecture and tells them Important Advice So They Can Sort Out What To Do Next. There's a nice orderly cause-and-effect but it ends up feeling emotionally empty. Skins finds a way around this, making us empathize with the characters so strongly that even when we don't understand why everything happened, the emotional resolution still rings true.

Fitting that the episode right before this one goes even further with namedropping Greek myth parallels, and most of the episode is questionable if it really happened or it's just a dream sequence, but it concerns Tony internally overcoming his struggles with identity. It's very strange, and it's breaking all these rules of how we're taught to write, yet the episode somehow works. Identity isn't something you can logic out of, but maybe something unexplainable just happens out of nowhere.

I was reminded of something someone once pointed out to me about the videogame Earthbound. In one part of the story, you ride a bus to the next city, but there's a huge traffic jam in the desert. You have no choice but to go out and walk through the desert hills, having a mini adventure, until you find your way back to the highway where the path is now clear. You didn't go around the traffic jam, nor did you do anything to make it clear it up. In real life, traffic jams just naturally go away after some time.

We like seeing perfectly logical plots because they keep us reading, but we can get addicted to seeking them out, like a child eating nothing but sugar. It's okay to break the rules of plot to reveal some truth. Of course, you still have to be very careful about using the Deus Ex Machina, because the audience can feel like they were cheated. But this one episode of a TV show made me completely rethink that they can be used carefully for a purpose.

Rewatching all of Skins recently with a friend made me analyze it episode by episode, and I found so many unusual and daring writing choices. I kept learning so many new things. I could write something like this about nearly every episode (I kinda want to), but again there's that hurdle of having to explain the story for people who never watched it.