By Lacy Baugher for Drama on June 10th, 2013

The Final Series of Skins Gets a UK Airdate and a Trailer at Last

Hannah Murray, Kaya Scoldeario and Jack O'Connel in the final season key art. (Via the official Skins Twitter)
Hannah Murray, Kaya Scoldeario and Jack O'Connel in the final season key art. (Via the official Skins Twitter)
Finally! More details have been released at last about the final series of E4’s groundbreaking teen drama Skins. The show is set to bow out with three two-hour specials entitled Skins Rise, Skins Fire and Skins Pure that are now officially set to air in the UK in July.

With the broadcast date looming, we’re finally starting to get a proper taste of what the final season will look like – E4 has released the first official trailer for Series 7. Like virtually every other Skins trailer that has come before it, the clip promoting the show’s last hurrah is kind of strange, a bit ethereal and features no actual scenes from the show but has a great soundtrack. 

The minute-long clip features returning stars Kaya Scodelario, Hannah Murray and Jack O’Connell and, despite the aforementioned lack of any actual new footage, clearly illustrates the themes being tackled by this final set of episodes now that the teens are  young adults dealing with real-world problems. “Time changes everything,” says the new Series 7 tag line.

Get your first look at the new trailer below. 

So what do we know about the finale series? Not much – the production team seems to be keeping story details on lockdown. As you can tell from the trailer, the three two-part films will each focus on a specific former Skins character and where they are now on the road to growing up.  

Skins Rise will focus on Jack O’Connell’s Cook, who is now a drug dealer in Manchester and must confront his violent past. Hopefully this means we’re finally going to find out what happened after he confronted that doctor who killed Freddie, since it wasn’t exactly clear after the Series 4 finale that Cook had even survived.

Skins Fire will feature guest star Lara Pulver (Sherlock’s Irene Adler) and focus primarily on Kaya Scodelario’s infamous Effy. Fan favorites Naomi (Lily Loveless) and Emily (Kathryn Prescott) also apparently make an appearance in this episode. Sadly, Nicholas Hoult – who played Effy’s older brother Tony – was apparently too busy to participate in Skins’ last hurrah, so we won’t be getting that sibling reunions we’ve wanted.  

Skins Pure brings back Hannah Murray’s Cassie who is apparently now lonely and broken and living in London and not living happily ever after in New York with Sid like every Skins fan ever has always assumed. She meets a mysterious stranger and they strike up a “poignant friendship”. It’s not weird to hope that mysterious stranger is Sid after some plastic surgery or something is it?

No characters from Skins third generation will be appearing in this final set of episodes – which, given the amount of loose ends surrounding most of the characters from the earlier two generations, is probably a great thing.

Neither Series 5 or 6 of Skins ever aired in America, but both seasons were made available via streaming on Netflix (and Hulu, actually, though sadly they seem to have discontinued carrying the show at this time) so we’ll hopefully get to see Series 7 before too long on our side of the pond. If you’ve never seen Skins, an online streaming service like Netflix is also a great way to get caught up before the finale. Yes, it’s a teen drama, but it’s a really well done teen drama and worth watching! It’s surprisingly addictive actually. So you know, fair warning.

What say you, Skins fans? Are you looking forward to the finale? What would you most like to see in this last set of episodes?

 

By Lacy Baugher for Drama on June 10th, 2013
Lacy Baugher

Lacy's love of British TV is embarrassingly extensive, but primarily centers around evangelizing all things Doctor Who, and watching as many period dramas as possible.

Digital media type by day, she also has a fairly useless degree in British medieval literature, and dearly loves to talk about dream poetry, liminality, and the medieval religious vision. (Sadly, that opportunity presents itself very infrequently.) York apologist, Ninth Doctor enthusiast, and unabashed Ravenclaw. Say hi on Threads or Blue Sky at @LacyMB. 

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