Season 4, Episode 7
June 2, 2017
In the transmedia elements for this week’s episode of Skam, the show laid the groundwork for an epic Friday showdown. Today is Eva’s birthday, and plans were made for a party at Chris’ house. It is the type of situation that has resulted in some of Skam’s most dramatic situations, and fans naturally brainstormed how the various story points could have converged in such a setting.
The party at Chris’ house never happened. [Edit: Saturday’s episode suggests it’s happening next week instead.] The suggested “climax” of this week’s episode was derailed by the chain reaction from Sana’s decision to share her screenshots of Sara’s Facebook conversations with Isak, which spiraled into a hate campaign against Vilde and eventually Isak being identified as the perpetrator and choosing to accept blame knowing Sana was the true culprit. The week was deeply invested in actions and consequences, beginning with Sana’s decision to post the screenshots to Instagram and then watching as she lost control of the resulting fallout. She thought that Sara’s friends were all going to collectively realize that she was a bad person: in truth, turning Sara into a victim only inspired sympathy, and then a quest for revenge, and in the end several (relatively) innocent people getting hurt.
There are a range of conflicts that still needed to be resolved heading into this week, but outside of some throwaway exposition—which I’ll address below—those are mostly delayed in favor of a deep investigation into why and how Sana gets herself into conflicts to begin with. At the end of last week’s episode, Sana had to decide the type of person she was when she decided to go through Isak’s Facebook; this week, the show uses multiple situations and characters to force Sana into a state of self-reflection, a crucial step in the season’s overall arc if also a messy one at the point in the season where some might seek greater clarity.
Cultural Learnings 