Skins Rise Part 1: Review

This is the skins I have been waiting for. Cook is back. Cook has always been one of my favorite Skins characters. He was a wild bad boy but cared deeply for the people close to him. We see him in Manchester as a drug peddler on the streets for a dealer named Louis. He is then told he needs to drive Louis girlfriend Charlie around.
The two have an attraction with each other but if Louis finds out it's major bad news for Cook. Charlie and fellow drug peddler Jason, played by the the miscast Lucien Laviscount are sleeping together. Cooks spots them in action and gets beat up by Jason and told to keep his mouth shut. Louis gathers his men and his lady to celebrate his purchase of a house with a nice pool. However he says how he knows that Charlie has been sleeping with one of his "mates" and Jason meets a grisly death by having his head lunged in the pool while being beaten mercilessly at the same time.
Cook panics and tells his girlfriend Emma they are leaving, knowing what will happen to him if he crosses that line of sleeping with the scary bosses girl, however as they make their getaway Cook receives a call for help from Charlie to pick her up and from the trailer of next weeks episode it looks like it's going to be an epic confrontation.
The reason I loved this is because is because it connected to past episodes. Cook is no longer the wild boy we knew, he is, as Louis said "straight down the line". He admits to Charlie "I killed someone" which we know is a reference to him killing Dr Foster after he killed his best friend Freddie. I like how it showed how such as traumatic event changed someone so drastically. Jack O'Connell who playes Cook gives an honest and brilliant performance. Although it was quite dark, it showed the characters really well. Jason was a cocky wannabe who thought he was untouchable but he met a deadly match at the end whistle Louis didn't even flinch. It shows the psychotic nature of Louis even when Cook points out "you know he's dying", Louis just stays purely calm. While the death scene was quite hard to watch it was good for the story. I thought Lucien Laviscount was miscast, I don't think he can pull of the bad boy drug peddler, I thought that he was just there because is a little bit of a name in acting. I thought Liam Boyle was fantastic as Louis, the drug dealing psycho who trust Cook do jobs because he's straight. I also loved this episode because it was a good story with a great character. I liked Effy's story, I just didn't like Effy, I liked Cassie but her story was a bit odd. I also think it was honest to the old character. We knew Cook would end up in a job like this, he was never going to be CEO of Barclays bank, they connected with the past but showed us a new side of the Cook. I can't wait to see the new episode, which will be the last ever, and the could not have picked a better character to end the show with.