Blink and you miss it: Noora seems more in love with Even than Isak does, she can’t keep her heart-eyes off of him.



Blink and you miss it: Noora gives Isak a look to show how proud she is of him for not hiding anymore, and that she thinks Isak has caught a damn fine-looking guy.



Subtext: Even is paraphrasing Pretty Woman. Edward orders one of everything from the room service menu for Vivian, because he didn’t know what she liked.



Blink and you miss it: Even wasn’t joking, he really did buy one of everything you could possible eat for breakfast. There’s at least two kinds of bread, a packet of granola, butter, tomatoes, avocado, three kinds of smoked ham, cheese, marmalade, juice, mango, the scrambled eggs he’s making, and a bag of carrots(?!).



Subtext: Even talks about Sonja while having his back turned to Isak, because he is hiding the truth. He isn’t exactly lying, but he’s not telling the entire truth either.



Subtext: The song lyrics to Fem Fine Frøkner matches Even’s mental state perfectly. Unfortunately.

Lost in translation: The Norwegian word for boyfriend/girlfriend, kjæreste, is gender-neutral by default, so sometimes you need to clarify if it’s a boy or a girl. Although in this case, Isak goes over the top, because he wants to shock his dad by coming out to him.



Subtext: What Isak’s dad means about mom being easily “stressed” can mean two things. He might think that she will react negatively to Isak coming out, because of her religious beliefs. But he might also think that this Christmas concert was meant for just the three of them, to meet up and reconcile as a family, and if Isak brings another person, it would spoil the entire thing.



Blink and you miss it: Sana admits to being wrong.



Subtext: The reason it was for the best that the guys left the apartment is of course that Even and Isak had sex. Mahdi is first of them to figure out what Even means, then Jonas, and… who knows if Magnus figured it out, or if he’s just laughing because everyone else is laughing.

Blink and you miss it: After Isak wrote his coming-out-text to his mom, he’s so nervous that his leg vibrates, just like in the scene when he confronted Sana about her religion.



Lost in translation: The whole dialogue with the receptionist is a mess, because Even keeps switching between Norwegian, Danish, and English, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. By having everything in English, all of that switching is lost, but here is how the dialogue actually goes:



Even: [Danish] This is my boyfriend.

Receptionist: [Danish] How nice.

E: [Norwegian] Yeah, very nice. Isn’t he handsome?

R: [Repeats it, because she doesn’t understand it] Handsome?

E: [Norwegian] Yeah, eh… How do you say it in Danish? Lovely… eh… [Danish] Lovely. [English] Uh, what do you say? Isn’t this man beautiful?

R: [Danish] Yes, very.

E: [Danish] Very [English] beautiful.

Cinematography: This montage is just here as appreciation for how the acting is un-fucking-believable in this clip, because you really see how Isak goes from happiness to confusion and fear. But let’s talk about the audio in this scene instead.



Every scene in SKAM has natural background sounds, unless a song is being used, in which case the song takes over entirely. But usually the background audio makes you feel like you are in the scene, it’s students chatting in the background in school, or it’s the quiet of the apartment when they’re alone, or party music and partying people if there’s a party, etc.



Sometimes the show does a diegetic switch, which is when music moves from being something that the characters hear, to something that only the audience is hearing, or vice-versa. In the kitchen scene earlier in the episode you can hear the radio playing Gabrielle in the background, but when Even turns it up, it takes over, and when the scene fades out, the music switches completely to being non-diegetic soundtrack.



But in this hotel scene, the background sound is unnatural. If you crank up the volume, you can hear an eerie soundscape, as if High For This never really faded away. It’s closer to a horror movie soundtrack, than the almost-documentary feel the show usually sticks to. And the reason the show does something different here, is that it really wants you to feel unease. It uses all the tricks in the book to make you unconsciously feel that something is Wrong here.



Subtext: The whole joke is that you think this season of SKAM is a Romeo+Juliet reference, double suicide bury-your-gays tropes and all, but it’s actually a Pretty Woman reference, but you won’t get that until Isak rescues Even right back. Ha-ha very funny.



Blink and you miss it: Moments ago, Isak was having the time of his life with his cool boyfriend in a cool hotel suite, being cool adults. And then everything comes crashing down, and he transforms into a scared little kid who is just completely in over his head.



Subtext: Isak doesn’t need to explain who he is talking about. The hotel staff just saw a naked dude walk straight out on the street, they know who Isak is chasing.

