Nobody thinks you're cool, you know: Lindsay and Sam Weir

It’s book release day! Screening Siblings is out today! Eep.

#1 on the list of screen siblings was always going to end up here, with Freaks and Geeks’ Lindsay Weir lobbing an egg out of a car window to inadvertently bean her little brother, Sam, in the head.

It’s Hallowe’en, and this is the icing on the humiliation cake for Sam, who like his friends has already had his bag of candy stolen by a group of common or garden bullies. Sam is at the age where dressing up for Hallowe’en will soon be a thing of the past; perhaps it already should be, but he and his friends skew young and goofy, and why shouldn’t they have fun? There’s an endearing, youthful defiance in their resistance to trying to be ‘cool’, especially when they already know they’ll likely fail by any high school-approved metric. And so Sam finds himself standing on the street, disheartened and disappointed in his bashed-up robot costume, and then a car drives past and out of the window leans Lindsay, tentatively (if conditionally) accepted into the orbit of the cool slacker kids, the ‘freaks’ of the title. Without realising that it’s her brother, Lindsay throws the egg.

Both siblings crumple in this moment, although not quite for the same reasons. Lindsay because she feels bad, but also because she knows how much trouble she could get in to with their parents, and because the fun evening with her new friends is now tainted by this, the look on Sam’s face. Sam is no longer just a bit disappointed by the turn the evening has taken, he’s devastated.

The way John Francis Daley plays Sam in this moment is exquisitely done, like a bit of him has actually broken and it’s all over his face (yes, like the egg), the sense of betrayal, the knowledge that all that’s left in his power - because he understands, through this series of events, that he has very little power in this new world of high school - is to withhold absolution and to refuse the ride home.

Later that night, a recognisable sibling negotiation silently takes place. Sam doesn’t do what Lindsay expects, which is to tell on her. Instead, he keeps the incident to himself but delivers a withering, hurt verdict that is more effective than any parental punishment might have been. “Nobody thinks you’re cool, you know,” he tells his sister, privately and quietly.

“Trust me, I know,” Lindsay replies.

The ability of a brother or sister to see through a façade is often unmatched. To cut through the image of yourself you’ve cultivated, to see the workings, to know where the chink in the armour is. Sam suddenly does have power, because he can see Lindsay in a way that no one else can.

Whether or not siblings choose to use this sense of understanding for good or mischief, it’s arguably there in every altercation and every re-allying. Later in the series, Lindsay confronts the bully who is terrorising Sam. Rather than thank her, Sam protests that he could have handled it himself. Lindsay chooses to agree with him, and let’s him have the last word (“and by the way, I weigh 103 pounds”), not because he’s right but because it matters to Sam that this is the version of the story that they agree on.

Lindsay and Sam made it to the top of this list because there’s a really authentic blend of indifference, antipathy, solidarity and love in their portrayal, and Linda Cardellini and JFD do a brilliant job of balancing all those things while making them feel like real kids. Bonus points for being one of the rare depictions of older sister / younger brother pairings, which of all the sibling relationships on screen might the most under-represented!

I’m going to have a lie down now.

See all the posts in the countdown:

#5: Missy and Cliff Pantone (Bring It On)

#4: Wendy and Jon Savage (The Savages)

#3: David and Alexis Rose (Schitt’s Creek)

#2: OJ and Emerald Haywood (Nope)