After a strong second season and a good third season, WTFock loses its grip in the forth season. Each season revolves around one of the main characters and their love life. This time, for inexplicable reason, the writers chose to focus on a brand-new character, one who wasn't even in the original Skam series.
Although I was hoping for a series around the clever Muslim Yasmina (which would have resulted in something original), we got the rather superficial Kato Fransen (Romi Van Rentergem) instead. She was introduced as an Instagram diva, but there was only little material to make that credible. Instagrammers are bus yday and night with their image , but for Kato this seemed like an afterthought. Moreover, she looked pretty average and had only a few qualities that could make us believe that she really had that many followers. I kept on thinking it would turn out that she would have bought her followers in China.
Consequently, the best scenes in the fourth season are the ones in which Kato does not play a major role. Scenes with stars such as Zoë, Yasmina and Milan. It is also a pity that Zoë (Veerle Dejaeger) only got little material to work with, and that the character took an inexplicable turn halfway through the season (and brutally ended an otherwise interesting storyline).
What bothered me the most is the morals that the writes want to display so emphatically, especially around social media and racism. Because - guess what? - social media divas also don't have an easy life, and people from little villages sometimes dare to talk about "that kind of people".
A strength of WTFock is the "real time" of the story. The scenes take place at the time when they are first broadcast. Covid-19 was notably present, and WTFock can call itself the first fiction series that integrated mouth masks and social distancing in its story. Still, you can feel the hand of the government in the scenarios, because all the characters stick, like civilized teenagers, to the rules. Just visit the affiliated website watwat.be and you know what I mean. Though, it was realistic that everyone in class wore a mask, and no one in the corridors.
WTFock is still perhaps the best teen series that Flanders has ever made (compare the quality for instance, with "Wat Nu Weer?" from the 90s). The producers must however focus more on the story and the depth of the characters, and less on trying to give moral lessons. Please don't let the series become a vehicle of the government youth service, this is a teen series for fock's sake.
