The new Doctor Who spin-off, Class, already lives up to the hype with its first two episodes, which premiered on Saturday, October 22nd 2016. Here we will review Episode 1: ‘For Tonight We Might Die.’
Tanya and April in ‘For Tonight We Might Die’ (credit: BBC)
*** This review contains spoilers. ***
We were hopeful that the new Doctor Who spin-off, Class, would hit the ground running to stand independently strong. Well, we are happy to report that we got our wish. With the first two premiere episodes released on Saturday, Class has already proven itself to be fantastic in its own right.
The first episode, ‘For Tonight We Might Die,’ opens with a night scene in Coal Hill Academy. An unfortunate student, Kevin, gets caught in the middle of what we later learn is a fight between Miss Quill — a physics teacher at the school — and a Shadow Kin. She pulls the boy into a classroom to hide with her. A shadow spills under the door and morphs into a smoldering creature. Cut to a rift ripping open in mid air in a hallway, through which we see a fiery landscape, creating a similar effect to the Eye of Sauron, tilted on its axis. An inky black mass comes flying through.
The opening credits roll. Upbeat pop rock music plays as colorfully psychedelic, kaleidoscopic images of the school and main characters fill the screen. The song is ‘Up All Night’ by Alex Clare.
As the next day at school begins, we overhear murmurs about how common it is for Coal Hill students to disappear, and that such incidents are glossed over. The main student characters — Tanya, Charlie, Ram, and April — are established, and we quickly become familiar with their personalities. As the episode progresses, they all see and are attacked by the Shadow Kin in both forms. This is what eventually forms the otherwise unlikely bond between the group.
Quill loses no time in showing herself to be the delightfully and wickedly snarky character whom we first saw in her featurette. It turns out that she and Charlie are not of Earth, but members of two (now extinct) species who went to war over resources on their planet, Rhodia — she a Quill freedom fighter against the government, he a Rhodian prince.
Miss Quill and Charlie in ‘For Tonight We Might Die’ (credit: BBC)
Before Rhodia was destroyed in an unrelated takeover by the Shadow Kin, she was sentenced to be telepathically bound (using an arn, a potentially deadly parasite in her brain) to him as his slave as punishment for what the crown considered to be terrorist actions. Under this sentence, she will die if she uses a weapon, fails to protect Charlie, or tries to remove the arn. The philosophical questions raised by their backstory are intriguing.
They save one another from the Shadow Kin, and, as luck would have it, the Doctor shows up to whisk them away to Earth. He later mentions his empathy for what happened to them, which echoes his own life story.
Despite the weapons ban, Quill does carry a displacement gun, which she is only able to use for non-violent purposes such as body scans. When used against a Shadow Kin, the shooter dies along with the target when they are connected through the shooter’s shadow. Kevin is lost this way, but Charlie narrowly saves April from the same fate. Unfortunately, the misfire links her heart to Corakinus, king of the Shadow Kin; if one dies, so does the other. The connection also intermittently causes extreme pain along with the ability to read each other’s thoughts. Quill has no problem with innocent humans dying this way, but Charlie does, refusing to shoot the king in order to spare April. Corakinus leaves to gather a legion, and our heroes are forced to come up with another plan.
The prom goes ahead as planned, because the Shadow Kin can attack anywhere, so what’s the point of missing out on a party? Of course, they show up during this time. Corakinus kills Ram’s girlfriend, Rachel, and cuts off the boy’s leg.
Ram in ‘For Tonight We Might Die’ (credit: BBC)
Summoned by an earlier phone call from Quill, the Doctor drops by just in time to save the day. The students do not show signs of recognition when he mentions being a former caretaker at the school. He learns from Corakinus that the Shadow Kin are after the Rhodian Cabinet of Souls, which can be turned into a weapon of global mass destruction, and is in Charlie’s possession. Quill tries to influence Charlie to use it against the Shadow Kin, but the Doctor stresses that avenging genocide with genocide would be wrong. Charlie then convincingly lies that the cabinet’s power is an afterlife paradise myth, making the immediate argument moot. Nevertheless, the parallels between this scenario and the Time War are apparent, not to mention the more recent events involving the Zygons.
Related Story: An Overview of the Class Panel at New York Comic Con 2016
The Doctor suggests that the Shadow Kin still need to answer for the genocide that they committed. When Corakinus threatens them, April threatens to kill herself to destroy him, and Charlie offers himself up to end the standoff. By means of the Doctor’s trademark stalling tactics, Tanya picks up on his train of thought regarding turning on the lights to dispel the shadows. On his way back to the crack in the Universe, Corakinus takes April hostage. Apparently running on adrenaline, Ram tells her to duck, and uses a chair to slam the king through the rift. The Doctor then seals up the tear, and scrambles their coordinates, with his sonic screwdriver. Conveniently, he is able to give Ram a high tech prosthetic leg.
But, of course, this is a temporary victory. The Doctor lets them know that, due to high levels of arton energy, the school “will continue to act like a beacon across all of space-time to any being who might want to make mischief.” Going somewhere else, however, will not make them any safer because “time has looked at faces,” and it “never forgets.” We are then shown a close up of a wall plaque with a list of missing and dead students and staff, with the names of Susan, Danny, and Clara included.
Miss Quill and the Twelfth Doctor in ‘For Tonight We Might Die’ (credit: BBC)
Instead, he puts Quill — who is quite the reluctant antihero — in charge of the matter. She does, however, have the same penchant as the Doctor for telling people to run.
I particularly enjoyed the way that Charlie and Quill’s tragic backstory is told. To save it from getting too melodramatic, humor is expertly woven into the narrative as a counterbalance. This writing technique has already shown itself to be a common one for Class. Another notable example is when the students are discussing television shows as analogies for their current situation. There is always a risk of pop culture references being shoehorned into dialogue to make a show seem current, but the ones in Class are not only naturally seamless, but are utilized well for the purpose of social commentary.
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It is a good thing that Class was produced very recently, rather than during the time of the early revival of Doctor Who, as well as The Sarah Jane Adventures, as special effects have come a long way in that short span of time. And while the cheesy computer graphics worked passably well for shows aimed at the family and children’s demographics, they would have easily detracted from a much more “sophisticated” program aimed at young adults.
Speaking of The Sarah Jane Adventures, it is interesting to note that, if the show had been able to continue, the intention was to eventually reveal that Luke is gay. The fact that Charlie has been established as such is something of a parallel between spin-offs in terms of the non-straight youth community’s representation in the Whoniverse. Directly intentional or not, it is a nice way to pick up an important torch that was meant to be lit years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing how his relationship with Matteusz develops.
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