August 4: "Detained" (Class)

It's a bit surprising that Class has a bottle episode (i.e., one set and basically just the main characters) when the series is only eight episodes long.  (Of course, next week's trailer looks pretty set-and-CGI-intensive, so I guess they needed a break.)  Bottle episodes can sometimes be a good thing, since it forces the characters to interact and (theoretically) leads to their growth and development and our appreciation for them.  That's what they're going for here, I think, but I don't know that they quite manage it.

It doesn't help that this is an episode that frequently threatens to go full CW again.  In fact, the only thing that stops it is that there's actually a narrative reason for these characters to start fighting with each other (since full CW is marked by a lack of understandable motivation for characters to behave in dramatic ways).  It's a bit of a fig leaf, true, but it helps.

April grabs the rock. ("Detained") ©BBC

The set-up is straightforward: the gang has been put in detention by Quill while she goes and does something else (we'll find out exactly what next episode), when a tear opens up outside the classroom and shoots a meteor into the room that ends up removing the classroom from space and time completely.  That's because the meteor was part of a prison, and the prisoner whose consciousness is still in the meteor is trying to make the students angry so that they'll kill each other, because that's the only way the prisoner knows to escape -- through death.  Oh, and the prison forced people to tell the truth, so anyone who holds the chunk of prison is forced to confess.  "They were living consciousnesses, put in a prison where guilt was their weapon," April tells the others.

In theory a nice idea, but (even though we know there's a reason for it -- and even before we know know we can tell something's wrong) it still means we have to watch the characters get angry with each other while occasionally confessing some shameful truth to the others.  And most of the confessions don't feel that grave, honestly.  Maybe it's just because I'm pretty sure I'm older than the target audience, but things like "I worry that I'll never feel as strongly for you as you feel for me" don't feel devastating.  Yeah, maybe that's true, but it's not a contest.²⁷³  There's certainly nothing like April revealing she's actually super bigoted or Tanya confessing her love for Ram too (thank goodness) -- nothing that would be actually devastating or potentially unfixable.  And the stuff about Matteusz being just a bit freaked out sometimes that his boyfriend is an alien and has a weapon of mass destruction with him seems very understandable and human.  And to be fair, Matteusz does try to explain this to Charlie afterwards, via a metaphor involving Narnia that ends with a reasonable point: "Do you never complain about your friends?  Do you never complain about me?  Even in the privacy of your head?" Except Charlie claims he doesn't.  (But then he also claims later on that he's not feeling angry right before he launches into a speech that sees him get really very angry indeed, so maybe he's not quite sure what he feels.)

And we also get some acknowledgement of Tanya's feelings of being left out, due to being three years younger (not two, as I thought) and also black.  "White people," she grouses to April.  "... Always so optimistic.  Always so certain things are going to work out for you.  Oh, well, because they usually do."  "My dad tried to kill me when I was eight!" April replies.  "But you got your mum up walking again," Tanya retorts.  "Typical white-person happy ending."  It's an interesting moment that they don't belabor, but it's still there.  Although I'm not quite sure lampshading that actually changes anything: Tanya's lost her dad, after all.

So yeah, lots of anger being thrown around and such, and even though we know why it's happening it doesn't really make it less awkward to watch, just less unmotivated.  And other than a few insights, like Charlie's claustrophobia and April and Ram's feelings about their relationship that I'm still not 100% convinced is all that believable in the first place, we don't really even learn that much about the characters that we didn't already know.  "Detained" tries, and the underlying prison concept is neat (even if mainly just used as the motivating force here), but it's ultimately a bit of a mixed bag.








²⁷³ OK, no, wait, there might be a counterargument to this involving Gricean maxims.  If it's the case that the statement "I don't love you as much as you love me" involves the implied meaning of something like "I don't love you the correct amount", then this might make a bit more sense.  I have a suspicion that that's the sort of conversational implicature that one loses as one gets older and yeah we're back to me not being part of the target audience, aren't we?  OK, so maybe withdraw this particular objection and just call it "characterization" instead.

August 3: "Brave-ish Heart" (Class)

Of course, the other problem with having an episode going CW is that the subsequent episodes have to deal with the fallout of going CW.  And so, unsurprisingly, there's some of that here.  But to his credit, Patrick Ness largely sidesteps a lot of it.  There's a brief conversation between April and Ram about their relationship, in which each one points out that they've only known the other for like a month, that does feel a bit like trying to have it both ways, of acknowledging the ridiculousness of a romantic relationship while trying to also actually have that relationship, but generally (and wisely) most of the CW stuff is ignored.²⁷²

And in fact, while the flower petal storyline is still more compelling than April and Ram's trip to the Shadow Kin homeworld, there's a really lovely scene between April and Ram that actually takes a moment to address Ram's being a Sikh:

APRIL: These are here to remind them that the universe will crush them if they don't defeat it.  All of it.
RAM: Pretty bleak.
APRIL: Yeah, well, most religions are.
RAM: Not all.  Not mine.
APRIL: Says the Sikh boy with the short hair.
RAM: Ever tried going through airport security in a turban?  My dad doesn't like that I don't practise Kesh.
APRIL: That's the long hair and the beard, right?
RAM: Yeah.  But you know, modern times, you got to look sharp.  I like that he does, though, honestly.  Tells me where I came from.  ...  This is the Kara. (his metal bracelet)  It reminds us that we're part of the community and that our hands and life should do good work.  We believe the important thing in your life is to do good action.  But, if you do the good action, right, somewhere in the process, there's got to be God, even if you don't have faith or believe there's some dude out there looking after you.  Isn't doing a good thing, one human to another, the closest we're going to get to God?

(from The Class Transcripts - Brave-ish Heart)

It's interesting to see an effort to actually describe what one of the character believes and to tie it to their religion without an automatic "religion is bad" viewpoint -- and in fact the contrast between April's and Ram's beliefs helps set up the argument as an argument, rather than a lecture.  Consequently, this is one of the better moments in the story.

It's not perfect, of course; April's parents very quickly grate on the nerves.  I get that having people keep exclaiming how they don't understand what's happening and choosing to start fights with other people (in this case, Ram's dad) is a realistic way for people to behave, but that doesn't mean I actually want to experience that.  It also doesn't help that Con O'Neill, as April's dad, chooses to play most of this in a heightened state of hysteria that frequently threatens to tip over into OTT-ness.  Ram's dad is better (although there's a weird moment at the end where he doesn't want Ram to hug April because "she's an alien now" -- although Ram gets a good rejoinder: "Dad, at least pay attention") but it's really Tanya holding this plot together, as she's the only one level-headed enough to actually look for solutions to the problems.  (And full marks to Vivian Oparah, by the way, who has consistently knocked it out of the park as Tanya every week.)

Charlie prepares to weaponize the Cabinet of Souls while Ms. Ames
threatens Matteusz. ("Brave-ish Heart") ©BBC

But as I noted before, the flower petal stuff is more interesting; Ms. Ames (the head teacher, in case you've forgotten) seems to know an awful lot about the alien stuff, although she notes that the Governors aren't affiliated with UNIT, they are well-informed, even if a bit sinister: "Governments have a way of tripping over themselves, slightly too concerned with rights.  It's terribly inefficient," she notes.  Her solution to the petal problem is to get Charlie to use the Cabinet of Souls to attack the deadly plants (and once again Class is going for the horrific factor, with the scenes of severely bloodied victims out on the streets)-- but doing so would destroy all the Rhodian souls in the cabinet.  Miss Quill, on the other hand, wants Charlie to wipe out the Shadow Kin, both as an act of vengeance and to save the universe from their future attacks.  Charlie doesn't want to do either, but Ms. Ames threatens Matteusz -- although, when Ms. Ames is sufficiently distracted, Matteusz knocks her out: "Even with a gun, you should never turn your back on an angry Pole."  That still leaves the killer flower problem, of course, but since April defeats the Shadow Kin's king in a duel and thus becomes the new king, she's able to order the Shadow Kin to go to Earth and kill all the flowers, saving Charlie from having to decide how to use the Cabinet.

So there are some good moments in here, and it's definitely better than the last episode.  Still, there's a bit of a sense of a letdown, with a story that's juggling a bit too much at times.  It's as if Ness wanted to resolve the Shadow Kin threat, at least for now, but it does mean that a lot of writerly heavy lifting had to occur to get there, rather than a more natural-feeling storyline; in some sense you can sense the gears moving.  Still, the Governors stuff is still intriguing, and the regulars continue to do a great job, which helps things no end.  "Brave-ish Heart" isn't a standout episode, but it's not a disaster either.







²⁷² Although the "Next Time" trailer makes it look like the CW stuff has been delayed until then, rather than dropped altogether.

August 2: "Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart" (Class)

After a couple episodes dealing with other things, Class gets back to some of the plot threads left dangling after the first episode: namely, what's up with April sharing her heart with the leader of the Shadow Kin?  The answer is nothing good.

My wife has a term that I've found useful.  When a show has characters acting in certain ways because it suddenly adds to the dramatic tension of the show, rather than because it's how these characters would actually behave (based on everything shown up to that point, as well as general common sense), she says that show has gone "CW", after the American TV network that airs shows (such as The Vampire Diaries) where such things are fairly common.  It's an artificial way of creating dramatic tension, rather than letting it arise naturally from the characters and the storylines.  And for me, "Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart" is Class going CW.

The thing I have the hardest time buying is April and Ram's relationship.  Last time Ram only called her up because he couldn't get a hold of Tanya, and while they subsequently shared a kiss in a stressful situation, the impression at the end of that was they had started to develop a friendship, not a romantic attraction.  Yet here we're meant to think that these two would just naturally end up together.  It's hard not to view this with a cynical eye: Charlie and Matteusz are already in a relationship, Tanya's two years younger than the others, and obviously Miss Quill is off-limits, so it feels like the production team said, "Well, I guess that just leaves Ram and April."  Because apparently these people don't know anyone else at all.  So that's already kind of annoying, but the speed at which Patrick Ness tries to throw these two together doesn't feel plausible, even taking into account the fact that teenagers are sacks of raging hormones.  If they'd taken one additional episode to show the relationship growing it would have been better.  Hell, just give us a montage of a week or two of them developing romantic feelings.  But I'm guessing they felt they didn't have time for any of that, and so the result falls really flat.

The other major CW aspect of this episode is how Ness has decided that we've been growing to like Charlie too much, so he decides to bring up some unpleasant aspects of his character, primarily the way he orders Miss Quill around.  To be fair, that's been lingering in the background prior to this, but here he seems much harsher when discussing it.  To her credit, Tanya refuses to put up with this ("Please don't question the morality of my culture," Charlie tells her.  "If the morality of your culture keeps on looking like slavery, you're not really going to stop me from asking questions," Tanya responds), but it's not a question that's really answered, as Matteusz has them focus on all the flower petals instead.

It's not all bad; the storyline with Miss Quill and the new head teacher, Dorothea Ames, is quite interesting, particularly as Ms. Ames has all sorts of information you might not think she would have (for instance, she knows that Charlie and Quill are aliens).  She's been sent by the Governors (remember the robot from episode 2?), and freely admits that the Governors have been watching all the goings-on at Coal Hill.  This is a much more engaging storyline, and the idea that the Governors might be able to remove the creature inside Quill's head that forces her to serve Charlie is a good one.  And in the background of the story is the proliferation of these pink, blood-sucking flower petals that the Governors want Quill's help to deal with.

April cuts a tear in space and time to go get her heart back.
("Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart") ©BBC

Fortunately we'll be coming back to this next time.  But that does mean that our focus this time around is on April -- not just the stuff with Ram, but also how she's being influenced by the Shadow Kin (since they did something to the king at the top of the episode).  It makes her a lot more violent and angry, as it threatens to take over.  And the reappearance of her dad, who just got out of prison after trying to kill her and her mum, doesn't help either.  (I'd say that's another CW aspect, except CW doesn't really have a monopoly on the "estranged parent shows back up" cliché.)  There's not really anything wrong with this, honestly, and Sophie Hopkins does a good job of being genuinely quite terrifying as the possessed April, but because I was already disengaged by the April/Ram stuff, this didn't really do much for me, and I found myself wondering when this storyline was going to be over with.  Well, the answer is "not yet", as this ends on a cliffhanger: the Shadow Kin king is preparing to come kill April (and everyone else on Earth) and take her heart, but she decides to take the fight to him by cutting a hole in time and jumping through, with Ram following close behind.

So ultimately I found this to be a very frustrating episode, as it suffers from a high dose of that CW-ness, and the actually interesting bits of the episode are relegated to the B-plot.  Hopefully the next episode will correct course a bit.  But as of now this is the least successful episode of Class yet.

August 1: "Nightvisiting" (Class)

Now this is more like it!

If the first episode of Class was largely setting everything up, and the second was good but a bit disjointed, then this episode is where they hit the ground running, firing on all cylinders.  "Nightvisiting" is a good balance of the character stuff and the "problem of the week" stuff.

This time around we focus primarily on Tanya; last week we learned that her dad had died, and this week it's the two-year anniversary of his death from a stroke.  Tanya is still broken up about it (or perhaps the anniversary has caused all her old feelings to resurface), which is why this week's monster has chosen to try and latch onto her.  This week it's a weird plant-like creature called the Lankin²⁷¹, which is here to feed on people's grief.  But fascinatingly, the Lankin can't just grab people and force them to give up their grief; instead, people have to reach out to the Lankin, to be willing to surrender their grief to them.  This means that the Lankin has to convince people to do so, which it does by presenting people with dead friends and relatives, offering them a form of closure.

Tanya talks to her "dad". ("Nightvisiting") ©BBC

Effectively, that means we get little character studies between Tanya and her deceased father Jasper, as well as (to a lesser extent) Miss Quill and her dead sister.  We learn who Tanya is and how much her father meant to her, and we learn that Miss Quill (or Andra'ath, as her sister calls her) doesn't like her sister very much.  Oh, and Ram sees Rachel again, because apparently the poor guy hasn't suffered enough -- but he books it out of there pretty fast (although that allows the show to have a very effective scare, as Rachel suddenly appears in April's Skype window due to the video lag).  But that also means that not only do we get insights into these characters, but also that we get to see just how manipulative the Lankin is.  It's fascinating, watching it try to say just the right things, freely admitting that it's not actually the dead come back to life (although it does suggest that it possesses the dead's souls) but nevertheless trying to convince people that it doesn't matter, that they can give over their grief to the Lankin -- although it leaves out the part that it will kill the person.

But because this isn't your typical swaggering alien invasion, "Nightvisiting" gets to be a much quieter piece, about characters talking to each other -- whether that's interactions with the Lankin, or Charlie's interactions with his boyfriend Matteusz, who's been kicked out of his parents' house.  And since this is geared toward teenagers/young adults, you'd better believe we get a sex scene -- tastefully done, mind, but still there.  But ultimately it's the two differing conversations with the Lankin -- Tanya's and Miss Quill's -- that hold the most interest.  Miss Quill is immediately distrustful and is largely playing for time, while Tanya seems actually interested in the Lankin's proposition, even if still hesitant.  It's a fascinating discussion that makes for compelling viewing.

I said last time that Class didn't really have a handle on how to actually deal with anything coming through the tear (and thank goodness the characters are back to calling it that this week too), but that was partly because it seemed like the sorts of things coming through were going to be largely beyond their capabilities.  The Lankin, by contrast, is a clever idea that the team clearly can deal with, and while the final solution is to drive a bus through the Lankin and sever its link to Tanya and her dad, it feels like a reasonable solution, rather than a skin-of-their-teeth save.

So in "Nightvisiting" we get a clever, intriguing monster that leads to a whole series of character studies and even some character growth (including Tanya letting go at the end and Ram starting to open up to the others), and most importantly the balance struck here is near perfect.  This is an excellent piece of television and an encouraging sign for the series.  I suspect this might end up being the high point of the run, but if the remaining episodes can even come close to this then they'll have a winning show on their hands.







²⁷¹ This appears to be a reference to the old ballad "Lamkin", about a sort of bogeyman who murders a mother and her son.  Some versions call it "Lankin", hence the name here.  It doesn't appear to be a parallel to the Shadow Kin from the first episode (so it's not actually the Lan Kin, as some sources have suggested).

July 31: "The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo" (Class)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this episode.  It's ostensibly about a killer tattoo (well, sort of), but the story seems far more interested in examining the human cost of the events last episode, particularly with regards to Ram.  That's an admirable goal, but it does mean that this is shaping up to be a rather different show from what the first episode seemed to indicate.

Let's be clear: Ram's storyline is very well done.  It's good that we get an episode that isn't shy about dealing with the fallout from the previous week, and Fady Elsayed is more than up to the task of portraying Ram as someone who's hurt and confused and can't even take solace in football anymore, thanks to his new prosthetic leg that the Doctor gave him.  You really get a sense of the anguish Ram is going through, with his girlfriend dead and him unable to tell anyone about it, other than some weird kids he was only thrust together with because of the circumstances.  The only one he kind of opens up to is Tanya, and we do get the sense that their relationship is stronger than we might have otherwise guessed -- Ram might ostensibly be using her for tutoring help, but there seems to be a stronger connection beyond that between the two of them.

The other nice thing that this episode does is actually examine what it would mean for these kids to be watching over the "bunghole of time" (as Tanya calls it).  "Even if something does come through, what are we supposed to do about it?" Tanya wonders.  "We're not superheroes."  But this is where the episode goes slightly awry -- because something has come through, and they don't really have any idea what to do about it.

Ram confronts the dragon's mate. ("The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo")
©BBC

That something is not actually the dragon tattoo that keeps moving around on Ram's coach Dawson's skin (which brings to mind the tattoo-like thing on Me in series 9's "Face the Raven"), but rather that dragon's mate, which kills people by skinning them alive and has Dawson reach into the corpse so that the mate can feed on the fresh blood.  Dawson is OK with this because the dragon made him stronger and more powerful.  What's notable about these scenes is how Class appears to be doubling down on the gore.  Ram is once again splashed with blood, and he witnesses the dragon kill one of the cleaning staff, as well as the aftermath of its killing one of the assistant coaches.  (Not that the others emerge unscathed, as they watch the dragon kill the headmaster, Mr Armitage -- which is actually pretty upsetting, given how much we'd seen of his character in Doctor Who, and how he seemed like a decent person.)  Writer Patrick Ness seems to really want to confront Ram with this awfulness, to keep reminding him of what happened to Rachel, but he does it in a rather sensational manner.  Which is fine, this is obviously trying to be a darker show, and it doesn't feel as pointless as it did in early Torchwood, but it is still noticeable.  And the good thing that comes out of it is Ram confronting the dragon's mate: "So she's trapped.  Maybe you'll never get her off his body.  That's the new reality. What are you going to do about it?  ...  Maybe you'll never have her back the way you want.  I'll never get Rachel back either.  But at least you'll have her.  Maybe you could find a way to make the new reality work."  But that means that they all seem to be largely accepting of Dawson's ultimate fate.  OK, fine, he was a murderer (or at least complicit), but it still doesn't sit right.

And this resolution is also where the episode falls down a bit.  Because the episode has made a point of saying that this group doesn't really know how to stop anything that comes through the tear.  (I'm gonna keep calling it the "tear", as I don't know that I can quite bring myself to keep using "bunghole of time" seriously.)  And the ultimate resolution of that is to talk to the creatures that come through, reason with them.  That's a laudable message, but I suspect it won't work that often.  (It didn't really work with the Shadow Kin last time, for instance.)  And so that means that they don't really have any more of a clue of how to handle things at the end of the episode than at the beginning.  And that's really unsatisfying, particularly because the episode seems to believe that they do have a better handle on things.  Maybe Miss Quill will be of more help next time (since here she gets her own subplot about being observed by a robot which has apparently been constructed by the Governors (aka the school board) which is clearly setting up something for later on in the series).  But as of right now I don't really buy it.

So I dunno.  If you were to judge this based purely on Ram's storyline, and on the growth he experiences, as he's finally able to (start to) confront his demons and his new reality and is even able to confide in his father Varun (Aaron Neil, doing an outstanding job), then this is a great success.  If you judge this based on avoiding characterization clichés and making our heroes actually confront what it's like living in this sort of world, then this is a success.  But if you were judging it based on the dragon/coach subplot, then it feels both a bit standard/unsurprising and a bit unresolved.  So that's probably the definition of a guarded success, then.

July 30, 2017: "For Tonight We Might Die" (Class)

Oh, hello again! Now where were we?  Ah, that's right, Class.

As noted last time, Doctor Who took a year off.  But it wasn't a completely Who-free time: in October 2016, Class, a brand new original spin-off, premiered on the online-only channel BBC Three, as well as in Australia.²⁷⁰  Class was the brainchild of author Patrick Ness (perhaps best known as the author of A Monster Calls), who expanded a Doctor Who pitch into a full-blown series, all about life at Coal Hill (the school seen all the way back in the first episode, and most recently as the school that Clara taught at).  Over the season's eight episodes, students would have to balance their personal lives with alien threats, much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  This was meant to be a show that spun off from Doctor Who but wasn't really tied to it, the way the previous spin-offs were.  Other than the setting (and the reappearance of Nigel Betts, from series 8, as the headmaster Mr Armitage), Class features a new cast of characters.

This first episode, "For Tonight We Might Die", is very much an establishing episode, as it takes the time to introduce all our main characters, but in a natural way.  So we get April, who seems to be the nice girl; Tanya, who's actually been moved up a couple years; Ram, who's a star athlete but needs tutoring help from Tanya; Charlie, a strange new kid from Sheffield; Matteusz, an immigrant from Poland who's Charlie's love interest; and Miss Quill, a fairly mean and sarcastic teacher who is connected to Charlie in some way.  The episode immediately sets out the series' stall in terms of diversity, if nothing else; Tanya's black, Ram is Sikh (or at least his father is, which therefore suggests Ram is too), Matteusz is an immigrant, and Charlie's gay.  But other than a brief mention from Matteusz, which is played for laughs rather than commentary ("Everything all right?" Charlie asks.  "Oh, yeah," Matteusz replies.  "My deeply religious parents are very happy I'm going to dance with a boy.  This has been an evening of love and warmth."  "Great!" Charlie replies brightly, missing the sarcasm), this is all treated just as a matter of course.  As it should be.

But yes, this episode is full of set-up.  We discover that Charlie is the last member of an alien race called the Rhodia, while Miss Quill is the last member of her species, the Quill.  The Rhodia and the Quill were involved in a war on their planet that the Rhodia won, and Miss Quill was sentenced to become the slave/servant (depending on who's speaking) of Charlie, who was the prince of the Rhodia.  But both races were wiped out by a third race, the Shadow Kin, who wiped out both races in a single day.  Charlie and Miss Quill only survived because they were rescued "by a figure of legend out of space and time itself" (aka the Doctor).  But because there's a rip in the fabric of time at Coal Hill (now an Academy instead of the School it used to be), the Shadow Kin are able to come to Earth to finish the job -- and because they want something Charlie has called the Cabinet of Souls, which they believe is a powerful weapon.  They can't just take over the planet, though, because the leader of the Shadow Kin has gotten his heart linked with April's; they both need to be alive in order to survive.  As I said, lots of set-up.

It's to the episode's credit, though, that all this set-up is handled fairly well.  Other than one big infodump speech to April about Charlie and Miss Quill's real origins, everything else comes up organically.  All the relationships are sketched out by showing rather than telling, which is really nice, and the threat of the Shadow Kin (who literally travel in shadows -- a bit like the Vashta Nerada from "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead") is clear without being oversold.  The way they come in and casually kill Ram's girlfriend Rachel just as a matter of course is horrifying but isn't fetishized.  It is surprisingly bloody though, as Ram is liberally splashed with Rachel's blood and subsequently loses half a leg attacking the Shadow Kin.

Tanya, April, Matteusz, Charlie, and Ram look as the Doctor tells them
they'll be protecting Coal Hill from the tear. ("For Tonight We Might Die")
©BBC

Really, somewhat surprisingly the downside of "For Tonight We Might Die" is that the shadow of the Doctor hangs over the whole episode.  Usually the presence of the Doctor enhances things (as in the two SJA stories he shows up in), but here he's a distraction.  Peter Capaldi's name is right there in the opening credits, and you just keep waiting for him to show up.  The Doctor does show up, of course, but not until the climax of the episode.  This unfairly shifts the focus off the main characters as a result.  It also means that the resolution of this episode feels off, somehow; the Doctor knows there's a tear in time here and that all sorts of potentially dangerous aliens are going to be attracted to it, and more importantly in a way much of what happens here is his fault.  The tear in time is because there's so much artron energy around Coal Hill (in other words, the Doctor keeps visiting) that time has worn thin.  And yet he decides to leave it in the hands of these teenagers, with a rather lame excuse that even he can't fix everything.  It's the sort of situation that the Doctor would fix as a matter of course in his own show (especially since it's his fault), but because this is a spin-off he has to hand it over to someone else.  This wasn't a problem in something like Torchwood (which this episode frequently looks like it wants to emulate, with the tear being a lot like the Rift) because the Doctor didn't really know about it.  But here he does, and he chooses to leave it.  It's weird.

Still, it's the first episode, and there's time to adjust the balance of things, particularly once Class can get a chance to stand on its own, away from the Doctor.  Its influences are clear (and overt, as the characters mention Buffy, Once Upon a Time, and The Vampire Diaries at the end as parallels to their own situation), as is its goal to be a somewhat dark, supernatural show aimed at teenagers and young adults.  They have a strong cast and some sparkling writing, and while it's not 100% successful in the first episode, there's enough here to be encouraging.







²⁷⁰ But not in the United States, despite the show being a BBC America co-production.  BBC America chose to hold the show back to air directly after new episodes of series 10 of Doctor Who.  In October, US viewers were instead provided with a new adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency -- a show that somehow manages to take a Dirk Gently-esque plot and put a title character who bears only the most fleeting resemblance to Douglas Adams' original conception inside it, with very mixed results.

July 29: "The Husbands of River Song"

Stuart Manning's poster for "The Husbands of
River Song" (from Design by Stuart Manning)

For the first time since, ooh, "The Runaway Bride", we get a Christmas special that's designed to be a comedy.  There's a sense that, after saying goodbye to Clara, the show wants to shift gears and do a nice, fun romp this time around.  And, on the whole, it largely works.  That's not to say it's perfect, mind, and parts of this are in fact deeply silly.  But what makes this work is the underlying tone of, "Let's just have a laugh", which means that this might be one of the funnier stories Steven Moffat has written for the show.

The opening stuff, with the TARDIS in a redressed Trap Street set, might actually be the weakest moments, but this is quickly addressed with the introduction of River Song.  I know some people aren't fond of her character, but I don't mind, and this story makes a virtue of her, showing us how she behaves when the Doctor isn't around.  And the answer isn't as virtuous as the Doctor might expect -- we get lots of back and forth between River and the guy she doesn't realize is the Doctor (since she doesn't know he got a new set of regenerations) as she tells him to kill King Hydroflax: "Is this what you're like when I'm not [around]?  ...  You're talking about murdering someone," the Doctor protests.  "No, I'm not," River replies cheerily, "I'm actually murdering someone.  Cheer up!  Get a saw, I'll kill the lights, you kill the patient."  The chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Alex Kingston is really quite good, and even while it's perhaps slightly uncomfortable to see River so morally ambiguous (she must put up more of a front while the Doctor's around), it's still great fun.  And interestingly, the Doctor largely just rolls with this, even if he disapproves -- it's like he just wants to see where this goes.

The rest of the guest cast aren't exactly slouching; Greg Davies seems like he's having a good time ranting as King Hydroflax, even though he was probably rather uncomfortable with his head stuck through tables and such (and apparently his head is so heavy it's distorting the TARDIS telepathic circuits -- aka the foam rubber is rather obvious here), while Matt Lucas does a cheery job as Nardole, who always seems to realize what's going on just a bit too late.  (His best moment is probably with the Doctor, starting to wail like a modern-day Stan Laurel in Hydroflax's chamber after the Doctor says to him, "This might be an alarming question in the circumstance, but you really do think I'm a surgeon, don't you?")  And Phillip Rhys walks just the right side of the slightly dim pretty boy line as Ramone, another of River's husbands.  Really, it's only the subplot of the robot who keeps cutting people's heads off to upload them that threatens to tip this over into pure silliness, but even that is handled fairly well -- although the bits with Nardole in the robot (like "It's really very whiffy down there") are the moments that threaten to unbalance everything.  Still, this is a cast clearly enjoying themselves.

Flemming takes the Doctor and River to the onboard restaurant.
("The Husbands of River Song") ©BBC

But no, it's Capaldi and Kingston who steal the show -- from Kingston's revelation that she's frequently borrowed "Damsel"'s TARDIS without his knowing to Capaldi's deliberately overacted reaction to entering the TARDIS for the "first" time to the two of them trying desperately how to figure out how to explain to the buyers of the Helassi Androvar diamond that said diamond is lodged inside the disembodied head of the king they worship, they're having so much fun that we do too.  And even when things get a bit more serious (as when River explains that the Doctor doesn't love her and isn't around to save her), they quickly shift back into a lighter tone:

DOCTOR: Hello, sweetie.
RIVER: (after a moment) You are so doing those roots.
DOCTOR: What, the roots of the sunset?
RIVER: Don't you dare.
DOCTOR: I'll have to check with the stars themselves.
RIVER: Oh, shut up. I was just keeping them talking till it kicks off.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Husbands of River Song)

It's nice to see River be the hero of her own story, with the Doctor relegated to companion status for most of this, and even when she learns that this is the Doctor she's still largely the one calling the shots ("I'm an archaeologist from the future.  I dug you up").  But ultimately this is a story designed to be nothing more than a romp (the script even goes to pains to say that literally everyone aboard the ship Harmony and Redemption is a killer of some sort, so that we won't feel bad when they die in the crash), purposefully shallow and something to smile at without too much trouble, and at that it largely succeeds.  Which is why it's a bit odd how the story suddenly takes a hard left in the last 10 minutes or so into a melancholy drama, as we see that the Doctor and River have finally made it to Darillium, where we learned way back in "Forest of the Dead" was the last time River saw the Doctor before she died.  It's a bittersweet moment, and it's handled deftly, but it doesn't really match the previous 45 minutes in content or tone.  But I think that's OK; it's a chance to give River's story some closure (even if it seemed we'd already done that in "The Name of the Doctor"), and the cheeky reveal that a night on Darillium lasts 24 years lessens the sting a bit.

So no, it's not a perfect episode, and depending on how you feel about River Song her inclusion in a pretty shallow story might not make this your cup of tea, but I don't mind it.  It's not the best Christmas special ever, but it might be the jolliest.

And that brings us to the end of series 9, which really has been an impressively strong run for the show; I'd wager this is the best run of stories since Matt Smith's debut in series 5.  I noted at the end of series 8 that, while I generally enjoyed that run, I sometimes felt you had to work a little harder at it, even if there wasn't as heavy a reliance on the overarching plot to deal with.  But series 9 offers no such reservations: the overarching plot is minimal (you could have missed every previous "Hybrid" comment up to "Hell Bent" and have been just fine), the stories are interesting, and the Doctor here seems far more accessible than he did.  In series 8, he was a bit prickly and brusque, but it seems that that epiphany at the end of "Death in Heaven" really did have an effect: he's so much more relaxed and comfortable this series, playing guitar, wearing sunglasses, and dressing in less formal-looking versions of his series 8 outfit.  This is on the whole a good thing, as it makes us that much more happy to be in his presence.  These things, combined with all the other things I've mentioned over the past couple weeks, makes series 9 a really outstanding run.  It makes you look forward to series 10.²⁶⁸

And once again, thanks for joining me on this little trip through space and time.  I'll be back on July 30, 2017, most likely discussing the latest (still upcoming) Doctor Who spinoff, Class.²⁶⁹  See you then, and cheers.







²⁶⁸ Even if they did delay it a year, with some handwavy explanation about there already being enough big events going on in 2016 that they wanted to delay things to 2017 to give Steven Moffat's final series a bigger impact.  My guess is the real reason was scheduling (maybe incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall wasn't going to be free until then) and/or budgeting.
²⁶⁹ OK, yes, technically speaking I haven't discussed "Friend from the Future", the quick 2-minute introduction to brand-new companion Bill, played by Pearl Mackie, but that's because we don't yet know where or how this scene fits into series 10 -- it might be part of an episode for all we know.  Bill looks like she'll be fun, though.