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.