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