An Hour of Who a Day: August 4: "Detained" (Class)

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.

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 confess 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.