August 5: "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did" (Class)

At the end of the last episode, Miss Quill came in and rescued the others by shooting the space prison rock with a gun, and then she presented Charlie with the dead body of the Arn that had been stuck inside her head to force her to serve Charlie.  She also had a wicked scar across her left eye and much longer hair.  This episode, "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did" (great title, by the way), tells us how she got to that point.

In general this is a much more interesting episode than "Detained" was; we still learn things about Miss Quill and her people, but it feels much more natural here than it did in the last episode.  Here we get Quill, the head teacher Ms. Ames (who Quill keeps calling "Headmistress"), and someone new: a member of the Lorr species named Ballon.  Ballon is a shapeshifter, albeit one "frozen" in human form; in exchange for helping remove the Arn from Quill's head, he'll be given his freedom by the Governors, who apparently have lots of alien resources at their disposal.  It's more than a little like old-school Torchwood, from before the events of "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", but there's still an awful lot they haven't told us about their goals or even who/what they are.  And some of what we do learn (like how some of them think the space-time tears around Coal Hill are intentional) make them sound a little bit cult-like.

Miss Quill, Ms. Ames, and Ballon are pulled into the metaphysical
engine. ("The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did") ©BBC

But the main motivator in this episode is a little machine called a metaphysical engine, which can transport people inside shared beliefs as their own realities.  "Everything in the universe is conserved," Ames tells the other two.  "Everything, even belief.  Get millions of creatures believing something strongly enough for long enough, and even space responds."  In practical terms, this is a bit of an excuse to let them travel to strange and exotic locations, but it's still an intriguing idea.  Plus they use it to go to deliberately non-real places, including Arn breeding grounds (a forest, despite the fact that the Arn are bred in labs), Lorr hell (where all Lorr are frozen in one form), and the beginnings of the Quill race, according to their mythology; this means that they're deliberately left questioning the reality of their situation, which ties in neatly with the whole metaphysical thing.  It certainly makes for fairly compelling viewing.

It's also kind of nice how, after having Ames basically be an exposition character, Patrick Ness reveals that she's in fact somewhat new to all this and doesn't actually have all the answers.  It adds a bit of charm to the proceedings and stops her from becoming a tedious info-dump character.  But it's ultimately Quill and Ballon who steal the show.  Quill has been largely backgrounded during the series, with Katherine Kelly mainly there to provide sarcastic quips, but here they put her front and center and that is definitely a good thing.  Quill maintains that sarcastic element, but we also learn about her beliefs as a soldier and how she feels about what the Rhodians did to her people, and Kelly excels at selling this while making it seem like part of the same character.  Ballon is also well-sketched, with discussions of how being "frozen" in one form seems like hell to a shapeshifter, and Chiké Okonkwo plays Ballon as such a noble person that even when we're told he's been imprisoned for murder, we believe him when he insists it was an accident.

So we get to go to strange places and explore metaphysical realities and have nice character moments as well.  Ballon is able to remove the Arn from Quill's head (which is a really impressively gruesome effect), which leads to him and Quill celebrating their victory with sex.  "Quill celebrate victory in battle in a certain way," Quill tells him.  "All species say that," Ballon replies.  But that leads to the twist, which is that Ames has trapped them inside the Cabinet of Souls and that the Governors are only willing to expend enough energy to pull one of them out.  Quill initially refuses to fight a fellow soldier, but Ballon forces her hand, motivated by the thought given to him by Ames of another Lorr on Earth.  He even ends up winning, but the gun provided tricks him, killing him instead of Quill, which leads to a great moment from Quill, as the Rhodian souls finally descend down to where Quill is.  "Ha!  You come to see me grieve! ... You just keep taking.  Is that all you ever did?  But I fought you and I will still fight you.  Because you know what?  I am free.  I am free and you are not the last.  There is one of you still living. ... I suffered in your home world and I have suffered in your heaven, but I will suffer no more.  No more!  Because I, I am war itself!"  She frees herself from the Cabinet of Souls (which she does on her own, it seems, rather than with the Governors' help -- which makes their forcing Quill and Ballon to fight seem completely unnecessary) and goes to check up on the others, who she'd left in detention.  She's free -- and also pregnant, it seems.  Cue cliffhanger!

This is a significantly better episode than the last one, and the setup it appears to provide for the series finale (with Quill angry at both the Rhodians and the Governors) makes you want to find out what happens next.  But the best thing about "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did" is that it finally gives Katherine Kelly a chance to really show off, and to give one of the more interesting characters on the show her due.  It's not quite as good as "Nightvisiting" was overall, but this episode comes closer to clearing that bar than any of the others have.