August 6: "The Lost" (Class)

This seems...confused.  In some ways this moves so quickly that characters barely get a chance to catch their breath, with Ram's dad murdered in the cold open (and Aaron Neil as Varun was one of the best things about this show!) and Tanya's mum murdered not long after.  But in other ways this slows way down, with long drawn out hesitations and indecision -- particularly in Charlie's case.  This makes sense to an extent, as it shows the conflict raging inside him, but it does noticeably shift the pace.

"The Lost" obviously wants to be a big season finale, and so it's immediately upping the stakes by killing off some of the better supporting characters as the Big Bad from the first episode, the Shadow Kin, returns to threaten the entire planet.  There's also some stuff regarding Quill's pregnancy (that, somewhat oddly, is never actually explained -- is it Ballon's child?  Is it one of the Rhodian souls?  Is asexual reproduction just something that the Quill race does?), but regrettably she's largely backgrounded in this episode.  Instead we focus on the main students, as Ram basically falls apart, Tanya wants revenge, and the others don't really know what to do.  In theory this should be a good thing, but one of the underlying problems throughout this first series of Class is unclear character motivations.  It's really quite hard to get a fix on what April is supposed to be like as a character, or what exactly Charlie feels, and so this episode falls flat a bit.  They want to push these characters to the limit, to see what it will take for them to break or stand firm, but if we don't have a great feel as to who these characters are we can't really tell if they're going to break or not, or even if this is their limit.  Take Charlie, for instance.  Is forcing him to use the Cabinet a really terrible choice for him, or is it just him giving into his desires?  Are we meant to believe that April is staying true to herself by offering herself up to Corakinus, the Shadow Kin king (and that's another unanswered question: how is he back in charge of the Shadow Kin?  Did he defeat April somehow that we didn't see, or is Shadow Kin law fuzzy on ruling in absentia?), or is she meant to be experiencing some sort of personal growth after being selfish in her relationship with Ram?  This means that this episode has less emotional wallop than I think they were going for.

Where this episode does succeed is in some of the smaller moments.  Basically any moment with Katherine Kelly is worth watching at this point, and her attack on Corakinus in the library or her showing Tanya how to fight are good moments.  And I've been crabbing about Charlie a bit, but his scenes with Matteusz (who continues to be one of the best characters on the show) are really quite lovely -- particularly the confrontation with Ms Ames, as Charlie threatens her with Quill's gun: "People are dead," Charlie says.  "More will die.  Here's your chance not to be one of them."  "What happened to our pacifist Pole who didn't like guns?" the headmistress asks Matteusz.  "We will speak of this after," he replies.  "But that is our business."

The Cabinet of Souls is unleashed upon the Shadow Kin.
("The Lost") ©BBC

But the big finale moments are here, present and correct: not only do we get those early deaths, but also an invasion of Earth by the Shadow Kin, complete with random people being threatened by them.  And after weeks of teasing the Cabinet of Souls, Charlie finally chooses to use it, wiping out all the Shadow Kin (and causing their home planet to collapse in on itself somehow).  Again, this is meant to be a big moment, but it's undercut a bit by the fact that we don't really get any discussion of it afterwards; instead this looks more like the big CGI shot of the episode, inserted where the big triumphant moment would be if this were a Doctor Who finale.  So the fact that this isn't meant to be triumphant is a good move, but it's hard to shake the feeling that the episode is trying to have it both ways here.  And there's the moment right before where Charlie kills April with the gun, making him the king of the Shadow Kin.  (I guess Ram hasn't been tortured enough this episode.)  Undeniably a big, season-ending moment.  But, perhaps because so much else is going on and they're already at a fever pitch before trying to go even higher, it just never quite clicks.

So ultimately "The Lost" feels like there's almost too much going on, crammed into a 45 minute episode.  It's like they tried to do a Doctor Who two-parter in half as much time, and so the pacing is a bit off, particularly since they want to have character moments in there too.  This episode is frantic, but also occasionally not, and it starts with a lot of high emotion that it just keeps trying to increase, rather than giving the audience a chance to absorb what's happening.  It's not really a bad episode, but it's hard to say it's good.  In fact it's a bit hard to say what this episode is at all, beyond big.  Definitely another mixed bag.

It ends with a couple big cliffhangers, though: Ms. Ames is killed by a Weeping Angel (apparently the Governors work for them), and April is revived by a Rhodian soul, albeit in Corakinus' body.  We'll (likely) never find out what happened next, though: Class as of now hasn't been picked up for a second series, and it's looking pretty certain that it won't be -- ratings just weren't good enough in either the UK or in the US.  It's a show that never really found its audience.  I have to say that I'm not terribly surprised by that; Class reminds me a lot of Torchwood: Miracle Day, with a strong start that lost its way somewhere along the line, ending with a bit of a confused resolution and some unresolved threads.  But where Miracle Day at least had a built-in audience from the previous Torchwood seasons, Class only had the Doctor Who connection, which it didn't really exploit much.  That's fine, wanting the show to stand on its own, but I don't know that it really had anything to provide instead.  Class is a show that's well-written at a dialogue level (in fact, make that very well-written, as this show sparkles with one-liners and generally naturalistic dialogue) but suffers a bit at the higher scripting levels.  Inconsistent characterization seemed like a problem (which is actually really weird, given these were all written by the same person), and it never seemed like there was anything to distinguish it from the other young adult TV shows out there now, nor any reason for people outside the target audience to bother to tune in (unless they really wanted teenage angst).  It's not a bad show, and had they given it a chance it perhaps might have gotten better (after all, don't forget how appalling the first series of Torchwood was).  But what we ended up with was decent but ultimately flawed.