An Hour of Who a Day

August 8: "The Pilot"

Some big news happened between Christmas 2016 and April 2017. We lost a Doctor, as Sir John Hurt passed away at the age of 77, and Peter Capaldi announced a few days after that (on 30 January, to be precise) that series 10 of Doctor Who would be his last. In other words, the twelfth Doctor is now on borrowed time.

Series 10 Parts 1 & 2 (UK edition)

It's also Steven Moffat's final series as showrunner, but he decided that rather than make things seem like they were ending that he was going to act like it was a brand-new beginning, with new companions (including an overt and admirable attempt to address the issue of diversity in the show by making sure they cast a black actress) and an effort to keep things fresh. Which is partly why he's cheekily chosen to call this episode "The Pilot". But it's clear from the outset that they intend for this to be a good jumping-on point for any new or casual fans. This episode is squarely from new companion Bill Potts' point-of-view. Which isn't to say there aren't little references and in-jokes here and there (pictures of both River and Susan, a pencil holder full of sonic screwdrivers), but they're not the main point. The point is Bill. And from the outset, Pearl Mackie knocks it out of the park, from her rambling non-answer to the Doctor's question ("I was hoping something would develop") to the casually awkward-yet-comfortable way she holds herself as she responds to the Doctor's questions. Bill is a bit quirky and a whole lot of fun, and the episode does a good job of easing her into things, with it initially being simply a student-teacher tutoring relationship between her and the Doctor (for actually quite a very long time, based on the amount of time that passes during this episode) before circumstances require a bit more.

And that slow development is something to admire here. They haven't really attempted an introduction like this since "Rose" -- even "The Eleventh Hour", Moffat's own soft relaunch, focused on the Doctor over the companion. But this decision puts Bill front and center and gives us a better understanding of her character, being tutored by the Doctor (mainly in physics, based on the papers we see), dealing with her foster mom Moira (Jennifer Hennessy, who was in "Gridlock"), and being interested in a particular girl named Heather, who has a defect in the iris of her eye that makes it looks like a star (hence the working title for this episode, "A Star in Her Eye"). The first time around, I did wonder if that was going to be significant, if it was going to turn out she was an alien or something, but no, just a girl with an unusual eye. She does discover the weird alien mimicking puddle and ends up getting pulled into it though, so she's inadvertently the catalyst for this episode's events.

It's also worth noting how relaxed the Doctor is here. Peter Capaldi's come a long way from the cold and distant Doctor of "Deep Breath" and "Into the Dalek", and his natural chemistry with both Bill and Nardole is really lovely. He's in one place for a while, guarding some mysterious vault (more on that in future episodes), but he doesn't necessarily seem frustrated and incredibly bored by it, the way (say) the eleventh Doctor would have been. Indeed, if what Bill says about his having been there for fifty years is true, he seems to have settled in remarkably well. But the point is that that slightly eccentric professorial thing seems perfectly natural for Capaldi's Doctor at this stage in his life. It works well for the character.

Bill and Nardole step out onto an alien world. ("The Pilot")
©BBC

The other cool thing this episode does is, yes, start with a slower build, but the ramp up to the second half of the episode also feels natural, rather than sudden or jerking. We get one of the greatest TARDIS reveals ever, with the interior in darkness and the Doctor and Bill at the door, and then that pan into the room as the lights start to come on -- it's just so gorgeous. And Bill's slow reaction as she starts to put the pieces together, along with the sly dig at the TARDIS anagram, is fantastic. And then we're off to the races, as the TARDIS heads to a different part of the university, and then a different part of the planet (Australia, for I believe the second time ever (after 1967's The Enemy of the World)), and then an alien planet in the future, and then a different alien planet in the past -- in the middle of the Dalek/Movellan War (from Destiny of the Daleks), in fact! (And they haven't changed the design of the Movellans at all, which is great.²⁷⁵). The narrative turns into a chase (much like, er, The Chase), allowing us to get a bunch of different locales and for Bill to get all the "oh my, it's a different planet/time" stuff out of the way more or less immediately. It makes for an exciting viewing experience without necessarily plodding down the same familiar paths. (Oh, and yes, a little bit of "Friend from the Future", the Bill intro scene, is used here.)

And the final nice thing is that the weird puddle thing taking Heather's form (or is it Heather herself?) isn't pursuing Bill because of evil designs or anything, but because Heather made a promise to Bill before she was sucked into the puddle that she wouldn't go away. "What, in the end, are any of us looking for?" the Doctor muses. "We're looking for someone who's looking for us." It's nice to have a monster that's not actually monstrous, and while Bill lets her go, she admits afterwards that she refused because she was too scared, but you get the sense she was still a bit tempted by the prospect of travelling the universe with her. And while the Doctor initially tries to wipe Bill's memory, Bill refuses to let him. "Just imagine how it would feel if someone did this to you," she says, and we get Clara's theme on the soundtrack, reminding us that that's exactly what happened to the Doctor at the end of last series. It's a nice, understated touch.

So "The Pilot" is a story that's both bold and understated, and it's a smashing season opener. If you could level any criticisms at it, the main one is that it's not the deepest or most nuanced story. But that's OK; sometimes a breezy, fun episode is just what you want. And Pearl Mackie is a sheer joy as Bill, full of energy and fun without being annoying or frustrating, while Matt Lucas is so much fun as Nardole, basically providing the comic relief but without him being annoying either. And with Peter Capaldi anchoring them both, the TARDIS team is in excellent shape. It might not end up being regarded as an all-time classic, but it's difficult to imagine how "The Pilot" could be any better.

²⁷⁵ Oh! But the Daleks are different; these are the bronze versions that we'd previously assumed were only introduced in the Time War, not the grey ones that were standard through most of the original run. Here's an effort to resolve any possible continuity problems: the bronze versions were initially introduced during the Movellan War to see if they were any more effective against the Movellans. They weren't, so the Daleks didn't make a huge switch en masse, but they later found the bronze shell was useful against the Time Lords, so that's when they made the switch. But I'm sure you can come up with a different in-universe explanation if you want.

August 7: "The Return of Doctor Mysterio"

It's been a full year since a new episode of Doctor Who has been on our screens, and while some exciting stuff has happened in the meantime (including currently-missing story The Power of the Daleks getting an animated reconstruction for its 50th anniversary and David Tennant doing a set of tenth Doctor audios for Big Finish), this still feels like something of an event: Doctor Who is finally back, with the punning title "The Return of Doctor Mysterio". ("Punning" because Doctor Who is frequently called Doctor Misterio in Latin America (dating back to the '60s), and Steven Moffat has recently learned this from his 2015 Doctor Who World Tour.) And so our very first shot of the episode features...Comic Sans?! No! The bane of typeface fans everywhere! Although it does appear in a comic book, so maybe it's more forgivable. And that's here because Doctor Who has decided to tackle the current trend of superheroes.

And so we get an affectionate opening, with the Doctor and a young boy named Grant Gordon who, as befits a young boy, is into superhero comics. (Although the adult Grant doesn't seem to have lost that interest -- note the modern Superman comic on his bedside table -- despite being an actual superhero himself.) There are some fun little gags with the Doctor, such as him working out that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person ("Everyone knows they're the same person," Grant scoffs²⁷⁴), or inquiring about Spider-Man:

DOCTOR: Why did they call him Spider-Man? Don't they like him?
YOUNG GRANT: He was bitten by a radioactive spider, and guess what happened?
DOCTOR: Radiation poisoning, I should think.
YOUNG GRANT: No, he got special powers.
DOCTOR: What, vomiting, hair loss, and death? Fat lot of use.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Return of Doctor Mysterio)

This is all ultimately in aid of two things: having Grant call the Doctor "Doctor Mysterio" (thus justifying the title) and having the Doctor give Grant a special crystal that he inadvertently swallows which grants him superpowers (so that there can actually be a superhero in the Doctor Who universe). It's all setup -- fun setup, but still setup.

No, what Moffat is interested in is looking at how having superpowers would actually affect a person. As he kept noting in interviews, he was more interested in Clark Kent than in Superman. It's not a bad move, but there's frequently the feeling lurking in the background that Moffat thinks he's being very clever by doing this, which rather ignores the fact that he's by no means the first person to consider superheroes in this light. Consequently, moves that look like they're intended to subvert the superhero genre end up looking like they're aping it instead.

The Ghost in Harmony Shoal. ("The Return of Doctor Mysterio") ©BBC

This leads to a rather curious episode. One of the strengths of Doctor Who is that it can essentially be any genre, but placing the Doctor in those genres tends to subvert them, to send them off into new and interesting directions. But since Moffat thinks he's already subverting the genre, he sends the Doctor off to deal with the other side of the plot, leaving the adult Grant to balance his life as both the Ghost and as a nanny for the baby of the girl he's crushing hard on, reporter Lucy Fletcher. And so what follows basically just is a superhero movie (albeit a condensed one). We get Grant switching rapidly back and forth between his two roles, trying very hard not to let Lucy figure out that he's the Ghost while rescuing people from fires and such. He even manages to get pulled into a rooftop interview/date with Lucy (yes, just like the movie Superman) that goes more or less the way you'd expect. None of this should be construed as being tough criticisms, mind; Justin Chatwin has an easy charm as Grant and does a reasonable job of being the tough guy as the Ghost, and Charity Wakefield does a good job as Lucy, providing the foil to both Grant and the Ghost (and watching her interactions with each, and the differences between the two, is nicely played). And crucially, there definitely is chemistry between Chatwin and Wakefield that really helps sell the storyline. It's certainly an enjoyable superhero tale -- it's just not a groundbreaking one.

The Doctor instead is far more concerned with the goings-on at Harmony Shoal. That name might have rung a bell with some people, as in the previous episode it was the Shoal of the Winter Harmony who were buying the diamond from River Song -- and if it didn't ring a bell, then people peeling their heads open to reveal blue insides should have. In some ways this plotline resembles another comic book, the seminal Watchmen, with Harmony Shoal planning on faking an alien attack on New York City -- although instead of averting a nuclear war, Harmony Shoal want all the world leaders to take refuge in their buildings and then convert them into vehicles for their brain hosts to use, thus controlling the world. And Harmony Shoal want to use the Ghost as one of those vehicles (thereby tying the two plots together). Oh, and look! Nardole is back! It seems the Doctor cut him out of the Hydroflax robot body and reassembled him, because, in the wake of River's death (or at least the last time the Doctor saw her), "you were worried you'd be lonely." Matt Lucas and Peter Capaldi have a fun and easy relationship here, with Nardole being both comic relief and the Doctor's conscience, to a degree. It works really well.

So this isn't perhaps the deepest episode ever, but it does take a stab at providing a look at the human side behind the superhero, and at that it's largely successful. You could, after all, imagine a version of this where the Doctor and the Ghost team up to stop Harmony Shoal, with the focus on the superpowers side of things, and that just wouldn't have been as interesting. I can see how people who are sick of superheroes would find this more of the same, but as long as you're not one of those people you should find plenty to enjoy here. It's not the most original story ever, but it is well told and acted, and there's the confidence that's typical of the current Doctor Who production team on display to help power through any of the weaker moments (such as the weird bit with Mr. Huffle the squeeze toy). This in fact may be the smoothest and most confident of certainly the Moffat era Christmas specials, and possibly even of all the Christmas specials. "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" might be a tad familiar, but it's undeniably fun.

²⁷⁴ Having taught classes where Superman and Clark Kent have come up, I can in fact inform you that no, not everyone knows that they're the same person. That made for an interesting conversation...

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.

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.

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.

April grabs the rock. ("Detained") ©BBC

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 confessing 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.

August 3: "Brave-ish Heart" (Class)

Of course, the other problem with having an episode going CW is that the subsequent episodes have to deal with the fallout of going CW. And so, unsurprisingly, there's some of that here. But to his credit, Patrick Ness largely sidesteps a lot of it. There's a brief conversation between April and Ram about their relationship, in which each one points out that they've only known the other for like a month, that does feel a bit like trying to have it both ways, of acknowledging the ridiculousness of a romantic relationship while trying to also actually have that relationship, but generally (and wisely) most of the CW stuff is ignored.²⁷²

And in fact, while the flower petal storyline is still more compelling than April and Ram's trip to the Shadow Kin homeworld, there's a really lovely scene between April and Ram that actually takes a moment to address Ram's being a Sikh:

APRIL: These are here to remind them that the universe will crush them if they don't defeat it. All of it.
RAM: Pretty bleak.
APRIL: Yeah, well, most religions are.
RAM: Not all. Not mine.
APRIL: Says the Sikh boy with the short hair.
RAM: Ever tried going through airport security in a turban? My dad doesn't like that I don't practise Kesh.
APRIL: That's the long hair and the beard, right?
RAM: Yeah. But you know, modern times, you got to look sharp. I like that he does, though, honestly. Tells me where I came from. ... This is the Kara. (his metal bracelet) It reminds us that we're part of the community and that our hands and life should do good work. We believe the important thing in your life is to do good action. But, if you do the good action, right, somewhere in the process, there's got to be God, even if you don't have faith or believe there's some dude out there looking after you. Isn't doing a good thing, one human to another, the closest we're going to get to God?

(from The Class Transcripts - Brave-ish Heart)

It's interesting to see an effort to actually describe what one of the character believes and to tie it to their religion without an automatic "religion is bad" viewpoint -- and in fact the contrast between April's and Ram's beliefs helps set up the argument as an argument, rather than a lecture. Consequently, this is one of the better moments in the story.

It's not perfect, of course; April's parents very quickly grate on the nerves. I get that having people keep exclaiming how they don't understand what's happening and choosing to start fights with other people (in this case, Ram's dad) is a realistic way for people to behave, but that doesn't mean I actually want to experience that. It also doesn't help that Con O'Neill, as April's dad, chooses to play most of this in a heightened state of hysteria that frequently threatens to tip over into OTT-ness. Ram's dad is better (although there's a weird moment at the end where he doesn't want Ram to hug April because "she's an alien now" -- although Ram gets a good rejoinder: "Dad, at least pay attention") but it's really Tanya holding this plot together, as she's the only one level-headed enough to actually look for solutions to the problems. (And full marks to Vivian Oparah, by the way, who has consistently knocked it out of the park as Tanya every week.)

But as I noted before, the flower petal stuff is more interesting; Ms. Ames (the head teacher, in case you've forgotten) seems to know an awful lot about the alien stuff, although she notes that the Governors aren't affiliated with UNIT, they are well-informed, even if a bit sinister: "Governments have a way of tripping over themselves, slightly too concerned with rights. It's terribly inefficient," she notes. Her solution to the petal problem is to get Charlie to use the Cabinet of Souls to attack the deadly plants (and once again Class is going for the horrific factor, with the scenes of severely bloodied victims out on the streets)-- but doing so would destroy all the Rhodian souls in the cabinet. Miss Quill, on the other hand, wants Charlie to wipe out the Shadow Kin, both as an act of vengeance and to save the universe from their future attacks. Charlie doesn't want to do either, but Ms. Ames threatens Matteusz -- although, when Ms. Ames is sufficiently distracted, Matteusz knocks her out: "Even with a gun, you should never turn your back on an angry Pole." That still leaves the killer flower problem, of course, but since April defeats the Shadow Kin's king in a duel and thus becomes the new king, she's able to order the Shadow Kin to go to Earth and kill all the flowers, saving Charlie from having to decide how to use the Cabinet.

So there are some good moments in here, and it's definitely better than the last episode. Still, there's a bit of a sense of a letdown, with a story that's juggling a bit too much at times. It's as if Ness wanted to resolve the Shadow Kin threat, at least for now, but it does mean that a lot of writerly heavy lifting had to occur to get there, rather than a more natural-feeling storyline; in some sense you can sense the gears moving. Still, the Governors stuff is still intriguing, and the regulars continue to do a great job, which helps things no end. "Brave-ish Heart" isn't a standout episode, but it's not a disaster either.

²⁷² Although the "Next Time" trailer makes it look like the CW stuff has been delayed until then, rather than dropped altogether.

August 2: "Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart" (Class)

After a couple episodes dealing with other things, Class gets back to some of the plot threads left dangling after the first episode: namely, what's up with April sharing her heart with the leader of the Shadow Kin? The answer is nothing good.

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.

Fortunately we'll be coming back to this next time. But that does mean that our focus this time around is on April -- not just the stuff with Ram, but also how she's being influenced by the Shadow Kin (since they did something to the king at the top of the episode). It makes her a lot more violent and angry, as it threatens to take over. And the reappearance of her dad, who just got out of prison after trying to kill her and her mum, doesn't help either. (I'd say that's another CW aspect, except CW doesn't really have a monopoly on the "estranged parent shows back up" cliché.) There's not really anything wrong with this, honestly, and Sophie Hopkins does a good job of being genuinely quite terrifying as the possessed April, but because I was already disengaged by the April/Ram stuff, this didn't really do much for me, and I found myself wondering when this storyline was going to be over with. Well, the answer is "not yet", as this ends on a cliffhanger: the Shadow Kin king is preparing to come kill April (and everyone else on Earth) and take her heart, but she decides to take the fight to him by cutting a hole in time and jumping through, with Ram following close behind.

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.