Class

Coal Hills To Who Castle

Class
22nd October - 3rd December 2016
BBC 3/iPlayer

Class is the new Doctor Who spin off show which I was waiting to start up for some time, before I found out the BBC had elected to screen it on internet channel BBC3, instead of a proper channel. So even though I was actively looking out for some kind of promotion for this thing...I still managed to somehow miss the first episode but, that’s okay, if I was going to watch a streaming show in the first place then I certainly wasn’t going to bother to watch it live (thank goodness for BBC iPlayer, I guess). I can half understand the BBC’s thinking here. If Doctor Who gets good ratings then maybe the hordes of people watching the spin off will be able to bring a lot of new customers to an ‘internet channel’. As it happens... Class doesn’t seem to have done very well on the ratings front at all, from what I can make out... which maybe explains why they’re now going to start broadcasting the eight episode run again on BBC1 from January 9th 2017*. That being said, putting it on at 10.30pm, considering the young adult (aka teen) audience that famous writer Patrick Ness is presumably going for, could mean that the series does little better connecting with its target audience in a more traditional route either... although I’m not 100% certain the people behind the show are all that sure of who their target audience is supposed to be, to be honest.

Set in Coal Hill Academy (formerly Coal Hill School) which is the teaching establishment introduced in the very first episode of Doctor Who in 1963 and which has been having fairly regular ‘cameo’ appearances in the main show of late, the series is using almost exactly the same plot device to justify the kinds of stories the writer wants to tell as another Doctor Who spin off series... namely Torchwood. Torchwood dealt with a group of people protecting Cardiff because it had some kind of hot spot or rift which attracted alien creatures and this is also, it seems to me, the case here. So, once more, the people behind this show seem intent on making this thing into some kind of British answer to the phenomenally successful American TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where the students in the show were apparently situated near some kind of hot spot or portal from hell, if I’m understanding things correctly.

Now, for all of those who want to brave this show, which is actually a pretty strong product for the most part, you should know that you will have to sit through something very painful and irritating at the start of each episode and you will have to survive this thing without turning off the TV immediately, if you want to continue to watch this. It is worth plugging on with. I’m talking, of course, about the fact that the fairly lame and “blink and you’ll miss things” opening titles are accompanied by one of the most infuriatingly bad songs you’re ever likely to hear on a British TV show (or one from any other country, for that matter). It’s so bad that your hand will almost involuntarily reach for the off button before even a few seconds of this bland cacophony has hit your ears but, seriously, resist the urge and you’ll hopefully agree that it was worth weathering the noise for. I remember someone on twitter commenting, while watching the first episode, that this is why the BBC should never have got rid of the Radiophonic Workshop and I can only echo that sentiment here.

However, once the ‘outrage that is pretending to be a song’ is done, we get into some characters who are, mostly, okayish but with the real strength of having some truly good dialogue behind them. Within minutes, for example, you’ll get a nice throwaway line about failing the Bechdel Test and this self awareness carries on throughout the entire run of the show. Although the storylines and situations are not particularly great in themselves, the episodes are inhabited by characters who are anything but cardboard and show an uncanny, for British TV, ability to change, adapt and progress as the pressures of the storylines continue to shape them. It helps a lot that the ensemble don’t all get along with each other all the time, too, which is somewhat useful in adding a layer to the way in which the characters can explore their situations. The performances from all the main leads such as Greg Austin as Charlie Smith, Fady Elsayed as Ram Singh, Sophie Hopkins as April MacLean, Vivian Oparah as Tanya Adeola and Jordan Renzo as Matteusz Andrzejewski are all very good at breathing life into their characters... with a special mention for the outstanding Katherine Kelly as Miss Quill, who manages to be truly ruthless and a bit of a softie at the same time. They’re all really good here.

Now there are some big weaknesses in the show too. The main villains, for example, who are in at least half the episodes and who live in some kind of shadow realm are, frankly, a bit rubbish to look at and just don’t have the ability to make themselves feel like a threat, even when they are killing off regular or important characters. That being said, there are also some good things in the show such as a nice appearance by Peter Capaldi as the current incarnation of The Doctor in the opening episode and also, the revelation that there’s a slow building plot with a mysterious enemy that includes, as revealed in the final episode, the collaboration of a famous enemy from the main Doctor Who show (of recent years... no, it’s not the Daleks or the Cybermen and I’m saying no more on that front... just don't---).

One of the biggest problems I think the series has is in its somewhat mixed tone. I know a couple of people who didn’t watch past the first episode due to it being presented as something for young teenagers (or young adult or whatever the heck the ‘buzzword’ term is at the moment which ensures you eliminate the target audience without even trying because... you know... who would want to watch something targeted at their age group) and then being hit with something which you wouldn’t expect to associate with that term. Bearing in mind it’s mostly all about a load of 16 and 17 years olds (and one 14 year old) its refreshingly surprising that the show is filled to the brim with overt sexuality and gory violence, to a certain extent. In the first episode, for example, one of the regular characters has his face sprayed with the blood of his girlfriend who is run through with a sword and killed in front of him before he has his leg cut off. Which is fine and I’m all for this kind of stuff but... it seems tonally wrong for the kind of audience it’s meant to be attracting (at least in terms of what they are allowed to watch in this country... I’m not naive about what youngsters are up for watching as opposed to what our ‘nanny state’ censors allow them to watch). When you think about it, it seems strange to have a show which seems to be aimed at 14 - 17 year olds that asks you to click to confirm you are over 18 when you try and watch it on iPlayer. Bit of an issue that, I would have thought.

However, the tone which mixes the truly naive innocence of the central characters with a baptism of blood and fire, so to speak, in terms of what they are asked to face each week (again, an interesting idea, in some ways) does seem a bit contradictory, at best, in terms of where the show is landing and I can see how this seemingly deliberate inconsistency may put a lot of people off of regular viewing. All that being said, though, I thought the writing by Patrick Ness was hitting the mark a lot more consistently than a lot of the various seasons of Doctor Who since Russel T. Davies left the show and I did enjoy it at least as much, if not more, than a lot of the Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi episodes of the main series... at least in terms of the dialogue, for sure.

Now, the final episode leaves the series on something of a cliffhanger with many characters dead or... well let’s just say changed... and it really does need to carry on to be able to get to something more satisfactory in terms of conclusion or closure. Alas, with the ratings such as they appear to be (from what I’m reading on Doctor Who news sites) and my expectations that a necessarily late time slot on the early 2017 broadcast of the show will be as doomed as the BBC3 ‘broadcasts’ were, I am kind of not expecting any of the ‘long game’ set ups and character closure to be dealt with anytime soon. Or probably ever. Hopefully I’m wrong about this because I’d quite like to see a second series made but... yeah, I’m not holding my breath on this one.

*Okay, I’m rumbled. I actually wrote this review at the tail end of December but have only now got around to putting it up. The show has been broadcast now on regular television and, to tell the truth, the ratings didn’t look too good then either. Time will tell, I guess.

Doctor Who: The Caretaker

The School On The Hill

Doctor Who: The Caretaker
UK Airdate: 27th September 2014
BBC1

Well that was a nice episode and getting back to doing what new Who does best... the soap opera. And I’m not being derogatory, in this case... otherwise that’s Star Trek: The Next Generation out the window, to be sure. What I mean is...

Back in the days of the classic Doctor, you had time to do things with your characters. Back in the day you had an average of between four and seven episodes, each 25 minutes long, making up one single story of a number of stories per series. So when you think about it, a standard story of Doctor Who, pre the Russel T. Davies era, was at least twice the length, sometimes more, than a standard story length is today.

What this meant, of course, is that you could progress both your story and the characters (and the way they all work together) at a slightly more leisurely pace and still keep things moving. Today’s episodes are mostly running as a single story with occasional references to a sense of a story arc operating behind the scenes and spearheading each series to a concluding episode which usually fulfils any set ups to that over-reaching arc. They are very fast paced because their shorter running time demands it so sometimes they have to concentrate on story and not pay much attention to a whole lot of other stuff (Robot Of Sherwood, reviewed here would be a good example of this approach) or they can custom a story so that its DNA directly talks about character based issues (and Listen, reviewed here would be a good example of that kind of approach) or, sometimes, they do what they’ve done in this episode and set up a threat which is an easily defeatable one with a quick and easy fix at the end, purely so they can concentrate on the relationships with the characters.

Now I found last night’s episode quite enjoyable, to be honest. We get an episode where The Doctor has to go undercover at the school in which Clara and her new love interest, Danny, work (the same school that was featured back in the very first episode of the show in 1963, in fact) with the excuse of an alien robot thing bringing destruction but which, of course, is really just a way of getting all these characters working together in a danger situation so The Doctor can accept Danny. This is so that, when he’s back later in the series, everyone has a measure of everyone else.

Now then, if I had my extra critical eye on this episode, I’d have to say that the way in which this was all brought about was really rather clumsy. We had an entirely new character spliced into things who was put in just to remind everybody of Matt Smith... down to the bow tie... so The Doctor could mistakenly think that he was Clara’s new lover and to push the difference in that her choice was Danny, in a comedy-dramatic way. And the bit when The Doctor is finally dealing with the “novelty alien of the week” at the end was an obvious set up for a fail. I sat there watching and just as The Doctor was about to push the button of doom (or whatever it was) on the enemy, I said out aloud... “No, that’s going to fail. The script hasn’t fulfilled what it needs to do with Danny yet, who has to rush in and save the day.” And, of course, that’s more or less what happened. So, yeah, too obvious and a little ham fisted, to be sure.

That being said though, it was a great episode because the bits which it did need to do, set up a credible start of a working relationship between Danny and The Doctor while still establishing both the differences and the strengths of The Doctor’s relationship to Clara, was nice and sharply written, hugely entertaining and had me smiling a lot. There was also som nice stuff done at the start of the episode that showed the way in which Clara’s travels with The Doctor impacted on her relationship with Danny and also established the fact that she’s been seeing him for a little while now, all done within the first five or so minutes of the show. Nice writing and editing people. Excitement and brevity in just the right measure. Good stuff.

And that was that, the monster was handled, the introductions were over but that left us with a little hook at the end that kinda showed me I was possibly on the wrong track with the Missy references they’ve been dropping in to the episodes. Another man was killed (this guy hadn’t even met The Doctor... at least on screen) and was then spirited away to “heaven”. However, it blew my idea from last week that they were using teleport devices because, in a scene a little more graphic than we’re used to seeing with Doctor Who, we did see part of his arm land somewhere after he was blasted into pieces. My next best guess as to what’s going on here, then, is that people are being auto downloaded into the same Library Of The Dead where River Song ended up (kind of... she seems to be a free spirit again as of the last time we saw her) in a, kind of, Heaven mode. We’ll see what happens, I guess, but I’m not really looking forward to the conclusion of this particular arc anymore, to be honest. Whatever convoluted explanation they come up with for this is bound to challenge my suspension of disbelief somewhat, I suspect.

Be that as it may, though, this episode, for all its transparency in it’s contrivance to accomplish certain character goals, was vastly entertaining and my second favourite of the series so far. Now let’s see what next week brings, shall we?

Doctor Who: Into The Dalek

Soldier Who

Doctor Who: Into The Dalek
UK Airdate: 30th August 2014
BBC 2

Okay, so after last week’s episode, reviewed here, I have to admit to being a little less than enthusiastic about watching the next episode in the show. Especially considering it stars The Doctor’s oldest and much loved foes The Daleks. You know, Tom Baker only went up against the Daleks twice and he was the longest running Doctor, to date, both in terms of years, number of episodes and screen time. Nowadays, the Daleks (not to mention the Cybermen, Silurians and Sontarans) are way over used as villains in the show. When someone like Tom Baker went up against the Daleks you knew it was a special event. Nowadays they’re everywhere. So that’s two reasons why I wasn’t really looking forward to tonight’s episode.

But you know what? I’m happy to report that tonights episode was a real corker. Not only did it give us something we hadn’t quite seen before but it also gave us a proper look at the way Capaldi’s version of The Doctor interacts with Clara without having all the usual regeneration angst getting in the way like it did last time.

Now, to be fair, the plot of this one was a little... well, it was a bit old hat. We basically had the lone, good Dalek concept which first raised it’s head in the first ever of Christopher Ecclestone’s encounters with the creatures when the show was initially rebooted (but in reality just re-continued) back at the dawn of the Russel T. Davies era of the show. This was then cross pollinated with a revisiting of the concept of the movie Fantastic Voyage (which was later novelised by renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov). The concept, where people are miniaturised down to enter the body of a person, in this case a Dalek, to make repairs from the inside of the host body is a popular one and this certainly isn’t the first Doctor Who story to revisit this concept. However, because it’s been used as a concept and fused with the aforementioned exploration of Dalek morality, asking some interesting questions and then making the answers to those questions relevant to the soul of The Doctor, the episode had a certain buzz about it that I really wasn’t expecting based on last weeks opening episode and, frankly, the last few years of the show.

The more interesting stuff was The Doctor’s new relationship with Clara which has turned from the flirting, flaunting of a younger looking Doctor trying to impress his travelling companion into a matured relationship where affectionate barbs are traded, Clara shows herself to catch onto things quicker than The Doctor and, in one nice moment, where Clara gives The Doctor a hefty slap around the chops. There are touches of River Song in her dialogue now because, presumably, since she’s met every incarnation of The Doctor in his past, her tone has changed to one of someone who knows the inner workings of somebody very well. So that was pretty entertaining stuff.

Equally entertaining is the introduction of someone who looks to be a new regular on the show, a soldier by the name of Mr. Pink, who is possibly the new love interest for Clara although, I don’t think this set up is really heading towards that, in all honesty. At least I hope it isn’t because, pleasant as that might be, it also seems a bit plain and simple for a show like Doctor Who and so I hope this is part of the beginning of a strange new twist to come. I hope I wasn’t the only one to notice that both Clara and said Mr. Pink are both teachers at Coal Hill School. I don’t think this is the first time it’s been mentioned that this is where Clara works now but the significance of that particular school, for those who didn’t catch it, is that it’s the school where Susan, The Doctor’s grand-daughter in the first ever episode of the show, was a student. It’s also the work place of his other two companions from that first series of the Hartnell years, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton. So this is all very interesting but I doubt if that particular one is going to be a sleeper plot element anytime soon. But again, we’ll see what happens.

Now, there were some bad things about this one in terms of continuity, I thought. It really doesn’t take a group of Daleks that long to wipe out a group of humans on a spaceship, for starters. Nor is it all that credible that a single, lone Dalek can take out eight or nine of its colleagues without being taken out itself. And as for the Dalek antibodies in the episode, another nod to the movie Fantastic Voyage, well the logic of the way they behaved didn’t really make a lot of sense in some scenes. It’s like they behaved in one fashion when it suited the script and then in a completely different way when it was needed that they should. Now I may have been distracted and am missing something there but... that was my initial impression of it but, really, these criticisms are only minor quibbles in what was an otherwise brilliant episode.

And we still have the more obvious set up scene, continuing on from last week, where the mysterious Missy is collecting the souls, bodies, after images or whatever of the people who find themselves dying around The Doctor. Now there has been some speculation that Missy is a female incarnation of The Master. Maybe, I’m not so sure, to be honest. I’m still wondering if we’re seeing the beginnings now of the woman who we came to know in later life in the Matt Smith era of the show as “the eyepatch lady”. So we’ll have to see what happens there... kind of too early to tell right now. I don’t think she’s going to turn out to be a version of River, after she was saved in The Library Of The Dead but, then again, who knows?

What I do know is that it was a brilliant episode, Capaldi has really found his feet very fast, Clara has great chemistry with him and the music on this one was pretty cool too. So that’s really good news as far as I’m concerned on this one because, frankly, I was kinda expecting really bad things from this series. But... quite the opposite. I’ve not been looking forward to next weeks episode, Robots Of Sherwood, with any amount of enthusiasm but maybe now I am willing to approach it with a little more of an upbeat twinkle in my eye. We shall see what we shall see. Until next time...