Eruditorum Press

Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Outside the Government: The Lying Detective

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CW: Discussions of Jimmy Savile and sexual assault.

It’s January 8th, 2017. Clean Bandit remain at number one, while Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Neiked, and Louis Tomlinson & Steve Aoki also chart. In news, the British Red Cross declares there to be a humanitarian crisis in England’s NHS hospitals, and the US Intelligence Community releases the results of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. On television, meanwhile, Sherlock’s fourth and potentially final season reaches its hump episode, which this time around is the one written by Steven Moffat.

Faced with an impossible task, Moffat took the obvious approach and failed. The Lying Detective does not fix the stumbling fourth season of Sherlock. Indeed, its efforts to do so are by and large its biggest problems, a point we will get to in good time. But I’m still coming off of two months of talking about why Class failed every week, and my next two posts are the finale and Broadchurch, so let’s put off that perspective for as long as we can and see what else we can do here.

After all, this is the first time Moffat has opted to give himself the middle episode. These have always vexed Sherlock to an extent, featuring so far their single worst episode, a low-stakes adaptation of a Doyle classic, and an ostentatious bit of comedy fluff. We’ve even talked, albeit a long time ago, about the way in which the three episode seasons of Sherlock and its own tendency towards constant event means that the middle episode, the only one not to be a premiere or a finale, is an inherent challenge. And so finally they think to have Moffat do one in the manner of Listen, a lower stakes “prove he can write” episode.

Well, for Sherlock at least. Sherlock never quite goes low budget, but this one largely avoids action scenes and elaborate set pieces. Mostly it functions by putting Toby Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch in a room and letting them do stuff. And there’s no time for an episode that doesn’t have at least some big arc responsibilities, and so this has to repair John and Sherlock’s relationship off the back of Mary’s death, give John a satisfying grieving arc, and do the Eurus reveal. Then again, the “prove he can write” pieces include Heaven Sent as well as Listen, so it’s not quite that these inherently have to be the quiet ones.

Nevertheless, at its heart what we have here is the long overdue return of Moffat writing out of anger. Last time we saw this was, fittingly, His Last Vow, where Moffat relished creating a truly nasty villain out of the detritus of current events and then saying exactly what he thought should be done with him. Here he repeats the trick. Ultimately, The Lying Detective is an exercise in monster design. Except instead of child-friendly creepiness, Moffat is depicting moral depravity. For this, unsurprisingly, he turns to Jimmy Savile.…

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Outside the Government: The Six Thatchers

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It’s January 1st, 2017. Did you guess that Rockabye were at number one with “Clean Bandit”? If so, well done. Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Bruno Mars, and Wham also chart, the latter with a post-Christmas surge for “Last Christmas.” In news, US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Obama imposes sanctions against Russian intelligence agencies for interfering with the election, and Nevada’s marijuana legalization goes into effect.

While on television, the puzzling failure of Sherlock Season Four begins with The Six Thatchers. Let’s begin with the obvious, which is that the death of Mary is a terrible idea. There was a bit in comments a few weeks ago about fridging, including a discussion of the fridging of male characters. But it’s worth de-genericiding the term a bit and remembering exactly what it is and why it’s bad. Because fridging is not simply character death in the general case. It is not even character death as a means of motivating other characters, a category that can also include plot beats like the mentor figure dying so that the hero can step up. Fridging was a term created by then comics journalist and now comics superstar Gail Simone in 1999 to describe the specific phenomenon of female comics characters who had been “killed, raped, depowered, crippled, turned evil, maimed, tortured, contracted a disease or had other life-derailing tragedies befall her” to provide dramatic stakes. 

Since then the term has been widened considerably, sometimes fairly (it’s absolutely worth talking about the tendency to use other less frequently represented groups as cannon fodder), sometimes less so (i.e. the tendency to use the term to refer to any death whatsoever). But the core of it is twofold: a woman or minority character, and a death that exists to add drama or up the stakes for whoever the story views as the real main characters. Indeed, the original Women in Refrigerators page has a secondary essay called “Dead Men Defrosting” that looks at the various male characters that have been killed, depowered, or otherwise tormented and the way in which they routinely bounce back from it, which implicitly highlights a different sort of death characters can go through. (And there’s plenty to talk about in the intersection between fridging and the current “death is reversible” trend across SF/F. 

But no matter how you cut it, the heart of the trope is the gendered dynamic. It’s the fact that in addition to being underrepresented in almost every creative industry, in addition to things like the chart of Best Picture films and the percentage of lines spoken by women and the fucking Bechdel test, in addition to the lack of pay equity, in addition to the fact that it took seventeen years from the start of the superhero film boom to us actually getting Wonder Woman, in addition to all of that monstrous fucking crap, one of the primary roles of women in popular media is to get killed off to add drama. And if you widen the description of the trope to include groups that are not traditionally underrepresented you lose the reason this was interesting and troubling in the first place.…

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Statement Regarding Big Finish

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As it’s come up a few times and I’ve thus far only said it on Twitter, I figured I should make a quick statement on the site. Short form: I have decided going forward that I will no longer be covering Big Finish material on the site or in my books. There are a handful of existing obligations I’ll still fulfill. I’ve promised Andrew Hickey I’ll cover Doctor Who and the Pirates in the revised Volume 6, and while I’m going to swap out one or two of the mooted 7th Doctor Big Finish essays for things on other topics, there’ll still be a few of those. And I’m not going to go around deleting already written Big Finish essays. But starting with Volume 8, none of the new essays added to any of the book collections are going to be on Big Finish material.

There are a lot of reasons why I’ve taken this decision. Many of them are outlined in my post on their UNIT Assembled box set, but I’ll sum up a few quickly.

  • The general low quality of their offerings.
  • The preposterous size of their line, which both contributes to the lack of quality and shows a callous lack of concern for fans’ budgets.
  • Their egregious failiure, especially given the size of their line, to break in new talent, instead relying on the same pool of often mediocre writers to produce the overwhelming majority of their titles.
  • The resultant lack of diversity, and specifically their abject failure to hire more women.
  • The degree to which they have, creatively, failed to utilize the specific strengths (or accomodate the specific weaknesses) of audio as a medium, even as audio drama undergoes a phenomenal renaissance in the hands of the podcast industry. (Which would be an obivous place to go looking for writers that aren’t white dudes.)
  • My distaste for their general attitude towards continuity and traditionalism, and the deep aesthetic conservatism they bring to Doctor Who.
  • Their continued willingness to work with people accused of rape and sexual assault.
  • Their serial queerphobia, including going out of their way to straightwash Clara’s relationship with Jane Austen and removing leaving out the trans character when introducing the supporting cast from Russell T Davies’ novelization of Rose.

This is not, to be clear, some sort of protest on my part whereby if Big Finish makes some definable changes I intend to reconsider my position. Although I reserve the right to someday change my mind, I’m not doing this as a symbolic or material pressure tactic on Big Finish. I’m doing it because, frankly, the issues outlined above overwhelm any other considerations that might come up when writing about Big Finish’s output, and I’ve run out of new things to say about them. I do not think that further essays on Big Finish would be good or interesting. They would be unpleasant to write and not much good to read. I can write better and more compelling essays than dragging the same shitty spin-off company for making the same tedious errors over and over again, and I intend to do so.…

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TARDIS Data Core Needs to Cut the Transphobic Bullshit

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The TARDIS Data Core has never been a great site. This ranges from its extraordinarily dubious content decisions such as individually listing every floor of the spaceship in World Enough and TIme to be mentioned in the episode to its outright pernicious decisions like having pages for “rape” and for individual racial slurs that exist to document every single case across all of Doctor Who where they have come up. And this badness has been known to take an overtly queerphobic tinge, such as the decision to jettison categories listing LGBTQ characters in Doctor Who because, and I quote, “We write articles in the past tense from an ‘end of the universe’ POV. The Category:LGBT individuals, makes no sense for me as it’s a very 20th to early 21st century view point” and “If the concept of LGBT existed in the DW universe we’d have a page for it, and we don’t, cause it’s really not something that’s given a lot of thought as a defined concept.” (It’s not clear why categories such as “human secretaries,” “victims of the bubonic plague,” and of course “gamers” are more relevant at the end of the universe.)  And of course there’s the incredible epic saga of the Zygon penis.

Nevertheless, recent events are bad even by their standards. An editor has recently been doing the very good and useful work of cleaning up mentions of trans people’s deadnames across the project. Although there are a handful of cases where it is necessary to disclose a trans person’s deadname, it’s an exceptionally short list. Deadnames are both deeply inessential information and information that it does harm to disclose. This is even true, to be clear, for cases where the deadname is widely and publicly known. I’m under no illusions that mine is remotely a secret; it’s still distressing to hear it. There re a few cases where the information might be necessary. But even in those, slowing down and applying some creative thinking can usually find an adequate alternative. (For instance, in the most justifiable case—an academic citation to something published under a deadname—one can easily just use the correct name and append a parenthetical note “published under a different name,” indicating that whoever wants to go looking for this article might want to search by title instead of author.)

Anyway. Because there is absolutely no reason for a public wiki to be using people’s deadnames, an editor went through and did the sensible thing, namely removing them all. These edits got reverted, and then, for good measure, the editor who reverted them, Shambala108, blocked the editor who made the changes for a stunningly long six months, despite the fact that the feud had not yet risen to the definition of an edit war and the fact that Shambala108 had been involved in the feud. Then, for good measure, all of their edits were reverted and all pages involving trans people were locked so that nobody could remove the deadnames anywhere on the wiki.

When another editor attempted to follow up on this decision, they got the reply shown to the right here.…

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It Could Be The End of the World, But One Thing At a Time (The Return of Doctor Mysterio)

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Sure, yes, you feel pain, but tell me… do you bleed? 

It’s December 25th, 2016. Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye” remains at number one, while Rag ‘n Bone Man, Little Mix, Zara Larsson, and the annual re-charting of Mariah Carey also chart. In news since Class got lost, the CIA reported to Congress that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, which President-elect Trump described as “ridiculous,” the Obama administration allowed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to pass, and a riot broke out in a Birmingham prison, the worst British prison riot since the Thatcher era. 

On television, meanwhile, for the first time in a year, Doctor Who. When this aired at the brutal end of 2016, suspended between Carrie Fisher’s heart attack and her death and in the immediate wake of George Michael’s, it felt like a baffling way to bring the show back after its longest gap between episodes since Rose. Two years and change later, it feels like a baffling artifact from another world. At its heart, it features Moffat making a well-earned return to autopilot. He will not phone it in for the entirety of Series 10, mercifully, but he is manifestly out of the weird, frenzied renaissance that launched with The Day of the Doctor. The ambitions of The Return of Doctor Mysterio are set firmly at “be an entertaining piece of fluff for an hour and then air a trailer for the upcoming series.” This is accomplished, inasmuch as that matters to us.

What is interesting is the utter batshit craziness of the method by which this relatively banal task is accomplished. On paper, the underlying concept of “Doctor Who does superheroes” is straightforward. They’d been the dominant genre of filmmaking for years, and were a genre Doctor Who had not meaningfully engaged with on television in forty-eight years. What that description of the concept fails to account for, however, is that Steven Moffat does not actually have the slightest interest in just dropping the Doctor into a superhero film. 

There is a standard plot structure that animates most superhero films (and indeed most contemporary films in general, in the same way that Campbell provided a satisfying straitjacket to another generation) derived from Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide Save the Cat. Extensive breakdowns of it are easy enough to find, but the basic idea is a three act structure where act one consists of a statement of theme and a main character whose life undergoes some upheaval. Act two is the main character living through this upheaval and the story relishing in its premise, ending in things going wrong for the main character. Act three is the main character successfully integrating the theme into their psyche and triumphing against the odds. 

Here is what the Save the Cat beats are not. Act one: Flashback setup of one main character’s origin at the hands of the other, followed up by their reuniting later in life to face a common enemy. Act two: Extended farce about secret identities and child rearing.…

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The Wasted Daughter of the Moon: The Trans Genius of Dave Carter

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I promised myself I wasn’t going to be the trans girl who wrote some stupid fucking essay about being trans in her first year of public transition. So happy anniversary to me.

The Butterfly Conservatory is very probably the greatest band never to actually play a single note. Instead it exists in hypothetical and implication; an almost that never quite resolves into being. A band under that name played a pair of songs at the 2012 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival—a folk supergroup consisting of Tracy Grammer and a phalanx of other musicians to honor the ten year anniversary of the sudden passing of her musical partner, Dave Carter. But this is not The Butterfly Conservatory—merely a marker of what could have been. The real Butterfly Conservatory would have been Grammer along with a woman who’s never going to have a name—the woman Dave Carter was in the act of becoming when she died.

Of course, this divide is complex and problematic. Transition does not straightforwardly make you a different person. And yet at times the divide between before and after is at times a stark chasm. An honest accounting of transition requires that we embrace a both/and approach. For instance, when I remember my adolescence I can both remember the leering and toxic sense of sexual entitlement of a sixteen-year-old boy and the sense of rapturous and uncanny possibility of a sixteen-year-old girl listening to Ani DiFranco’s “Untouchable Face” for the first time and getting to the chorus. I am both—a boy named Phil who was, but is no longer (even as a person who is self-evidently the same person as him exists) and a girl named Elizabeth who always was, but only just became. The trans scholar Grace Lavery has written movingly about this on Twitter, describing how “trans narratology teaches us that neither a singular narrative of becoming, nor the laying out of life as a causal sequence, will do justice to the complexity of trans identification. Trans lives slip and slide, forward and backward in time.”

So instead of The Butterfly Conservatory we have the career of Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, who worked together for five years starting with the release of When I Go (credited as Dave Carter with Tracy Grammer)  in 1998 and ending with Carter’s fatal heart attack in 2002, a few months after she started hormones. By this time they had released two further albums, Tanglewood Tree and Drum Hat Buddha. The canon has posthumously swelled with two further albums, one recorded prior to Carter’s death, one created by Grammer taking some vocal demos and expanding on them, and two EPs, one a collection of holiday songs recorded across their career, the other releasing a couple more expanded demos. Adding to this body of work is a solo album by Grammer, Flower of Avalon, which consists of her takes on songs that Carter had written but that the duo had not recorded prior to her death.

That Carter and Grammer would have recorded as an entirely new band instead of simply rebranding as _______ Carter and Tracy Grammer speaks to the degree to which Carter, at least, saw this as a disjunct.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Mr. Robot

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A thing we will inevitably have to address is what it looks like for Doctor Who to respond to Trump. Or, in the UK context, Brexit, but let’s go ahead and just use Trump as a metonym for the catastrophic politics that form the backdrop of the Moffat-Chibnall handover. This is, of course, something it is not fair to ask Class to do. It’s not fair to ask most of Series 10 to do it either—Trump’s election happened late in the block where they shot Oxygen and The Eaters of Light, which was in time to work the “too orange” gag into The Pyramid at the End of the World (although more on Trump and that episode when the time comes) but nowhere near early enough for anything in this season to be conceptualized as an intentional response to his Presidency. (His campaign is a different matter.) Even with Brexit, the vote took place four days after filming started—enough to have some impact (we know that Gatiss was considering an explicitly Brexit-themed script), but still fundamentally after the series was well underway. On the whole, Series 10 emerged from the midst of 2016’s turmoil; it is the Chibnall era that exists wholly and cleanly as a post-Trump work.

But of course, cultural response has never been as simple as mere causality. Production dates don’t matter to how something is received in context. As soon as Trump was elected or the Brexit vote was called, popular culture began existing in their wake without any regard for intentionality. And if you want further proof that intentionality is not the be-all and end-all of this, just consider the show we’re looking at today, which immediately seized the crown of the most essental post-Trump television show despite the fact that it’s not until late 2017 that it finally gets around to airing any post-election episodes.

Indeed, it’s worth flashing back to how we began the Capaldi era—with Moffat hemmed in on all sides, his best tricks routinely being incorporated into the larger popular culture. As we’ve discussed, Moffat rose to the occasion, honing himself a late style that wedded his gifts at flash and glitter to a new sense of substance and weight. But no gambit lasts forever. In 2015 you could claim Doctor Who as the best show on television with a reasonably straight face, although Hannibal’s swansong season offered ferocious competition. Still, the high point of Moffat’s career could plausibly fight off any given comer. 

In 2016, however, with Doctor Who off the air, a new king was able to emerge. Mr. Robot had been a fresh-faced debut in 2015, but for all its clever trickery it was ultimately bogged down trying to sell a stolen from Fight Club twist in which Mr. Robot, eponymous the revolutionary leader, turns out to be a hallucination on the part of Elliot, the main character. This still led to the most gobsmackingly audacious moment of television that year, when at the end of the episode in which this is revealed (the big twist having been burnt off in a cut to commercial) the show uses a chintzy piano version of The Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” as its exit music.…

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Outside the Government: The Lost

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It’s December 3rd, 2016. Clean Bandit remain at number one. Weeknd and Daft Punk get a seond song in the top ten, while Neiked, Maroon 5 ft. Kendrick Lamar, and Bruno Mars also chart. In news, a plane crash kills the bulk of Brazillian football team Chapecoense. Donald Trump sparks a touch of  international incident when he calls the President of Taiwan, while a fire in an Oakland art space known as the Ghost Ship kills 36. A man opens fire inside a Washington pizza restaurant because, basically, Mike Cernovich said there were pedophiles there. 

While on television, the season and de facto series finale of Class, “The Lost.” “The Lost” hangs over the rest of Class. Without it you have seven well-meaning episodes of various levels of success—a show that could frequently have stood to be a little braver, but that always meant well and wanted to be good. With it, however, the picture gains an ugly, cynical tinge. “The Lost” is not Class’s first bad episode. It is its worst episode, which is never a good thing to have happen with your finale. But more damning than its general crapness is the particular flavor of badness that it offers. There are, after all, many ways to suck. “The Lost,” however, picks one of the laziest approaches possible—one that it is difficult to feel anything other than contempt for.

God, where do we begin? The beginning, I suppose. This is an episode of television that attempts to deliver the line “do you ever feel like it’s so dark that it’ll never be light again” as an entirely sincere and meaningful piece of dialogue that sets out the basic terms for the episode. I mean, what do you even say to that? I cannot actually imagine how someone would sit at a computer, type that line, and think, “yes, good, I am writing serious and insightful drama about the lives of teenagers.” It’s shockingly crap in a way that suggests a complete failure to care.

From there we have the cheap slaughter of POC to raise stakes, a return of a villain we defeated two episodes ago with no explanation beyond “I had guile,” a plot resolution in which Tanya becomes the second biggest badass in the show after a quick training session, Ram’s complete lack of any involvement in anything, the absolutely appalling “Black is the Color” musical cue over April’s non-death… I mean, there’s a lot here that’s egregiously, painfully inept. This is the rare piece of media that actually does call for an “everything wrong with” video that points out all the massive plot holes and gobsmackingly lazy bits of writing it employs.

But the larger problem is just how dull the episode’s basic ideas are. The crap big bad comes back again, fridges some tertiary characters, and is then defeated by the MacGuffin that’s been pointedly hanging around all season. It’s utterly bog standard season finale stuff, made worse by the way in which the episode has one eye on setting up its season two plot, a frankly humiliating moment of hubris in light of how badly Class flopped.…

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Outside the Government: The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did

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It’s November 26th, 2016. Clean Bandit are at number one with “Rockabye,” with James Arthur, Bruno Mars, and Neiked also charting. Indeed, the overall top ten are the same as last week in a very slightly different order. In news, the government of Colombia reaches a peace agreement to end the fifty-year long fight against FARC revolutionaries. 300 people are injured when police attack a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation. And Philip Hammond makes his Autumn Statement to Parliament.

On television, meanwhile, Class tries something different. “The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did” focuses almost entirely on Quill, telling the story of her efforts to get the MacGuffin removed from her head so she is no longer enslaved to Charlie. This is already unusual, in that it gives us a YA show that has temporarily dropped all of its YA characters to focus on… well, exactly who and what Quill is as a character will come up later, so let’s save it and move on. Adding to the strangeness is the eponymous concept—a device that allows people to travel into the afterlifes and higher planes of any species that has imagined one. This means that the episode takes an unusual picaresque structure that is unlike anything else in Class.

What’s going on with the Metaphysical Engine itself should be obvious, especially if you look to any of the shots of its interior in which it the camera stares down at its hexagonal metal floor. It’s the TARDIS. Which means “The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did” can basically be summarized as “Class does Doctor Who.” So immediately there’s a lot to unpack.

There’s a line of thought regarding Class—one pushed most notably over at the excellent blog Downtime—that reads it as a critique of Doctor Who. Actually, I suppose it’s pushed most notably by Patrick Ness, who has explicitly said that the show is about ordinary people when the Doctor isn’t there. In this reading, the show is about the bad consequences of the Doctor’s decision in “For Tonight We Might Die”—a critique of his tendency to swan off into the next adventure instead of staying and grappling with the consequences of his actions. This is of course a common critique of the character, typically within the show itself. But as a central thesis of Class there’s something less satisfying. Part of it is that, contrary to Ness’s protestations, Class is not about ordinary people but rather about television characters. As a result, the show never quite manages to be about what happens to ordinary people in the Doctor’s absence, instead ending up just being about what happens to characters from another TV show.

More complexly, Class’s protestations on this front end up sounding uncomfortably like that Edgar Allen Poe quote dragging bad mystery writers as trying to look clever for figuring out solutions to problems they invented. The show endeavors to construct a Doctor-shaped hole at the heart of its narrative and then to present this hole as a substantive subject of critique as opposed to as something that’s been deliberately excavated.…

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Outside the Government: Detained

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It’s November 19th, 2016. Clean Bandit has debuted at number one with “Rockabye,” while Rae Sremmurd, Bruno Mars, James Arthur, and the Weeknd also chart. In news, the British Medical Journal calls for the legalization of drugs while Donald Trump agrees to pay $25m in settlements over Trump University. 

On television, meanwhile, Class does its bottle episode. As with “Nightvisiting,” there is a sense of “really, already?” to this. The bottle episode is a classic contrivance. And while better shows than Class have gotten to them as soon as their third stories, they are generally a sign that something has gone oddly somewhere else in the season. In this case the culprit is fairly obvious: this is a Quill-free episode done on the cheap. Next week we have a Quill-only episode that’s blatantly where the money has gone. 

If this sounds familiar, it’s presumably because you’ve watched Doctor Who and remember Russell T Davies tossing David Tennant into a cheap bottle episode he wrote in basically two days so that he could have Catherine Tate and Billie Piper do a costly greatest hits tour of his era the week after. Indeed, the basic setup, with its incorporeal monster and ratcheting internal tensions, owes a pretty obvious debt to Midnight. And the other obvious source for an episode in which people are trapped somewhere and being made to confess is, of course, Heaven Sent, which lacks the budget motivations of a proper bottle episode but is still working in the same general mode.

A peculiarity of bottle episodes is that, despite generally being born of desperation, they’re also historically pretty good. This is easy enough to explain: countless artists across media have discovered the creatively liberating power of constraints. And so it is not a surprise that when Class both takes on this structure and starts pilfering the show it’s a spinoff of instead of deciding that its main peers are American shows that mostly air on the CW, things improve above the baseline. 

This has a satisfyingly propulsive structure over its forty-five minutes. A weird disaster traps everyone in a classroom with a glowing rock that both compels the revelation of unpleasant truths and advances the plot when it’s picked up. One by one the characters pick it up. Wacky hijinks ensue. This is strong enough that a variety of small contrivances like “making everybody angry is an arbitrary and slightly hackish escalator,” “the explanation of what’s happening here only narrowly makes sense,” and “there’s not actually a clear reason why nobody can pick up the rock more than once” don’t really interfere with proceedings to any meaningful extent. This works, and does so with a breezy confidence that borders on swagger; something that Class generally comes nowhere near mustering.

At the heart of its success, and something that has consistently been rescuing Patrick Ness from peril, is that he really is quite good at writing adolescence. Characters fuck up in fundamentally understandable ways here.…

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