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Elizabeth Sandifer

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.

13 Comments

  1. Tom Marshall
    November 14, 2016 @ 10:33 am

    One small correction: you write “Tanya and her parents” but you mean April. Tanya’s parents didn’t feature in the episode.

    A lot of awkwardness this week, though I do still love the killer flower petals and the next two look more experimental so I have my fingers crossed. I do hope it gets a second season to iron out some of the flaws.

    Reply

    • ViolentBeetle
      November 14, 2016 @ 10:36 am

      Poor Tanya got her niche stolen, her romantic plot stolen, her relevance stolen and now even her name got stolen by another girl.

      Reply

      • Tom Marshall
        November 14, 2016 @ 10:42 am

        Romantic plot? I don’t think she was ever supposed to have a romantic plot, especially not as she’s the youngest by 3 years.

        Reply

        • ViolentBeetle
          November 14, 2016 @ 10:47 am

          Probably not. It wasn’t an entirely serious comment. I wasn’t seriously expecting a romantic plot between her and Ram. Just sort of you know, nights chatting is usually how romantic plots start, but instead Ram is banging April now.

          Reply

          • Tom Marshall
            November 14, 2016 @ 12:53 pm

            Well given that Tanya is 14, Ram would actually be breaking the law if he slept with her, so I doubt they’d go there.

    • Daibhid C
      November 14, 2016 @ 10:46 am

      But April wasn’t standing around with her folks for most of the episode. He meant Tanya, but he didn’t mean her parents.

      I’m deeply intrigued that they’re doing a “miracle cure” story with an actress who is actually in a wheelchair. Both in terms of the fact Shannon Murray is a disability advocate who presumably won’t let it go in any obvious direction, and the purely technical point of how they did the scene where she stood up.

      Reply

      • Tom Marshall
        November 14, 2016 @ 12:54 pm

        I think Phil’s point is that April is standing around yapping in one place, while her parents are standing around yapping in another, and occasionally the two yapping plotlines/locations intersect – Huw coming through the rift and talking at her, or the psychic connection between April and Jackie.

        I agree with your second statement though; I was sure they wouldn’t be going there based mostly on Shannon Murray, but they seem to be. Odd.

        Reply

  2. ViolentBeetle
    November 14, 2016 @ 10:34 am

    I really hate shadowkin. Really really hate them for embodying every single evil race trope in existence with a shred of irony. That’s about it for this episode.

    Reply

  3. AlfredJ
    November 14, 2016 @ 6:40 pm

    When they started discussing the soul box in one of these episodes for the first time (in that it could be a weapon, but it’s original intention is to be used for the souls of Charlie’s race to get new bodies, if I remember right), I immediately thought that would be the link with the Shadowkin. After all, we didn’t know anything about them (the minor backstory in this ep hadn’t happened yet but didn’t change much) beyond them being mortal enemies of Charlie’s race and basic, big, bad, Sauron type bad guys from a lava planet. When the Shadowkin king (Shadowking?) started talking about how they were an evolutionary mistake that shouldn’t exist at all, that sealed the deal for me. My theory was that the Shadowkin were meant as a sort of empty vessels for Charlie’s race to begin their second life after death, but that that piece of their history got lost/corrupted, which lead to the endless war between them (and which also resulted in the idea of the soul box as a weapon).

    In the end, I figured it had to be something like that, because even though Class hasn’t blown me away so far (I still like it!), i thought Patrick Ness was a smarter/more interesting writer than just making the primary bad guys of his show typical 90s videogame end bosses. Maybe I’m wrong though, as I suppose this episode didn’t hint at any possibility of that, so perhaps they are really just boring old fiery bad guys.

    I did love the sex scene between the two Shadowkin in the earlier episode, which has to be one of the most gloriously baffling things I have ever seen on a Doctor Who show.

    On another note, is it just me/my setup or is some of the dialogue really impossible to hear? Seemed worse to me in this episode than usual, although I’ve had this problem before. Like Phil, I would have loved to have heard more of Ram’s story about his father’s religion, but even with rewinding there were just entire parts that were unintelligible to me. It’s an odd production mistake that has been, for me, exclusively recurring for Doctor Who these last couple of years.

    Reply

    • Tom Marshall
      November 14, 2016 @ 6:43 pm

      Are you watching in America? I always rely on the BBC iPlayer subtitles in the UK.

      Reply

      • AlfredJ
        November 15, 2016 @ 3:20 pm

        Ah, yes, i should probably just watching with subtitles. I usually try to avoid that for languages I actually speak because it’s a bit too distracting for me. I can’t avoid reading them when they’re there and I read faster than the actors speak their lines, which ruins some of the delivery for me.

        But now I’m just complaining so I’ll shut up.

        Reply

  4. Riggio
    November 15, 2016 @ 2:28 pm

    Well, I’m really glad to see the Shadowkin storyline seemingly over with, since they really were some of the most laughably generic villain races I’ve seen this side of Before the Flood. This was an action-heavy episode, which made it tough to get its tone right, since Class isn’t really about action. Underlying the swordfights, WMD, gunfire, and flesh-eating flowers, there was a really interesting meditation on how religion and wider conceptions of the nature of the universe can shape a person’s character. Which is the sort of thing Class is quite good at.

    As usual, I’m piggybacking on Phil’s reviews to throw up a link to my own stuff.
    https://adamwriteseverything.blogspot.ca/2016/11/a-strange-taste-to-this-status-quo.html

    Reply

  5. Rodolfo Piskorski
    November 30, 2016 @ 11:13 pm

    Duh, Mateusz has those nice, long, muscly arms. Surely that’s enough?

    Reply

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