It’s November 5^th, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out To My Ex.” James Arthur, Clean Bandit, Bruno Mars, and Drake also chart. Everything is fine. The Chicago Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in over a century. US Presidential election is in three days and Hillary Clinton is obviously going to win. Then, three days later, she doesn’t. Clean Bandit seizes the number one spot, Maroon 5 and Kendrick Lamar enter the top ten, and the other half of Class’s only two-part story airs

Let’s start with the basic structural oddity: a midseason two-parter in an eight episode season. This means that there’s never really a sense of momentum in the show. Its apparent initial pattern of being a monster-of-the-week show that picks a focus character each week is discarded. The subsequent structure of the next two episodes, in which the cast is split to do a bottle episode and an expensive episode that takes place at the same time, is too singular to establish a new pattern. This could be a compelling gambit of a show that has no pattern and is constantly surprising the viewer, but as we’ve seen, Class just isn’t that show; its source material is all about the repetition of patterns, and indeed the ritualized reiteration of their basic structure is part and parcel of their fun. Class instead blows up its patterns before it’s really established them, and ends up feeling like a dilettante, flitting from structure to structure without ever honing one to the point where it shows off its full potential.

The obvious solution to this would have been to rethink the arc of this, either splitting the Shadow Kin plot over two prospective seasons so that the big two-parter comes at the end of the season or reducing this middle beat to a single episode. Certainly the underlying structure of this, with its parallel crises and perpetually escalating stakes, is well-suited to a finale. (Indeed, this is more coherently imagined finale than “The Lost” will end up being.) This would have forced the show to build and use its status quo for a few more episodes, and then allowed for enough of a shift following this as Quill is let off her leash. The biggest problem is that you’d lose the next episode in this structure, as it’s unimaginable as a season premiere, and of course that the show had flopped by its second episode and was never going to get a second season anyway. Well, that and it would (assuming the show continued to build to the same basic plot beats and just took longer to get there) involve spending two seasons on the Shadow Kin.

Indeed, this is the even larger problem with a midseason two-parter in the course of an eight episode season: it leaves the show stranded with four episodes about the fucking Shadow Kin. We talked back in “For Tonight We Might Die” about the basic pointlessness of creating a monster that’s “the Vashta Nerada only stompy.”…

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It’s October 29^th, 2016. Little Mix remain at number one. Actually, the second, third, fourth, and fifth songs on the chart do too. The news is altogether more volatile; Parliament approves the long-gestating Heathrow third runway project, which isn’t that big. In the US, meanwhile, the far-right militiamen who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier in the year are all acquitted and FBI Director James Comey makes a stunning intervention into the US Presidential race less than two weeks before election day as he announces the re-opening of the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mails due to e-mails found on a device during the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a fifteen year old girl while continuing not to disclose that Trump Campaign was also being investigated over its links to Russia. This has consequences.

On Internet streaming platforms, “Nightvisiting.” It is here the cracks begin to show for Class. It’s not that “Nightvisiting” is bad. Its ending is slightly misjudged (having Tanya’s effort fail so that Miss Quill can get a hero moment driving a bus into a tentacle mostly serves to ostentatiously deny the black girl an earned hero moment so the femme fatale white woman can get an unearned one), but on the whole it’s a perfectly reasonably constructed thing. It’s an effective execution of “the cheap one,” getting most of its mileage out of human actors in rooms talking with a minimum of effects shots and scheduling hassles. 

The problem is that this is episode three, and functionally episode two because of the (increasingly clearly bad) decision to bundle “For Tonight We Might Die” and “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” Plenty of shows have resorted to the “cast members are visited by their dead loved ones” episode. But it’s generally a late-series contrivance—something you throw out to put your longstanding characters in a new light. Doing it as episode three in order to substantially introduce and flesh out two of the characters, on the other hand, feels desperate. And indeed, it leads to mixed results. Quill’s scenes with her sister are shockingly devoid of content, adding exactly no depth to a character who risks being a cartoon. And Tanya does only slightly better. There’s some decent character beats for her, but they’re all origin story stuff, and generally don’t relate to the character as we see her. The origin of her “puddle” nickname is indicative. Not only is there something slightly unsettling about the fact that Tanya’s nickname is based in a story in which she dives into a puddle of horse piss, this never comes up outside of this story and doesn’t actually tell us anything about who she is. 

A larger problem, though, comes in the form of Tanya’s basic arc in this episode. Last week Ram engaged with his grief and trauma and used an articulable lesson about it to defeat an enemy who was thematically adjacent and mirrored his previous inadequate response to the trauma. It was smart and well-structured.…

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It’s about as long since the last post as it took anybody to select the next episode in the BBC Three menu system. I mean, unless it autoplays. I have no idea. Anyway, neither the music nor news have advanced much in that couple of seconds. 

This gap, or lack thereof, does not do “The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo” any favors. In the course of a double release it largely disappears as “the one that isn’t the premiere” in terms of how Class made its first impression. Actually, it mostly just disappears in general—more than half the audience didn’t even bother playing the second episode, with only 300,000 people tuning in on BBC Three and 600,000 on BBC One a few months later. But taken as originally presented, as a singular item with “For Tonight We Might Die,” this was always doomed to be the smaller one, establishing what the show did in its default setting as opposed to setting the mission statement for it. The unfortunate thing is that this is only half wrong. This isn’t setting the mission statement, but it’s also not the default setting; if it were, Class would be a much better show.

What we have here is a story that looks at trauma and toxic masculinity via a Hannibal/Red Dragon ripoff in which a literal dragon eats people at a high school. This is, at baseline, fucking fantastic. I love everything about this concept. It’s like “the moon is an egg” in that you can just repeat the concept over and over again with the emphasis on different words and get a perfectly coherent argument for why it’s good, only you get more words to do it with. It’s just an intrinsically satisfying setup; one that finds a patch of ground no other show is quite set up to explore and does it. It’s a beautifully inventive setup where all of the parts go together and are still surprising.

Let’s start with the monster. The red herring that Coach Dawson isn’t being possessed by his tattoo but is abusing it in a display of gendered violence is a rock solid twist, but the fact that it works—that the show can get away with a fakeout just by having a tattoo that moves, a bunch of dead bodies, and a guy grunting “I AM IN CONTROL” like he’s a Robert Holmes villain shows an awareness of genre tropes that goes beyond knowing how to lampshade them and into being deft at transcending them. It’s obviously utterly wrong to suggest that this is smarter than the final six episodes of Hannibal, but it has a brash confidence that the iconography that Hannibal went to such gloriously baroque lengths to establish can be sketched lightly and then slyly detourned. 

More to the point, however, this is just a smart villain. The Robert Holmes comparison is apt, because Coach Dawson is in many ways a 2016 version of the classic Robert Holmes villain.…

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It’s October 22^nd, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out to my Ex,” with James Arthur, the Weeknd, Sia, Ariana Grande, and Calvin Harris also charting. In news, most of 2016 has happened. The US Presidential election is in full swing, Theresa May is in 10 Downing street, Jeremy Corbyn has survived an attempt to replace him as head of the Labour Party, and UKIP is in its usual chaos. 

While on television… well, actually, let’s start there. Class is on television in a sense that we’ve never really dealt with before. It’s a BBC Three show. But unlike Torchwood, which premiered ten years earlier to the day, BBC Three in 2016 is an online only channel following a round of budget cuts that resulted in the shuttering of BBC Three as a broadcast channel. This move contained a wealth of decisions about priorities and privilege. For instance, BBC Four, the more adult-oriented channel with a heavy focus on arts and entertainment programs, remained in place. Instead what was axed was the channel focused on the 16-34 age group and on experimenting with new programs and new talent. 

As a hedge against the obvious (and true) perception that taking it off the air consisted of some sort of deemphasis of BBC Three the BBC looked for some high profile programs to commission for the new online service. Unsurprisingly given that their previous Doctor Who spinoff was among the network’s biggest hits, one of these, announced a month before the decision to pull the plug on BBC Three was actually formalized, was another spinoff: Class. Tragically not the result of hiring Jack Graham to write an openly Marxist Doctor Who spinoff, Class is instead a series by acclaimed young adult author Patrick Ness in which kids at Coal Hill School (now Coal Hill Academy) fight aliens. 

In practice, this was a flop. The first episode pulled 660,000 people on iPlayer, with 1.1m tuning in in early 2017 for a BBC1 re-airing. By episode two, those numbers fell to 300,000 and 600,000 respectively. The BBC1 airing would eventually bottom out at 300,000, while the BBC Three version dropped to 195,000. Its AIs ranged from 70 to 82, with five of the episodes coming in below 80. This was in no way a good enough performance on the part of the new BBC Three’s flagship program, and so Class wrapped after a single season to minimal alarm and consternation. 

None of this is unfair per se; Class was in practice a deeply flawed piece of television that, in lieu of finding its own voice, borrowed several others, mostly Joss Whedon’s. It routinely lacks the courage of its convictions, slouching towards genericism even as it flirts with more interesting alternatives. It is frequently hokey and way too proud of itself, such as its invocation of the Bechdel test in its ninth line and its super knowing “it’s like the Hellmouth” exchange at the end.…

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