SPOILERS AHEAD
The extended universe of Doctor Who has not been present on-screen since way back in 2011. In the initial burst of popularity the revival received in the 2000s, showrunner Russell T. Davies capitalised on this success by offering up two spin-off shows: the kid-friendly Sarah Jane Adventures, featuring the late great Elisabeth Sladen, and the Cardiff-based Torchwood which was geared more for adults. Russell succeeded in making a thriving TV franchise in his first era. The world of the shows was tightly plotted but not to the point where keeping up with it all proved cumbersome (I’m talking to you Feige), and it meant that Doctor Who consistently had a presence on TV no matter what the time of year. The show even expanded into documentaries, with the regular feature Confidential offering a behind-the-scenes insight into all the episodes.
The changing of showrunner to Steven Moffat led to changes for Doctor Who in the cultural landscape, and spin-offs had become a thing of the past by the end of the Matt Smith era. Elisabeth Sladen sadly passed away leading to a truncated 5th and final series of the Sarah Jane Adventures, and Torchwood quietly disappeared after RTD put the show on indefinite hiatus in 2012. Since then that’s been it, apart from one blip on the radar during the mid-2010s.
Doctor Who spin-offs saw a brief revival with 2016’s Class, written by young-adult scribe Patrick Ness and focusing on a group of teenagers attending Coal Hill School, who have to battle aliens coming from tears in the fabric of space-time while encountering the trials and tribulations of being a sixth-former. The first series of eight episodes was released on BBC Three every Saturday from October to December 2016, with more series planned. However, BBC Three controller Damian Kavanagh officially announced that the show was cancelled in September 2017, cutting short an attempt at reviving the lost TV universe of Doctor Who.
There is no denying that Class is a flawed show, however, the major thing that has been addressed about the show ever since its announcement, is that the premise and its link to Doctor Who is tenuous at best. This wasn’t like Torchwood or SJA, where the foundations had been laid in the storylines and characters of the main show. Every character in Class bar a few small side characters is previously unknown to the world of Doctor Who, and even the setting of Coal Hill School seems a bit tacked on.
OK, the school is featured in the first-ever episode, An Unearthly Child, and Danny and Clara were teachers there in the Capaldi era, but apart from that there are no other main connections. This is perhaps why Capaldi’s Doctor turns up out of nowhere in the first episode to say ‘Yes, this is actually a spin-off of Doctor Who.’ Also, I can almost guarantee that when you first read the synopsis line, ‘teenagers battling aliens and monsters,’ the theme of Buffy The Vampire Slayer started living in your head rent-free for the rest of your day. For which I don’t apologise because that theme tune rocks. So we’ve established that the show already had a large uphill battle to fight. However, what was the show we got like? Honestly, pretty good.
I have very fond memories of being in Year 7 and not being able to wait for the weekend to come around so that I could see the new episode of Class. There was something strangely addictive about it. It had a fast pace, perhaps too fast in places but we’ll get to that, and a cast of endearing characters to invest in. One of the show’s biggest strengths was its performances, which were unanimously fantastic. Katherine Kelly commanded so much screen presence as the enigmatic Miss Quill, bringing authority, sarcasm and emotion into every scene she had. The cast of teenagers was fronted by Greg Austin’s Charlie, the prince of the planet Rhodia who has been exiled to Earth after his people were wiped out by the Shadowkin. Much like the best actors to play the Doctor, Greg Austin managed to capture a weariness and feeling of being much older than his age in Charlie, a character dealing with the loss of his people and finding solace in his relationship with Jordan Renzo’s Mattheusz.
Almost everyone in the series has their own demons to face. April is a teen carer for her disabled mother struggling to make peace with her dad, Ram loses a leg after an alien altercation which affects his ability to pursue his passion for football, and Tanya is struggling with being younger than all her peers and having an overbearing mother. OK, Tanya’s arc doesn’t quite compare with the genocide of your whole species and having a parent in prison, but it at least shows that Patrick Ness was not going to let any character fall by the wayside. Every character is in some way engaging, something you can’t say for a fair few other shows.
I have a feeling that Class will begin to get re-appraised, and I really hope that happens, because Patrick Ness and the cast and crew deserve it.
Ness is the sole writer for the series, penning all eight episodes, which gives the show a remarkable sense of tonal and narrative consistency. It’s not entirely original, but to his credit, there are many great science-fiction concepts being played with here, such as a journey through the metaphysical world, humans and aliens having physical connections with one another, and a stealth alien invasion of killer flower petals.
I have already alluded to the connections that can be made between Class and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and once I watched Buffy, I began to see the nods almost immediately. The Class episode Nightvisiting features a malevolent force taking the guise of our characters’ lost loved ones, which resembles the First Evil in Buffy’s final season. Two head teachers are killed much like in Buffy, and there’s enough emotional heartbreak to lull you into thinking Joss Whedon wrote the series himself. However, Class never felt like it was mimicking Buffy or Skins or any other teen drama. Most of these shows were already building on well-known tropes and freshening them with new ideas and characters, and Class does the same thing.
This does lead me to Class’s problems, of which it did have some, and I think the main one is that it never could figure out whether it wanted to be a show telling an overarching story or go down an episodic route. Combining a long-running narrative with individual episodes is something that Buffy nailed, but remember that Buffy had 22 episodes a season to play with, so it was allowed to take time. Class had just 8. Therefore, the show’s pace suffers as a result of BBC’s sticking to the typically short seasons we have in the UK.
Standalone episodes do suffer occasionally from the modern Who trope of rushing the last ten minutes, and although these endings do make sense given what’s come before unlike some other Doctor Who episodes (*cough* The Power of Three *cough*), it can have the effect of making great episodes such as Night visiting have damp squib resolutions.
It might also be seen as an unwise decision to end the first series of a show on as many unresolved cliffhangers. I’m not just saying that because the show got cancelled either. Having the reveal of an evil board of governors working with the Weeping Angels in the last five minutes of the finale is undoubtedly a bold move, but it can also mean that your series is left frustratingly incomplete if the show is prematurely axed – like this was. Then again, I blame the cancellation more on the BBC’s pitiful marketing than I do on Patrick Ness.
All that doesn’t detract from the fact that when Class was at its best, it was really good and engrossing TV. I certainly seemed to think so when I watched this at transmission – I was there at 10 am every Saturday morning when the episodes were released on BBC Three, and religiously engaged in the fan community for the show called ‘Classmates,’ which showed many Doctor Who Youtubers discussing each episode. It was also notable for me because it was easily the most ‘adult’ thing I’d watched at that time. It wasn’t just cool to see people being dismembered and skinned with spatterings of blood everywhere, it made the world of the show feel dangerous.
Oh, and the title sequence goes just as hard as Buffy’s. No matter how many times I’ve watched it, seeing the explosions of colour as Alex Clare’s Up All Night blares out of the speakers still amps me up way more than physical exercise will ever do.
It might not be the first idea for a Doctor Who spin-off you’d think of, but what we got with Class was very exciting indeed, and if you’ve never seen it I highly encourage you to give it a chance. With the planned return of spin-offs in the new era, now being affectionately coined as RTD2, I have a feeling that Class will begin to get re-appraised, and I really hope that happens, because Patrick Ness and the cast and crew deserve it.
CLASS (2016) is available to watch on BBC iPlayer
