Camestros Felapton

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Review: Class – The Lost + Series round up

Well, the eighth and last episode was a bit of a mad rush. The Shadowkin come back to complete their story arc and they were as unconvincing as they had been throughout. There was the same sense of urgency plus standing around a lot that had impacted the other faster paced episodes. Dialogue was mixed and the acting was good but overall…not sure it really worked. Plus a final big twist reveal that really didn’t feel earned, when we discover who is actually behind the mysterious School Governors.

My personal ranking

  • Ep 3 Nightvisiting
  • Ep 6 Detained
  • Ep 2 The Coach with a Dragon Tattoo
  • Ep 7 What Quill Did or The Metaphysical Engine
  • Ep 4 Co-owner of a Lonely Heart (part 1)
  • Ep 8 The Lost
  • Ep 1 For Tonight We Might Die
  • Ep 5 Brave-ish Heart

Top half best episodes and the bottom half the episodes that didn’t really work properly. The ones I liked best were all the non-main story arc ones but they were also the ones in which the cast talking and sorting stuff out made sense.

I thought, at first, it was episodes were they tried for action but Episode 7 (What Quill Did) was fun. Fight scenes? Consistently unconvincing (including Episode 7). That’s weird – Buffy the Vampire Slayer managed convincing action fights. On the other hand, Doctor Who has avoided them for decades. Class tried too many half-baked ones.

The bottom half were also episodes in which action and threat were supposed to be escalating into crisis. Yet the pace always seemed off. Characters spent a lot of time standing around chatting. Now, that isn’t a bad thing in itself. In the BETTER episodes characters also spent a lot of time standing around chatting and it was convincing and made for good TV.

How it could have been better:

  • Maybe take the opposite lesson from what is suggested above. Maybe, a single unitary eight-episode story would have worked better, allowing for the pacing and the character building together better.
  • The people-in-prosthetics approach was a bad choice for the shadowkin. The spooky visual-effect shadowkin was a better choice. That wasn’t a money-saving measure because they still had them surrounded by a visual effect. Dialing that up several notches so the vaguely human shapes were obscured would have been more effective.
  • …or the monster-of-the-week approach was a safer choice and were the show generally worked (but didn’t really ‘wow’).

Great cast, great characters, some satisfying episodes but in total Class didn’t get to where it needed to be.

camestrosfelapton

4 responses to “Review: Class – The Lost + Series round up”

  1. Yes, a single eight-part story would have been much, much better. I also felt that the “this is all we’ve got so let’s stuff everything in” approach served the characters very, very badly – there were story arcs that were compressed into a couple of episodes instead of being allowed to develop over, hopefully, years.
    My general feeling was that Misfits did pretty much everything this was trying to do, but mostly better.

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  2. Yep, there just wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre because of the standalones. I feel like a lot of the lazy/rushed choices in the finale would’ve been done far more effectively if they’d had just one episode of breathing room to set it all up properly instead of the mad rush to kill the parents etc.

    Also: kids, please never try to block a kick with your arm, unless the goal is to have your arm broken.

    Also also: I pretty much continue not to give a shit about the Governors, partly because that is probably the most boring name for a Big Bad ever.

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  3. The finale was a bit faffy, and strangely lacking in tension at times considering they’d been killing off characters.
    I’m also side eyeing the decision to give Quill a pregnancy plot. Granted they’ve set up her species ecology as a plot point already, but it’s such a cliche of poor use of female characters.

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