Story: Class: For Tonight We Might Die
Written By: Patrick Ness
Length: 50 Minutes
Year: 2016
When first announced, this Doctor Who spin-off seemed only of mild interest to me. It sounded sort of like a mix of Torchwood (with some kind of rift of aliens beings) and Sarah Jane Adventures (being fought off by a gang of school kids)...but now that it has come...it is surprisingly more mature and a stronger show than I expected. As a pilot...this is a tad clunky and all over the place...but pilots tend to do that. It has a core that makes it somewhat appealing, even if it doesn't seem to hit all the right marks just yet.
The young cast is surprisingly strong, holding together a script that has to introduce a lot of new characters, a drastically different version of Coal Hill, and the basic premise of this sci-fi/fantasy series that is aimed at a sort of angsty teenage audience. The script is definitely sloppy...but it has a lot to get done, and I can forgive the clumsy moments that don't feel natural, because it is, after all, just the pilot.
We do meet all of our new characters here, with only the Doctor showing up at the end to really give a sense that this has any connection to Doctor Who (seeing as it is a show made up of no one we have ever seen before). The characters of the show are April (a somewhat shy girl who by episode's end has her heart shared with the Shadow King), Ram (a jock who loses his girlfriend and his leg, which the Doctor replaces with a bionic one), Tanya (a younger girl who has advanced ahead in school), Charlie (an Alien Prince who is posing as a student on Earth), Matteusz (a Polish student who begins a relationship with Charlie), and Charlie's protector and the school's physics teacher Miss Quill (a former terrorist/freedom fighter who fought Charlie's people, now punished for her actions and forced to obey Charlie and unable to use weapons).
It was also lovely to get a little bit of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, seeing as 2016 is a year without a season of Doctor Who-proper. I will take what little of him I can get! And while his presence is basically just shoehorned in to ham-fist the premise of the series in? I'll take it!
For the most part, I enjoyed this pilot...I think it may have suffered from some sloppy script and pacing issues, but as I have stated most come from just plain Pilot-syndrome. And at the very least it made me more intrigued for the show than I was before it finally arrived. I expected something far less compelling, a little more juvenile, and something that probably wouldn't fill the void left with a missing season of actual Who this year. Color me happy to be wrong.
NEXT TIME: Bunghole of Time
Written By: Patrick Ness
Length: 50 Minutes
Year: 2016
When first announced, this Doctor Who spin-off seemed only of mild interest to me. It sounded sort of like a mix of Torchwood (with some kind of rift of aliens beings) and Sarah Jane Adventures (being fought off by a gang of school kids)...but now that it has come...it is surprisingly more mature and a stronger show than I expected. As a pilot...this is a tad clunky and all over the place...but pilots tend to do that. It has a core that makes it somewhat appealing, even if it doesn't seem to hit all the right marks just yet.
We do meet all of our new characters here, with only the Doctor showing up at the end to really give a sense that this has any connection to Doctor Who (seeing as it is a show made up of no one we have ever seen before). The characters of the show are April (a somewhat shy girl who by episode's end has her heart shared with the Shadow King), Ram (a jock who loses his girlfriend and his leg, which the Doctor replaces with a bionic one), Tanya (a younger girl who has advanced ahead in school), Charlie (an Alien Prince who is posing as a student on Earth), Matteusz (a Polish student who begins a relationship with Charlie), and Charlie's protector and the school's physics teacher Miss Quill (a former terrorist/freedom fighter who fought Charlie's people, now punished for her actions and forced to obey Charlie and unable to use weapons).
It was also lovely to get a little bit of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, seeing as 2016 is a year without a season of Doctor Who-proper. I will take what little of him I can get! And while his presence is basically just shoehorned in to ham-fist the premise of the series in? I'll take it!
For the most part, I enjoyed this pilot...I think it may have suffered from some sloppy script and pacing issues, but as I have stated most come from just plain Pilot-syndrome. And at the very least it made me more intrigued for the show than I was before it finally arrived. I expected something far less compelling, a little more juvenile, and something that probably wouldn't fill the void left with a missing season of actual Who this year. Color me happy to be wrong.
NEXT TIME: Bunghole of Time
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