Tony get inked.
‘Watch Episode 2 of Class,’ they said.
‘It gets better,’ they said.
Does it?
Well, that depends on your
definition of ‘better.’ It’s bloody, and deals with the trauma of seeing your
partner torn apart, rather than simply, as is too often the case in slick
sci-fi drama, having such a death be ‘the incident of the week.’ It deals with
the reality of young people’s reactions and worlds in the 21st
century, and it kills a character that’s been there since the beginning. It
delivers gore and horror and one gratuitous but entirely worthwhile ass-shot.
Oh and dragons. Did we mention the dragons?
Bottom line, The Coach
With The Dragon Tattoo is a not entirely subtle but condensed, intense drug
allegory, quite fittingly worked into the sports world of Coal Hill Academy.
You could say it’s about chasing the dragon, and what happens when the dragon
starts chasing you instead. It’s about what people want, and when they get a
chance to have it, what they’re prepared to do, to themselves, to others, to
the very nature of their lives to keep it.
But it’s about more than
that too – very often the second episode of any show is the one you really need
to look at to determine what it will be like on a week-to-week basis, once it’s
done devouring the meat of its origin story. Here, Class promises a healthy
shot of science fiction magical realism, emphasis on the realism – the Junior
Torchwood vibe is strong in this episode, with Ram, the football jock who in
Episode 1 suffered the dual shocks of losing his girlfriend and losing half of
one of his legs, only to have it replaced with a spacey synthetic, going
through a genuine emotional mill over both losses, and making the journey from
sullen, insular rejection of the Coal Hill Gang’s new world-saving mission to
being a part of it, and letting out some of his grief and trauma, and finding
the beginnings of a pathway back to the sporting excellence that meant so much
to him.
Storywise, this feels like
the satisfying opposite of Episode 1, which was left open and bleeding in so
many ways – will the Shadowkin return, will April ever get full use of her
heart back, will the team ever come together etc. This is tighter, more compact
storytelling, free of the burden of origin story, but committed to delivering
consequences in a way that feels real to the teenage audience. The coach
represents what Ram describes as ‘the right kind of scary’ in an adult, the
pushing kind, the kind that makes young people strive to go behind their
self-perceived limits. But there’s a price for that inspiration, and it all
crumbles to nothing when the ‘addiction’ he has is revealed. It’s only really
by freeing himself of his preconceptions and his locked-in pain that Ram can
find the strength, albeit a clouded, still agonised strength, to stand up to
both the coach and the dragons, in a way that will remind some viewers of the
epic Twelfth Doctor speech from The Zygon Inversion, matching pain for pain,
matching consequence for consequence, prepared to put his life on the line, but
nobody else’s. It’s a scene among many that make this episode very much belong
to Fady Elsayed, who plays Ram, though there have to be honourable mentions too
for Vivian Oparah as Tanya, Aaron Neil, who plays Varun, Ram’s dad – look out
for some touching, almost heartbreaking short scenes here where the father
tries to get the son to open up, and one touching one when the time is right to
do so – and of course Katherine Kelly, still acting her socks off when fed good
material. Patrick Ness is no fool, and feeds her a sub-plot here to do with the
OFSTED inspector of the damned.
At least two of the
on-screen deaths here feel shocking because we rather liked the characters who
do the dying, but be warned – all the deaths are gruesome, and the BBC did say
that Class was ‘not for younger viewers.’ True enough, some of the directorial
decisions from Ed Balagette here, including the amount of blood and some almost
horror-movie shots of what happens to it – running into troughs, literally
hitting the fans etc – would be enough to trouble the kind of children
traumatised by some of Series 9 of Who. But that aside, what The Coach With The
Dragon Tattoo delivers actually is a better episode than Episode 1
was – real consequences, real-feeling teens dealing with some freaky stuff, not
Scooby Ganging too readily, but able to see the benefit of working together
when the chips are down.
Grab at least a cushion,
if not an entire couch to hide behind, and The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo will
give you a satisfying dose of Class action.
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