YMMV / Class (2016)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Miss Quill a genuine victim to the Rhodia's slavery and oppression, or is she, as Charlie puts it, a terrorist defending an irresponsible people? Keep in mind that the Doctor had the chance to remove the Arn from her head, and he chose not to, though that's explicitly not for anything she did on Rhodia but for tricking someone into dying to save herself.
  • As well, is Quill truly helping everyone, or is she just doing what she feels she is being forced to do by Charlie while biding her time to free herself. Now, she did help Tanya save her brothers and even trained her, but that could have been because out of everyone else, Tanya was the only one who really wanted to use the Cabinet of Souls out of revenge, which also benefited Quill.
  • Similarly, were the Rhodia just in turning their attackers into protectors, or were they just enslaving people as Miss Quill interprets?
  • Does Tanya truly feel that the others just see her as too young, or is she more resentful of the fact that most of them seemed to have paired off with each other while she is all alone? Notice that she went after both Charlie and April, two people who happen to be in relationships? She also may be so resentful that she made a comment about all of them being white and therefore having their problems go away, while ignoring/forgetting that Ram is also a nonwhite (he's a Sikh with Indian ancestry).
  • Tanya could also have the mistaken belief that her pain and problems matter more than everyone else's, something that she snapped at April over when they were all trapped together. Later, when she had lost her mother, she demanded that Charlie use the Cabinet of Souls. When she was told that it could kill anyone infected with Shadow ash (like Charlie) or linked to the Shadow Kin (like April), she yelled that she wasn't going to choose them over her own family, knowing full well that Charlie and April had people like Matteuz, Ram and April's mom who would feel the same pain that she was going through.
  • A third interpretation is that Tanya is just too hung up on issues of race, and tends to see her friends as racist. Tanya keeps making comments about white people to Ram behind their backs. A joking comment to April about liking Downton Abbey due to "white people being nice to each other" also lends to the idea, as does her telling Charlie and April that they don't understand Ram's trauma over losing his girlfriend when he ices them out (Charlie and April had already gone through their own trauma by then). Her possibly deep seated anger over race and her perceived mistreatment by the others could explain why she has bonded with Quill, whom she also sees as mistreated by Charlie.
  • Charlie's desire to use the Cabinet of Souls to possibly bring back his dead people (at the cost of certain genocide), is clearly depicted as being wrong. However, one could argue he's simply yearning for a people he once governed and cherished.
  • Charlie's relationship with Matteuz could be genuine love. However, it could also be that Charlie is suffering from a deep and intense version of PTSD due to losing his people and is very afraid of losing anyone else ever again, which could also be why he is so afraid of using the Cabinet (and can also explain his reluctance to kill Corakinus, which definitely kill April as well. He is hesitant to rid himself of Quill while she is unconscious, knowing that she is a threat to him.)
  • Is Charlie justified in enslaving Quill such that she'll die if she disobeys him, or is he an arrogant jerk who thinks Culture Justifies Everything and has never really confronted the unsavoury aspects of his civilisation?
• Anvilicious: April's mother giving a very heavy-handed speech about how she was happy in a wheelchair after April heals her spine, which seems a very obvious attempt by the writer (or possibly the actress) to avoid being accused of creating the negative implications of Throwing Off the Disability.
• Broken Base:
  • Doctor Who fandom was split into those who enjoyed the series and its more adult take on the Who franchise and those who did not. Interestingly, whether one is a fan of the even more adult-orientated Torchwood or not appears to have no bearing on whether one accepted or rejected Class. A list of the points of contention between fan factions would require a separate article.
  • Among those who were Just Here for Godzilla - the cameo by the Twelfth Doctor in the first episode "For Tonight We Might Die" - the base was broken further between those who applauded the reference to his Lost Lenore, Clara Oswald, and those who ... did not.
• Complete Monster: Corakinus, the Shadow King, believing the Shadow Kin's existence is a mistake, decides to destroy as many worlds as he can with his army. After wiping out the planet Rhodia, he relentlessly pursues the survivors Charlie Smith and Miss Andrea Quill on Earth. He kills the student Rachel Chapman in front of her boyfriend Ram Singh and slices off the boy's leg. Forced to share April MacLean's heart, he has his men search for a way to break the connection and kills them when they fail. When he duels with April, he sends his minions to attack Ram to distract her. To prove how ruthless he is, he murders Ram's father and Tanya's mother right in front of them before starting the negotiation, and later attempts to kill Tanya's brothers as well. Holding Charlie's boyfriend Mattheusz Andrzejewski hostage, he orders April to surrender if she doesn't want to see the end of mankind. When she agrees, she reads in his minds that he has no intentions of respecting the bargain and plans to kill everyone no matter what they do.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of the main cast, Charlie and Quill are usually ranked the most highly for their Fish out of Water antics.
  • Matteusz is quite liked for being laconic, a loyal boyfriend, moral, and very attractive. When Big Finish starting doing audios on Class, he became such an Ascended Extra that he showed up in more audios than main characters Tanya, April and Ram.
  • Ram Singh is this for British Asian fans, as he averts the tropes that are typically associated with young South Asian male characters; he is not Bollywood Nerd but the star footballer, and, rather than being a passive wimp or meak nice guy, he is a jerk with hidden heart of gold. His interracial relationships ^note  Rachel and April are neither Punjabi or Sikh are treated as normal and not a secret affair in case the parents won't approve due to conservative mind set. Finally unlike many typical Indian characters he doesn't have a sliding scale case of Informed Hinduism/Ambiguously Hindu rather he is explicitly Sikh and talks about his beliefs in one episode.
• Jerkass Woobie: Quill lost her people as well. Before that, she was enslaved due to her actions in war. While she can be cruel and sarcastic, and even willing to sacrifice others to save herself, she also is in a lot of pain and really misses her people.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many fans only watched the first episode because the Twelfth Doctor made a guest appearance. It was brief, but he did steal the spotlight while he was there. While some fans watched the rest of the show, many others tuned out after the first episode either out of lack of interest or because the show was too sexual and violent. This is reflected in the BBC One ratings that saw a marked drop off between the first and second episodes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  Tanya: Ram said April's body has been taken over by the Shadow Kin. His voice sounded kind of funny - I think they had sex.
  Charlie: Ram and the Shadow Kin?
  • This exchange is already hilarious, but given that in the next episode, April defeats the Shadow Kin King and becomes King herself makes it even better.
• Mis-blamed: The series' detractors tend to lay the blame at Steven Moffat's feet, as this was the only spin-off made during his tenure as showrunner. His actual involvement in the series was in fact very minimal.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Lankin are a mass of green tentacles with simulacrums of people's dead loved ones attached to them. If you touch it, it will eat you whole. Many of the protagonists have to deal with its manipulations. In particular, Tanya's father Jasper gradually gets more insistent and creepy as it goes on. This is made worse by the Lankin's appearance in a Bottle Episode in which the various members of the gang are all cut off from any help, and by the fact that Quill is quite afraid of it.
• Pandering to the Base: One of the very first lines of dialogue is Tanya gleefully declaring, "We just failed The Bechdel Test!" with zero context on what that is for those not in the know. For better or for worse, this show knows that it's aimed squarely at the sizeable Tumblr fandom of Doctor Who. Unfortunately, it just contributed to the Broken Base instead.
• Shocking Moments: The shocking reveal of just who the Governors are working for. It's the Weeping Angels.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus is that the show is a rather unremarkable supernatural drama and does little to distinguish itself from other shows of the genre.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The opening sequence of "Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart", showing one of the evil alien flowers being blown through the neighbourhood, has rather bad CGI, with the flower, looking obviously computer-animated and pasted onto the background image.
  • The soot-and-cinder haze that follows the Shadow Kin around can be a little too obvious at some points.
• Squick: When Ram and April have sex in "Co-owner of a Lonely Heart", it also causes Corakanius and Kharrus to have sex as result of the link between Corakanius and April. That's not something anyone wanted to see.
• Strangled by the Red String: April and Ram kiss in Episode 3 without much romantic buildup, and then hook up in Episode 4 with little prompting. By Episode 6, he's already confessing to being in love with her.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Device in "What Quill Did". It has the ability to turn beliefs into physical settings, such as a heaven for Arns. Interesting idea, only really used as a setup for angst and a bit of development for Quill.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Moreso than Torchwood with its bleak tone, graphic violence, and having little-to-no connection to Doctor Who outside of the Doctor appearing in the first episode and the Weeping Angels appearing in the finale as the Greater-Scope Villain.
• The Woobie: Where to start?
  • Ram starts off the series by losing his girlfriend, Rachel, at the school dance to the Shadow Kin. At the same time, he also loses his leg, and gets a prosthetic from the Doctor, only to struggle greatly in football and suffers from PTSD as a result. He then finds out that his coach was using an alien tattoo for his own needs. He goes on to start dating April, but her heart is linked to Corakinus, the Shadow Kin leader, and he almost loses her. Then when they are all trapped together by an alien prisoner and forced to make confessions, he confesses his love for her...only for her to say that she doesn't really feel the same way. The finale has him losing both his father and April as the Shadow Kin attack Earth. However, April isn't so much dead as she is trapped in Corakinus's body.
  • April just wanted to set up a dance. Instead, she gets her heart linked to Corakinus, so if he dies, so does she. She has a run-in with her father who nearly killed her and crippled her mother in an aborted murder-suicide attempt. Her anger towards him only serves to strengthen the link with Corakinus, and that leads to a showdown where she nearly becomes a murderer. Later on, she gets trapped with a prisoner, who forces her to confess that her feelings for Ram aren't as strong as his are her, breaking his heart. When the Shadow Kin come, she finally confesses her love for Ram, only to have to sacrifice herself to stop them. Now, she is stuck in Corakinus's body.
  • Charlie lost his home and people to the Shadow Kin, and is now forced to live in a world where he is a complete outcast with limited knowledge of pop culture. His enemy, Quill, is his only companion, and she plans to kill him once she is free from him. He is terrified of losing his boyfriend, Matteusz, if he uses the Cabinet of Souls on the Shadow Kin. During the episode when they are all trapped together, he learns that Tanya and Ram have low and nasty opinions of him, and is forced to confess his desire to kill the Shadow Kin. Once the Shadow Kin attack, Tanya and a now free Quill try to force him to use the Cabinet. But it's April who gets him to do so, killing her in the process. Charlie nearly dies, but is saved by Quill. Now, a completely destroyed Charlie has to live with the fact that his people are truly gone, he has committed genocide and may no longer have Matteusz as a result, and that April is stuck inside Corakinus.
  • Matteusz has been kicked out by his parents for dating Charlie. He fears that Charlie may do something like use the Cabinet to kill, and even admits this later on. When he and Charlie try to work things out, the Shadow Kin attack and Charlie uses the Cabinet.
  • Tanya lost her father two years prior, and on the two year anniversary of his death, an alien taking on his shape comes to her in the hopes of taking her grief and, therefore, her life. Later on, she reveals her belief that she is The Friend Nobody Likes. Everyone denies that, but she later starts arguments with both Charlie and April that also reveal her hidden resentments towards the group. After that, she avoids everyone and tells her mother that they are not her friends. Seconds after her mom comforts her, she is killed by Corakinus out of pure malice, completely destroying Tanya.

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