Yes, I finally got around to watching the final episode of Class, about two days before it got taken down from iPlayer.
Yes, it took me a whole year to watch eight episodes.
Anyway, The Lost is where some of the narrative threads writer Patrick Ness has been toying with all season get wrapped up; where Our Heroes have to reckon with what they value most and what they’re willing to sacrifice; where, in other words, This Shit Goes Down.
The episode sees the Shadow Kin return and start killing people’s parents willy-nilly. Will Charlie finally use the Cabinet of Souls to destroy them and his people both? Will April escape from the bond between her and Corakinus, king of the Shadow Kin? Will Miss Quill go batshit crazy?
I was disappointed with The Lost, truth be told. Like preceding episode The Metaphysical Engine, it dumps all the careful character work the series has been doing – that lovely and very YA intertwining of the SFnal and the real – in favour of Stuff Happening. So much Stuff Happens, in fact, that, as in many, many Moffat episodes of Class‘ parent show Doctor Who, the emotional clarity of the whole is lost. There are about five different endings, in the course of which pretty much every character sacrifices something the series has established as emotionally important, even fundamental, to them; each ending is of course meant to Finish Things Once and For All, and invariably doesn’t. (Incidentally, this inability to conclude, er, conclusively crops up in a lot of SFF blockbusters nowadays, and by God it’s irritating.)
What’s more, the episode pulls its punches; most of those sacrifices end up meaningless, because the promised consequences don’t materialise. That doesn’t just ruin the episode; it ruins the entire series, which has from the start, and radically for relatively mainstream SFF TV, asked us to take its characters and their decisions seriously and realistically. That’s one of the effects of wrapping the SFnal up with the real: it signals that this isn’t a monster of the week show, but that these are real people with real emotional lives, people who have to live with their decisions.
Except now, they don’t.
There are reasons for this undoing. It’s clear that Ness and the production team expected there to be a second series, so any truly game-changing developments were out. Which doesn’t change the fact that there were other ways to write the episode without completely undermining the entire emotional foundation of the series. Other mysteries that have not yet been unravelled, and now probably never will be. Who are the Governors? What will happen when Quill has her child? Will April patch things up with her father? And so on. It’s a real shame that Class has been cancelled – but it’s even more of a shame that its last hurrah is so emotionally empty.
The English Student 