Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 22, 2017

Doctor Who has been such a venerable enterprise for so long (as evidenced by that very link, which doesn’t even account for “this” Doctor Who) that it almost inevitably has given rise to any number of multimedia tie-ins and spin-offs, though my hunch is all but the most diehard fans of Doctor Who in any of its (his?) iterations would be hard pressed to name a television spin-off other than Torchwood. There have in fact been several, though some at least haven’t had that much impact on this side of the pond. That same trend is perhaps going to be inevitable again with regard to Class, whose release on Blu-ray includes the perhaps overly hopeful Season One as a subtitle, though it’s already been announced that the series has been cancelled. It’s actually not hard to see why, though the show was evidently met with relatively ubiquitous critical approval when it aired in the United Kingdom. Torchwood at least had a premise that seemed to anchor it in a world of high-tech “professionals”, so to speak, while Class’ major conceit is that a whole bunch of Whovian interplanetary shenanigans unfold at a school with a long ago Doctor Who connection, Coal Hill Academy. The show features an arguably overly complex yet ultimately too simple setup involving a pair of aliens who have plopped down in London and taken up residence at Coal Hill, one as student Charlie Smith (Greg Austin), and another as harridan teacher Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly). Charlie in his original alien form is a prince from a devastated planet, and he is “tethered” to Miss Quill in a kind of symbiotic relationship where she is more or less his slave, despite being pretty mouthy and petulant about it (and everything else, for that matter) most of the time. Had Class limited its focal characters to these two, it might have had a better shot at success, but instead it tries to mine a multicultural route that includes other, human, students at the school, something that introduces a number of soap operatic elements which aren’t especially at home with the series’ supposed emphasis on monsters ripping through the fabric of spacetime to endanger Mankind (and, evidently, Alienkind).

Class does a number of things right, including introducing Charlie and Miss Quill in their human personae, with a kind of maybe sorta salacious subtext when it’s revealed they live together. Only later in one of the series’ many expository info dumps is it revealed that the two are escapees from a wartorn planet. That planet was overrun by big nasty monsters known as Shadow Kin, and guess what? Let’s just say that Coal Hill Academy suddenly has entities without hall passes roaming the building. Both Charlie and Miss Quill are instantly interesting characters, for different reasons, which is perhaps another argument that dispersing audience attention among a whole slew of other characters may not have been the best decision.

One of the odder subplots involves one of the humans, a sweet if “plain Jane” type named April MacLean (Sophie Hopkins), who has eyes for Charlie until he awkwardly announces he’s gay (which April accepts with a certain amount of relief). But when the Shadow Kin show up to a prom April has planned, she becomes kind of telepathically linked to the chief bad guy, Corakinus, albeit through her heart, which is somehow magically merged with the alien villain’s. It’s already a kind of convoluted conceit, and it provides both too convenient formulations (April is now kind of clairvoyant with regard to the Shadow Kin) and too melodramatic moments (she has a penchant for near death experiences).

There are a number of other weird elements in the setup, including having another student named Ram Singh (Fady Elsdayed) lose both his girlfriend and one of his legs in the Shadow Kin’s initial attack at the prom. And it’s exactly in additions like this that Class probably presents too much of a logical hurdle for even science fiction fans already used to some fairly outlandish premises from Doctor Who. If there are casualties at a school (and over the course of this season, believe me, there are casualties at this school), wouldn’t you think someone would start to get suspicious? The series wants to have Coal Hill Academy as an isolated environment where paranormal phenomena can just pop out of the veritable woodwork, but it also wants to have everything kind of mundane and normal, at least relatively speaking, with regard to the students and their home lives. This means that there are several patently odd tonal and even content mash ups in the series, as in Ram’s own “confession” to his father about his Doctor Who supplied high tech prosthetic leg.

Class has a sometimes cheeky sense of humor (as befits a Doctor Who spin-off), but I think it’s just hindered by the limits of its geography. The show might have worked better had Charlie and Miss Quill been undercover operatives able to roam about London taking out interdimensional interlopers anywhere they found them. The focus on a school just doesn’t pay enough dividends, and some may even feel that having so much violence break out in a school is itself a problematic formulation for a series, even a science fiction one.

Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Class is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of BBC with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Perhaps because the show favors villains known as Shadow Kin, there's a kind of drab, dark ambience to a lot of the interiors of this series, to the point that fine detail levels can sometimes struggle simply due to something simple like lighting conditions. A lot of the show is either designed or graded toward slate grays and cool blues, and the palette can seem kind of monochromatic as a result. There are moments of nice "pop", as in flashbacks to the former planetary home of Charlie and Miss Quill. Detail levels are generally excellent when lighting conditions allow, though much of the CGI is fairly soft looking.

Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Class features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that springs to life whenever a "portal" rips into Coal Hill Academy, as well as other SFX laden sequences, as when a kind of unstoppable vine takes over the region in and around the school. In moments like these, there's very good surround activity, but the series tends to kind of ebb and flow in that regard, delivering a nicely immersive sequence only to fall back (or forward, as the case may be) on the front and center channels for more dialogue driven scenes. Fidelity is fine and dynamic range fairly wide, though in fits and bursts.

Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One

• Behind the Scenes (1080p; 15:52) is actually more of a traditional EPK, with lots of interviews and scenes from the series.

Disc Two

• Outtakes (1080p; 4:49)


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 34:00)

Class: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'd love to see Miss Quill in another Doctor Who series, and in fact the character kind of comes off in the same curmudgeonly way that Doctor Who himself can at times. The backstory for Quill and Charlie is okay, if hardly innovative, but limiting this series largely to a school environment may have spelled this particular spin-off's doom. Technical merits are generally strong for those considering a purchase.