Class: For Tonight We Might Die

Chapter the 326th, which is just what the world needed, a Buffy / Waterloo Road mash-up.

Plot:

Something awful is happening at Coal Hill, and it's not that the school has now adopted Academy status: a sixth-form student has gone missing, and nobody's talking about it. A gang of wholly original pupil characters not like any others ever written - jock, prim do-gooder, nerd, posh one, gay one - notice weird shadow creatures following / attacking them. The posh one turns out to be an alien prince, and the pupils' somewhat aggressive teacher his unwilling bodyguard. They were enemies on their planet, but are now both fighting the Shadow Kin, who infiltrated their world and killed everyone else. A time traveller called the Doctor brought them to Earth where they could lie low. Unfortunately, the Shadow Kin have tracked them down, arriving at the school through a tear in space-time. The teacher isn't able to wield a gun, thanks to the Doctor's interference. She had earlier got the missing pupil to shoot one of the Shadow Kin for her; unfortunately, the gun that destroys the shadow also disintegrates the person firing it. With the school's Autumn prom for sixth-formers in full swing, the Shadow Kin attack en masse. The jock (a footballer) loses his leg, and his girlfriend gets killed. The prim do-gooder ends up linked to the Shadow Kin King through a shared heart. The others manage to get the non-speaking prom attendees out of the school, but then get locked in. The Doctor arrives and saves the day, gives the jock a futuristic false leg, and leaves the teacher as the pupils' protector as a further penance for getting the missing pupil killed. The Shadow Kin were seeking a super weapon that the alien prince has, powered by the souls of his fallen people. He claims that the box is empty, the souls thing a myth, but - big twist reveal at the end - he's lying about that.

Context:

As I'm spinning off again, I need to ask my standard set of questions of For Tonight We Might Die, opening episode of the 'Doctor Who adjacent' series Class. Does it star the Doctor? Yes; there's a surprise appearance by Peter Capaldi towards the end that's highlighted by a whopping great "And Peter Capaldi" in the credits at the start. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. It even has pictures, thought I recently relaxed that rule. With the questions successfully answered, I watched this episode from the BBC iplayer one evening early in April 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. When not covering spin-offs and the like, I have completed ten Doctors' televisual eras (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors) and 36 out of the total of 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing - the 41st having just begun): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

Doctor Who was off air for a whole year between its 2015 and 2016 Christmas Day specials. As in previous 'gap years', a spin-off series provided a distraction for fans starved of episodes of Doctor Who proper. Previous staples Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures had both stopped airing a few years earlier, so 2016 got a completely new spin-off. Class was a series on BBC3, a channel with a target demographic of 16 to 24 year olds; at the time it was digital only (which mattered a lot more back then, now it's hard to tell the difference). I still watched the episodes on my TV (through an application running on a Sony Blu-ray player connected to the screen) accompanied by the Better Half. It's a hazy memory now, but I'm pretty sure I was intrigued enough to watch the first episode as soon as it landed, the 22nd October. It was one of two episodes that dropped that day, with the remaining six appearing weekly thereafter; the series completed in early December, a few weeks before Peter Capaldi returned as the Doctor in the main show on the 25th. Class got a tepid reaction from fandom in general, I think it's fair to say, and no second series was commissioned. At the time of first watching the series, I was mostly concerned with where my DVD of the newly animated The Power of the Daleks had got to; I'd attended the BFI screening of the first three episodes of Power in early November, the ticket price of which included a copy of the DVD to be mailed out soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it was delayed. A 50-year old story seemed more exciting to me in 2016 than anything Class had to offer: would I feel the same on this latest watch?

Reaction:

The thing that leapt out at me most on this watch was how odd the set-up is for the intended audience. BBC3 programmes generally didn't and don't get set in schools. Audiences don't tend to associate strongly with characters younger than them, so the cast being a bunch of sixth-formers - at the lower age end of the target audience - is a risk. The sci-fi twist that one of the sixth-formers is actually an alien prince feels like it would fit better in a CBBC show than a BBC3 one. One of the main cast is even younger, as she's been advanced a couple of school years (something that almost never happens in the UK school system, thus damaging the already shaky verisimilitude). Further to this, UK sixth forms don't have Autumn proms at the start of a school year, and don't have special classes for over-achievers seemingly untethered to any specific A-level topic. These all, mind you, are things that have happened in American series set in American schools. The creator Patrick Ness has dual citizenship, and the show was intended to be accessible to US Who fans, so perhaps it's forgivable that it has a mid-Atlantic milieu. It doesn't feel real, though, and that's an issue when the series is going to counterpoint the every-day with the fantastical. The characters also don't feel like real people, but instead twisted versions of John Hughes teen flick archetypes. The most interesting person is the fake teacher and unwilling bodyguard Quill, played with relish - and a very cool look - by Katherine Kelly. Unfortunately, she's introduced in scenes with a nasty edge. In fact, everyone is introduced with material that makes them seem like an idiot or arsehole or both. There are also inconsistencies: Quill and prince Charlie both arrived on Earth at the same time, but he has to google every pop culture reference that comes up, whereas she knows what Care Bears are and uses idioms like "Potayto Potahto".

In the episodes that followed, as each personality and backstory got more fleshed out, things improved. Even when something has an eight episode commission in the bag, though, the first episode has to act as a pilot in order that people might come back to watch the rest. With the characters not necessarily engaging from the off, the plot is left to be the attraction for audience. Unfortunately, the set-up is complicated (a side effect of setting a science fantasy series in the unlikely precinct of a school), so there's many sections of exposition dumping. This doesn't leave much room for a story of the week, and the skirmish with the Shadow Kin is therefore very slight: they appear, they attack the prom, they're seen off. The other thing that happens - which again is investigated in the remainder of the series - is the inadvertent linking of the leader of the Shadow Kin with do-gooder April. This means that there are two pairs of characters unwillingly linked to each other in the story, the other being Charlie and Quill, which feels like at least one pair too many. The stuff with the gun is also not very clear. Quill can't use a gun, so encourages a pupil to instead - tendrils extend from it wrapping round the shooter's arms (quite a cool visual) and then they can kill the Shadow Kin, at the expense of their own life as the gun shoots backwards too. This is suggested, in breathless snatches of easy-to-miss dialogue, as the only way to kill a Shadow Kin. Later, though, Charlie has a gun he shoots repeatedly at the Shadow Kin, but it doesn't do the tendril thing, and doesn't disintegrate him. Is it a different gun, or does it behave in a different way because it's being used by an alien? It's very muddled.

When Torchwood (an earlier BBC3 Who spin-off) started it was muddled in its own way too, with the most difficult aspect being tone. Figuring out how to make Doctor Who-style adventures but for an older audience led to some awkward and often risible lurches into both sexual and violent content. It took them a year to find the right balance. Class settled down quicker, but some of the lessons haven't been learned here in the first episode: there's a weird cameo from the magnificent June Hudson who apropos of nothing starts talking about finding her husband "fiddling with himself on the stairs", and there's some very gory action during the battle sequences. Clearly this wasn't enough to prevent the Doctor from appearing in Class (it was a consistently adhered to rule that the character was never to appear in Torchwood). I don't think the cameo works particularly well, but it's still the best part of the episode. One does wonder why the Doctor doesn't pop back every week to help out, as the Coal Hill gang face much worse challenges later in the series; this is a central flaw of any Doctor Who spin-off, though, so it's not fair to blame Class for it. There's good moments without Capaldi too, like the spooky chase scene at the start. It's nice to see Nigel Betts return as Coal Hill's headmaster, who appeared in a few stories in Capaldi's first year, and there is a nice reference to Clara Oswald and Danny Pink, former teachers / former companions (though how does the school know Clara's dead?). All in all, there's a lot of promise there, despite the flaws, but the first episode has too much set-up material to be seen as a standalone story.

Connectivity:

Both For Tonight We Might Die and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children feature a character revealed to be more than the ordinary person they may seem to be, and are instead a key figure from an alien planet (Charlie is a prince, and the Doctor is the original template for her people's special power); in both stories, the Doctor doesn't do much in the story until the end (this is by accident for Whittaker but by design for Capaldi).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Never Ending Story? John Higgs book event, Ropetackle Arts Centre, 8th April 2025. I've gone to quite a few Doctor Who events in London that I've written up and shared here on the blog, but this time I had an opportunity to go to one closer to home. On the sunny evening of the 8th April 2025, I took a short journey along the coast from home to an arts centre cum venue in Shoreham-by-Sea, accompanied by the Better Half. City Books, a very lovely independent bookshop in Brighton, runs regular book tie-in events at Ropetackle; this was the first one I'd ever seen advertised that was Doctor Who-related. I don't know any local fans, but my judgement of the crowd based on T-shirts and the odd Tom Baker scarf was it was about 60% fan to 40% arty bookish types that might have had more interest in Higgs than Who. My internal split was about 50/50: Higgs is a cultural commentator and scribe who covers his subjects - in the past, he's covered William Blake, Bond, the Beatles and the KLF amongst others - with a playful, sometimes mystical, storytelling style. My holiday reading last Summer included his book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, which I very much enjoyed. That holiday I was continually being reminded of Doctor Who (as retold in the blog post for The Ice Warriors, which I watched while I was away). I didn't have room in that post to mention that as well as the many other reminders, including the foam machine used in a pool party, the KLF book contained multiple references to my favourite programme too. It was clear than Higgs was something of a fan. I was very intrigued to see how he would approach a book about Doctor Who, a topic much more extensively covered than the KLF or William Blake (and probably even more than Bond or the Beatles).

The stage is set (with question mark umbrella and jelly babies)

Higgs gave an illustrated talk, speaking for just over an hour with a few slides of images projected behind him (he very properly gave a spoiler warning before revealing the final one, an image from Ncuti's second series trailer). He started with an anecdote about an event that became his inspiration for writing the book in the first place, which is also mentioned in the book's introduction (I'd purchased the book from the City Books stall while waiting for the event to start - thrillingly a couple of days before it would be generally available - and had a read of the first few pages). Higgs was having a post work drink in Fitzrovia, London with Tom Baker sometime in 2007 - Baker having been providing voiceover work on a children's series that Higgs was directing. There was another man at the bar of an age such that he would have watched Doctor Who when Baker was in the titular role. Higgs witnessed the moment this man clocked his childhood hero drinking nearby, and saw an expression appear on his face of genuine awe. This stayed with Higgs; so few things are truly awe inspiring in this world that he needed to write about this one. His talk, as well as Simon Guerrier's review that I subsequently read, convinced me Higgs had pulled off the almost impossible task of saying something fresh about a topic covered by so many other writers and tomes over the years. At Ropetackle, he covered everything from the character's genesis to fill an absence (both in the Saturday night schedules and in the cast of characters in a series planning document) to the Doctor as trickster, and all the way up to the recent tabloid knife-sharpening by hacks anticipating Doctor Who's demise. Higgs, though, does not think Doctor Who will ever die, believing it has become an ever-lasting myth that will continue forever in some form or other. Given that it has given rise to spin-offs like Class, and that even those continue on (Class stories are still being made by Big Finish on audio) suggests that he's on to something.

Swag

Audience questions followed his talk. An early one touched on what stories he would use to introduce a newbie to Doctor Who; he chose some good 'uns: The Curse of Fenric, Pyramids of Mars, Evil of the Daleks, "there ought to be a Pertwee ... Carnival of Monsters", and finally added "The next one". In response to a question about Star Wars versus Doctor Who, he said that he believed the UK show could only compete with the US franchise by doing something completely different. He was asked about the fear factor of the programme and said that he thought it was healthy, and that viewers would never be truly scared, "because they know that the Doctor's there". I had a question, but didn't ask it as it was not really about his views on Doctor Who, which everyone else wanted to hear about. I got to ask Higgs when I spoke to him briefly as he signed my copy of the book. It struck me that his book about the KLF was almost a fictional story about real characters, whereas his Doctor Who book sounded almost like a real biography of a fictional character; given that, I put to him "Are your books tricksters?" He thought about this for a moment and said "Perhaps, but perhaps all books are." This good answer, plus his musing on which Pertwee story to pick and coming up with Carnival of Monsters (quietly the best Pertwee, and up there with the best stories in the history of the show, in my humble), plus this excerpt online from later in the book than I've currently read covering similar (and quite niche) ground to my Deeper Thoughts section of The Wedding of River Song post from this here blog, many years ago, and the swag that I got with my copy including stickers and a badge (I'm easily pleased) - all of these predisposed me to feel warmly about the book. I'm a few chapters in, and it's so far as good as I thought it would be - that's already enough for me to urge you to get a copy. Enjoy!

In Summary:

Class report: could do better.