Class series one discussion thread (spoilers)

[Bob The Skutter]

It seemed to me to be too American in it's style. He was tweeting about how much Buffy,Vampire Diaries, etc. he was watching for inspiration. The school was very different to the school in Doctor Who.

The other thing I felt was a problem was there wasn't enough team building. They rarely interacted as a group, none of the drama felt earned. It had potential but never really got there with any of it

 

[The Nth Doctor]

I liked that Class took a DS9-approach or SVU-approach as a spinoff -- very few hooks to the parent series and a willingness to develop its own narrative identity. Much as I enjoyed Torchwood and Sarah Jane, both had the problem, in my view, of trying too hard to be "Doctor Who without the Doctor." Yet, I also understand the indifference that Who fandom showed Class when it was announced, because Class was as tangential as it was to Doctor Who, with no pre-established characters, only a pre-established location.

That is a good approach to take, I agree, but it didn't find a strong footing to stand on it's own while remaining connected. Plus, not only did Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures have pre-established characters, so did Deep Space Nine and Special Victims Unit (DS9: O'Brien, tried to include Ro; SVU: Cragen, Munch from The Wire and guest starred on the mothership).

I would also be interested in seeing BBC America's take on a spin-off. They've proven capable of producing strong original work with Orphan Black.

 

[Christopher]

The thing is, Class was, by design, going to be "dark and gritty and sexy" because it was aimed at an older audience than Doctor Who is.

Yes, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about. My problem with Torchwood and Class (and a lot of other people's problem with Torchwood, from the comments I've read over the years) wasn't that they were dark, gritty, and sexy -- it's that they were so self-conscious and affected about it, that they were trying too hard to make a point of it rather than just using it as needed to serve the stories. The problem was how they did it, not that they did it.

 

[Mr Awe]

I've seen it suggested that they could reshoot the lost Hartnell episodes with David Bradley. Although the question is, what would they do with the ones that partially exist? Reshoot the whole things?

One problem with that, among others, is the cost. We've heard that the animations of missing episodes are not profitable. I'd imagine that reshooting missing episodes would be even less profitable.

I'd love it, but I don't see it as financially viable.

 

[KirkusOveractus]

One problem with that, among others, is the cost. We've heard that the animations of missing episodes are not profitable. I'd imagine that reshooting missing episodes would be even less profitable.

I'd love it, but I don't see it as financially viable.

Not to mention, to me anyway, the animated versions of the missing episodes were not animated well.

They just seemed to be very cheaply done, and would rather have seen some better work done on them. I couldn't really watch much of them because the animation just wasn't well done.

 

[ATimson]

It's more accurate to say that a Paternoster Gang spingoff was "much-desired-by-fandom" rather than "much-rumoured"; from all indications, there wasn't any interest by Moffat or the BBC in making one.

Then why did the BBC tell Big Finish they weren't allowed to use the Paternoster Gang (as a whole)? It seems like someone had least enough interest to quash the licensees from stepping on their toes...

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Probably because they weren't sure if Moffat was going to use the characters again on the show. The same reason why Big Finish wasn't allowed to use The Master in The Hollows of Time even though he was in the original unused script (and then renamed as Professor Stream).

 

[publiusr]

And I really wanted to see the Weeping Angels again.

 

[The Wormhole]

Probably because they weren't sure if Moffat was going to use the characters again on the show.

IIRC, Moffat has been saying since Deep Breath aired he had no more intention to bring the characters back on the show, a promise he actually seems to have kept.

 

[Starkers]

For me, the writing was the main problem -- the stories and characters just didn't engage me. And the situations were so blatantly contrived, so unsubtly engineered specifically to create drama for the characters. An alien that replicates their dead loved ones so they can spend the whole hour sitting around talking about their feelings? A cosmic anomaly that traps them all in a single room together with an alien presence that heightens their anger and literally requires them to reveal deep truths about themselves in order to beat it? It just felt forced, self-conscious, and overliteral. Yes, you want tell stories that create opportunities for character development, but you don't want it to be that obvious.

It's like the discussion Ram and April have before she's supposed to fight the Shadow Kin.I think you can get away with that kind of thing in a novel, but not in a film/TV episode.

 

[Christopher]

It's like the discussion Ram and April have before she's supposed to fight the Shadow Kin.I think you can get away with that kind of thing in a novel, but not in a film/TV episode.

I don't think that's fair to novels. Sure, they can devote more time to dialogue and discussion, but that doesn't mean it's okay for the dialogue scenes to be blatantly contrived just to make the characters stiltedly speak their innermost secrets. Whether it's prose or performed dialogue, the characters should still be written organically and believably, and if you're going to contrive a situation that leads them to reveal their secrets, at least you should try to do it in a subtle enough way that it isn't obvious that the whole situation exists exclusively to force the characters to do that.

In other words, it's not the amount of dialogue that's the problem, it's the way the situations are so obviously and awkwardly set up to generate dramatic reveals. I'm reminded of a time when I was a kid and my father took me to see the magician Harry Blackstone onstage. Blackstone had a lot of comedy and verbal humor in his act, and there was one point where he had a volunteer from the audience whose attention seemed to be drifting, so Blackstone teased him about it by loudly announcing things like "We're doing a rope trick now!" A lot of scenes in Class felt like that, like the writer turned to the audience and shouted, "We're doing a deep character revelation scene now!" It just had no subtlety.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

So, um...Class is retuning via Big Finish? Has anyone covered this?

Apparently, two volumes, and Ace, as played by Sophie Aldred, will guest in one of the stories. Already more interesting than the main show, that I've never ever seen beyond the pilot episode.

 

[Nightowl1701]

If nothing else, it confirms that Ace is back on Earth and still among the living; no magazine comic-strip or off-screen Time War death for her!

 

[Christopher]

If nothing else, it confirms that Ace is back on Earth and still among the living; no magazine comic-strip or off-screen Time War death for her!

Oh, that was confirmed nearly 8 years ago (that long??) in The Sarah Jane Adventures: "Death of the Doctor, Part 2." "And there's a Dorothy something. She runs that company, A Charitable Earth. She's raised billions." (Note the charity's initials: ACE.)

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I always thought we were going to get an "answer" to Ace's fate one far off day, when Aldred would simply not continue the role and call it quits. Either in a main range/Seventh Doctor box-set, or in the Gallifrey series. I wonder if Class will present that for us, and more one that is in-line with what RTD had in mind for her, before Elisabeth Sladen's untimely demise.

 

[Steve Roby]

I’m intrigued. Well, I’m going to buy this, of course I am, I bought the Class novels and blu-rays. But with what Big Finish has done with the Sixth Doctor, Torchwood, and Blake’s 7 — all of which I liked on TV, but which BF has done some remarkable things with — I suspect this could change some Class-skeptical minds, if they give it a chance. I just hope at least one story focuses heavily on Miss Quill. She’s not just the most interesting character, Katherine Kelly’s by far the best actor of the bunch.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Have they really improved on Blake's 7? I've not heard about that, myself.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Have they really improved on Blake's 7? I've not heard about that, myself.

Absolutely. I loved the series and the stories Big Finish created has further enriched that universe's tapestry, both with the Chronicles and the full-cast stories. It's just a shame Josette Simon has refused to return, although they recently recast Dayna with the wonderful Yasmin Bannerman (I haven't listened to those stories yet, so I can't judge her performance).

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Absolutely. I loved the series and the stories Big Finish created has further enriched that universe's tapestry, both with the Chronicles and the full-cast stories. It's just a shame Josette Simon has refused to return, although they recently recast Dayna with the wonderful Yasmin Bannerman (I haven't listened to those stories yet, so I can't judge her performance).

I always mean to go into that show, prompted by Linkara's enthusiastic sponsoring it, but I never had time to. I've known BF tackled it for a while, but I didn't realize they were that good with it. A cursory google search showed some even consider the audios better than the main property, which is a somewhat similar case for DW for me (Six's entire BF era, while bumpy, especially lately, is still a LOT better than his TV one, and I can almost say the same for Five, too).

Well, after I finish with Jago & Litefoot, Sarah Jane Smith and Charlotte Pollard, it might be about time I delved into the dystopian future of the evil Federarion...

 

[The Nth Doctor]

I always mean to go into that show, prompted by Linkara's enthusiastic sponsoring it, but I never had time to. I've known BF tackled it for a while, but I didn't realize they were that good with it. A cursory google search showed some even consider the audios better than the main property, which is a somewhat similar case for DW for me (Six's entire BF era, while bumpy, especially lately, is still a LOT better than his TV one, and I can almost say the same for Five, too).

Well, after I finish with Jago & Litefoot, Sarah Jane Smith and Charlotte Pollard, it might be about time I delved into the dystopian future of the evil Federarion...

I would recommend watching the show first, not just for premises reasons, but also so you'll have a better understanding of the characters and greater emotional connections with them. Much like Big Finish's stories for Doctor Who, the time placements are all over the place and only a few of them are set during Series A (largely because David Jackson, who played Gan, died more than a decade ago).