class-1-2As the Coal Hill Academy students come to terms in their own ways with what happened, people are being skinned alive…

This review contains spoilers for episodes 1 and 2

While the first episode showed that Patrick Ness had a handle on what makes a Doctor Who story tick, and created some interesting characters whose interactions looked promising, it’s this episode that really gives us an idea of what Class is going to be, and how it’s going to differ from the parent show. For a start, it’s considerably gorier – the shots of Ram with blood on his face in episode 1 are nothing to the out and out nastiness that we see occurring to the dragon’s victims, and there was possibly one too many flashbacks to Rachel’s death: we’d definitely got the point at that stage.

The “bumhole of time” is serving something of the same purpose as the rift did in Torchwood, but that’s not the only mystery surrounding Coal Hill. We know from The Day of the Doctor that “I. Chesterton” is Chair of Governors… but given what we learn in this episode, what does that mean, exactly, in this context? There’s plenty of nods to the past – from the names on the board in episode 1 (and did everyone look to the left of the picture when the Doctor was looking at Clara and Danny’s names?) to the name of the new building in which the series is set – but Class is clearly determined to set its own stamp on the Doctor Who universe.

But the show is also working because Class is built around the characters as much as it is the sci-fi and horror elements. We saw some of that in the first episode, particularly in the way that Ram and Tanya interacted outside of school. That’s ramped up in this with the bonds between the students being forged further not just through more unusual experiences that of necessity they have to keep to themselves, but by their sharing elements of their own personalities that they’ve kept hidden. There are some powerful moments, particularly this episode for Ram (Soph’s comment on watching was, “Is he going to get covered in blood every episode?!”). The adults are also being rounded out – Katherine Kelly is terrific as Miss Quill (very much in the mould of Spike), while we’re getting to know more about both Ram and Tanya’s parents, while Ben Peel’s Coach Dawson in this episode brings back memories from rather too long ago of PE teachers I’d much rather forget.

Blair Mowat’s music score strikes more of its own note in this episode than the first, (although there were some nice shoutouts to Murray Gold’s themes from Doctor Who in that) and Ed Bazalgette is giving the programme a distinctive visual style.

Verdict: Maintaining the standard of the opener, this makes me wish we had a full 13 of these to look forward to across the autumn. 9/10

Paul Simpson