In 1980s America, the Cold War is in full swing and Reaganomics is taking money away from important causes like mental health to be put elsewhere. Homeless teenager Marcos is a victim of that system, doomed to sleep rough and run from the authorities until he is offered a place by the mysterious Master Lin at his school of the Deadly Arts.

Even as an adaptation of a comic book series, Deadly Class doesn’t have the most original core premise – disaffected loner kid gets enrolled in secret school for deadly assassins is basically the underlying premise of the 00 division of MI6 in the Bond series when you think about it. But what it does do is handle the idea with style and a nice way of keeping the audience guessing.

Marcos, our central character, is a homeless orphan whose backstory is slowly revealed throughout the course of the episode, mostly by him in monologue. All we know at the start is that he’s on the run from the authorities because he apparently killed everyone at the orphanage he was in, and therefore has something of a reputation as a psychopath, and that he really hates Ronald Reagan.

Showing off the same sensibilities they hinted at in Winter Soldier, series creators and producers the Russo brothers go all out to submerge the viewer in the period, with era-appropriate props and sets, a soundtrack that any 80s kid would have been proud of, and as many mentions of Reagan being the president as they could feasibly get in there before it got silly. This show bleeds its period setting, much like Stranger Things, feeling like a love letter to the 80s written by people who were young enough at the time to appreciate the wonder but sophisticated enough to realise the horrors as well.

Where it gets interesting is in delving behind the clichés one expects from any drama set in a school (however unconventional). Nobody here is exactly who they might appear – not even Marcos – and the show makes some interesting choices with regards to Marcos’ fellow students and their ideologies. Evidently despite his strict code of conduct, Master Lin tolerates (or perhaps even encourages) his pupils belonging to whichever affiliation they like. Sure, we see dramas all the time where the characters are Yakuza or cartel, but how many shows of this type would have Nazis attending a school with Black activists, Yakuza and Latinx cartels?

The way in which these different groups interact with one another is always intriguing, suggesting that for these kids who are learning to kill ‘those who deserve to die’, pragmatism is every bit as important as ideology.

Oddly, given the subject matter, there isn’t an awful lot of blood or gore on display. Partially I guess this can be accounted for by this being a SyFy show (though I’d say it’s even less graphic than that channel’s recent Nightflyers) but given how few punches it seems willing to pull in other areas, it can feel a trifle discordant. Nonetheless, what the pilot gives us is interesting, dynamic and often surprising.

Verdict: Stylish, surprising and engaging. I look forward to seeing where this one goes. 8/10

Greg D. Smith