Hazing of the Rats is at an all-time high as the school’s Legacy Ball approaches. Marcus navigates the vagaries of this and of his complicated friendships while Jurgen has some surprising news for Master Lin.

In its third episode, Deadly Class regains a little of the focus it had in its opener, though it still can’t help but feel a little like a really violent version of any American high school comedy.

The Big Dance is nearly here, where the Legacy Kids (those who come from families with a tradition of attending the school) party and have fun and the Rats (those without the connections of the Legacy Kids) get alternately excluded and hazed. Pranks abound then, but of an expectedly deadlier and nastier bent than the average teen high school show might have.

In-between all that though, the show has a lot to say about relationships. There’s Saya and Maria’s friendship, which seems so unlikely and yet so very genuine. Maria’s boyfriend Chico continues to be an abusive asshole, but it’s clear from conversations between these two gal pals that she isn’t quite the poor diminished victim Chico might like to think, though she’s hardly striking a blow for women’s lib either. At any rate, it’s interesting to see the interactions between the two, which carry more than a few surprises along the way.

Petra is starting to regret having slept with Viktor, who seems to have become very attached to her despite her ‘lower’ status as a Rat. Her friends don’t want to let her forget her ‘betrayal’ either, and the tension this causes for her leads to her making some rash decisions. Watching those play out is very interesting indeed.

And then there’s Marcus himself, who has issues of his own with Willie – a friend who doesn’t want to be seen associating with him anywhere in public. This is a relationship that the show could very easily have got badly wrong by taking easy choices or giving in to just making either character a cypher. Instead it leans heavily into the choices it has already made and commits to exploring them, leading to some of the most fascinating moments of the episode.

Meanwhile, as the kids carry on being kids, Jurgen has some inclinations of his own, which are more than a little bit of a shock for Master Lin. This subplot allows the show to actually start (slightly) exploring the borders of what Kings is, and the wider world of which it forms one part. It doesn’t exactly feel as intriguing (or as subtle) as the hints to wider world-building of the John Wick franchise, but that it calls the comparison to mind at all tells you where it’s coming from. Certainly it’s again fascinating to see the relationship between these two men – friends as well as colleagues – and to get the very first inkling that there’s a human person lurking behind Lin’s eternally impassive exterior.

We also open with a little bit of extra background on the guy who turned up at the very end of the last episode, and this is where the show feels like it’s on less firm ground. Introducing a bad guy with a predisposition for bestiality last week felt like a tonal shift too far, and the way in which the show chooses to expand on that this time out seems to reinforce the idea that even the writers aren’t really sure what to do with this particular idea.

Verdict: A mixed bag though stronger than the second episode. Decent character interaction and development somewhat undermined by one or two cheaper moments, but overall holding my interest for now. 7/10

Greg D. Smith