Marcus finds himself in a weekend detention with Saya, Chico, Petra, Viktor and another pupil as punishment for their hijinks at the ball. But Saya’s past comes back to haunt her in a way that puts all of them in danger.

Continuing to mine the bag of tropes for High School Drama, this episode puts a bunch of our gang in detention. But this isn’t the Breakfast Club – detention at Kings means confinement to the Library for the weekend, which isn’t such good news when one of you is the target of a hit and your detention means that you’re trapped unguarded in one place.

Of course, the added frisson to the standard fare of a bunch of kids with issues with authority being locked together in a room when they really don’t like each other is that this is a school for assassins, so there’s a far deadlier set of skills and rivalries at play here. But like any good high school detention story, the gang find common cause in something fairly mundane – in this case hunger with a little mic of boredom – and further hijinks ensue, which is fine until Saya’s past, in the form of a pair of Kuroki syndicate assassins, arrives to take her away and deal with anyone who stands in their way in a fairly terminal fashion.

From that point it’s the usual round of Deadly Class action set pieces and tense fights, but what surprises here is who ends up getting left behind and how they spend their time waiting to die together. It really isn’t the sort of result you’d expect and also gives us a bit more background on one character in the form of another animated flashback which serves to drive home another key point.

That point being: every one of Marcus’ fellow students has something in their past that has made them functionally broken on some fundamental human level. Each has endured a personal tale of such awfulness as to perfectly underscore why they are where they are, being trained to do what they do. And yet, of all of them, Marcus is the stone-cold killer. He is the one who is capable of using violence to settle his own problems, the one with not a second’s pause or regret about the idea – and let us not forget the only one to have actually completed the ‘homework assignment’ from Master Lin of killing someone to make the world a better place. Surrounded by scions of the Yakuza, Cartel, Street gangs, KGB and White Supremacists, Marcus stands out as the real stone-cold killer.

But the thing that really rams that point home is an interaction with one of his fellow pupils which emphasises his still very-intact human side. His simple emotional response to the story of a friend underlines that Marcus is perhaps the most functional human being among all his peers, while simultaneously being deadlier than any of them.

On the B-Plot side, there’s some stuff with Maria when she sees an opportunity and seizes it, finding that perhaps she has more friends than she might realise at Kings. There’s more from our mysterious Arch Nemesis who is edging slowly and destructively closer to Marcus, but remains at this point a distracting sideshow rather than a main fixture, and there’s a hint at deeper things in Master Lin’s life than the school which may prove interesting down the line.

Verdict: Mostly proving to be deeper than it might first appear. The concept may be well-worn but the execution throws up quite a few pleasant surprises. 8/10

Greg D. Smith