SNAPSHOT
What if your planet was massacred and you were the sole survivor? What if a legendary figure out of space and time found you a place to hide? But what if the things that want to kill you have tracked you down? And worst of all, what if you haven’t studied for your A-Levels…?Coal Hill School has been a part of the Doctor Who universe since the very beginning, but that has come at a price. All the time travelling over the years has caused the very walls of space and time to become thin. There’s something pressing in on the other side, something waiting for its chance to kill everyone and everything, to bring us all into Shadow. (synopsis via Digital Spy)
Beware the dangers that lurk in the shadows.
That seems to be the overwhelming, quite unsettling message from the trailers for Class, a new spinoff from Doctor Who penned by noted YA genre author Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls), that centres on a group of students at Coal Hill Academy, a place of learning that has featured heavily in the Time Lord’s adventure’s and which sits, for want of a better term, on an extra-dimensional hellmouth.
That last reference points to the on point pop culture references littering the new show (try The Vampire Diaries, Buffy) which promises to add an extra dimension to humanity’s fight against the nasties out in the universe, a fight to which the Doctor is more often than not called to assist.
But what if he can’t be there all the time, reasons Capaldi’s voiceover, what then? Who stands in his stead?
Well, a bunch of kids named Charlie (Greg Austin) who is not of this planet, April (Sophie Hopkins), Ram (Fady Elsayed) and Tanya (Vivian Oparah), assisted by their physics teacher Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) who challenges the Shadow Kin, who attack in the first episode in pursuit of an alien enemy hiding in the school’s midst that she is “war itself” and not to be trifled with.
Quite how warlike she is and how well the students of Class are at keeping alien threats at bay will become clear when the show debuts on BBC Three Online (followed terrestrial screening on BBC 1) on 22 October followed by Canada and Australia, where Class will screen on national broadcaster ABC’s iView service.
- For a complete rundown on Class check out Digital Spy.
And here’s your chance to meet the characters …