Nightvisiting
Nov. 19th, 2016 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatNightvisiting is another confident and assured episode from Class. The comparisons with Buffy are beginning to appear increasingly apt, since Buffy liked to make its Monster-of-the-Week an embodiment of the personal crises and dramas of its protagonists.
Here it is Vivian Oparah's Tanya who gets to take centre stage and the episode benefits from the fact that she is, arguably, the strongest actor among the ensemble of teenagers. I particularly liked the fact that we see her intelligence at war with her emotions. She knows the appearance of her dead father promising to ease her grief is probably a trick and yet she wants to believe, and the episode allows us to see her reasoning with the creature, gradually peeling back its layers of falsehood as she attempts to get to the truth. Sadly the denouement is a little blink-and-you-miss-it, particularly since, like Doctor Who, Class sometimes fails to deliver key pieces of exposition clearly - I'm not sure if this is a sound technician problem or the tendency to deliver longer speeches very quickly - at any rate I had to look up what Tanya actually did on the Internet. That aside, it is hard to fault this episode its clear focus and self-contained execution of one thematic idea.
I feel about Nightvisiting much as I do about The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo. I can objectively appreciate its quality but I'm still waiting for the show to actually grab me. It may be that while its ideas and execution are pretty solid, it lacks much of a sense of fun (Miss Quill getting all the best lines). I think maybe its point-of-view is much more that of the teenager embroiled in the process of growing up than Buffy's (obvious point of comparison) which was always much more that of the adult looking back on their teenage years with compassion, but also with wry amusement at teenage obsessions and behaviour.
Here it is Vivian Oparah's Tanya who gets to take centre stage and the episode benefits from the fact that she is, arguably, the strongest actor among the ensemble of teenagers. I particularly liked the fact that we see her intelligence at war with her emotions. She knows the appearance of her dead father promising to ease her grief is probably a trick and yet she wants to believe, and the episode allows us to see her reasoning with the creature, gradually peeling back its layers of falsehood as she attempts to get to the truth. Sadly the denouement is a little blink-and-you-miss-it, particularly since, like Doctor Who, Class sometimes fails to deliver key pieces of exposition clearly - I'm not sure if this is a sound technician problem or the tendency to deliver longer speeches very quickly - at any rate I had to look up what Tanya actually did on the Internet. That aside, it is hard to fault this episode its clear focus and self-contained execution of one thematic idea.
I feel about Nightvisiting much as I do about The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo. I can objectively appreciate its quality but I'm still waiting for the show to actually grab me. It may be that while its ideas and execution are pretty solid, it lacks much of a sense of fun (Miss Quill getting all the best lines). I think maybe its point-of-view is much more that of the teenager embroiled in the process of growing up than Buffy's (obvious point of comparison) which was always much more that of the adult looking back on their teenage years with compassion, but also with wry amusement at teenage obsessions and behaviour.
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Date: 2016-11-20 12:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
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