Class: Nightvisiting
(1 episode, s01e03, 2016)
When memories become weeds.
On the two-year anniversary night of Tanya’s father’s death, she is visited by something that resembles him. She doubts his appearance, believing that he is a hallucination, but the being has actual memories of their lives together. If she takes his hand, her grief will be gone forever.
A similar apparition visits Miss Quill, posing as her sister and promising that she can use a gun again if she accepts the bargain. Ram also gets a visitor in the form of Rachel while he video chats with April. Meanwhile, Charlie and Matteusz hook up after the former consoles the latter about his family’s homophobia.
Tanya returns to her room to talk with her “father” after checking in with her mother. She presumes that her mother is asleep but doesn’t notice that the woman is entangled in the alien vines. Both Tanya’s and Quill’s apparitions explain that they are the Lankin, an organism that feasts on a victim’s grief while killing them. They are all connected to the “great trunk” by vines running throughout the city and can presumably read their victims’ minds to emulate essential memories. The vines are also self-healing.
Ram and April rendezvous outside and try to work out this invasion. April reveals that her father attempted to kill himself by driving off a bridge when she was eight. Unfortunately, both she and her mother were in the car, resulting in her mother’s paralysis. April focuses on the things she loves to prevent the memory from controlling her life, and she uses this power to console Ram.
Ram and April follow the vines to Coal Hill and then follow the one into Tanya’s flat. Tanya struggles with the memory of her father since the Lankin only gets more aggressive about feeding on her grief. Ram and April arrive and warn her about the threat, but Tanya takes the Lankin’s hand. Unfortunately for the vine-creature, Tanya has more anger than grief toward her father’s memory. The anger poisons the creature but doesn’t weaken it enough.
Quill outright rejects her nightvisitor’s offer and eventually has Charlie and Matteusz stab the creature. They join up with the others to fight the threat. They finally defeat it after Quill steals a bus and rams it through the tentacles, forcing the broken links to retreat into the rift. Everyone seems fine afterward, and most of the victims have amnesia about the event.
The adventure ends as new bonds are forged within the team: Charlie offers space in his home for Matteusz while April and Ram continue to bond over their time together.
There’s not much to talk about here.
The episode tips its hand too way early by exposing that the ghosts of loved ones past are an alien tentacle invasion. While it does a good job of exploring the deeper hurt within the core team members, it spends a lot of time meandering through the 45-minute runtime before spending about five minutes actually fighting the threat.
The good side is that we see the team being proactive (in pieces, anyway), and admitting that they are gelling together after the threat is defeated. Hopefully it means that we’ll see them taking action more often in the remainder of the series run.
Rating: 2/5 – “Mm? What’s that, my boy?”
UP NEXT – Class: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart & Class: Brave-ish Heart
The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.
