Class – The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo – Episode Review
This week’s twitter rewatch was of episode 2 of Class, aka The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo. This is definitely one of my favourite episodes. While the first episode introduced our major players, this is where we start seeing what they are really made of.
Synopsis
Ram struggles to cope following events at the Prom, isolating himself from the others. But when the school is faced with a dreadful new threat, the gang must unite to fight it.
Specifically this episode centres on Ram Singh (Fady Elsayed) who is still reeling from the double whammy of having his girlfriend murdered right in front of him AND his leg chopped off by Corakinus. This episode sees him getting covered in blood again as a terrifying dragon rampages through school flaying people. He’s also trying to get used to that alien replacement leg that the Doctor gave him which is really messing up his skills on the football pitch. That’s brought him into the line of fire of Coach Tom Dawson (Ben Peel) who is kind of a dick. He’s also home to a massive dragon tattoo that moves around his body, communicates with the coach and also apparently kills people.
School is NOT for kids!
This episode goes heavy on the gore and has some nudity, reinforcing that this is definitely NOT a children’s show. It also handles some heavy themes. The two skype conversations between Ram and Tanya (Vivian Oparah) about how to handle death and grief are amazing. The friendship between these two characters is one of the high points of the show for me. The conversations they had in this episode were poignant. All credit to writer Patrick Ness for penning believable dialogue between two teenagers on such a difficult subject. On the basis of the first episode it would have been all too easy to make Ram an unlikeable, arrogant fuckboy. But between the writing and Fady’s emotional portrayal, Ram fast became my favourite character.
While Ram is trying to deal with things on his own, Charlie (Greg Austin), April (Sophie Hopkins) and Tanya are all worrying about him and trying to engage with him in their own ways. I loved the montage at the start of the episode of all their various messages to Ram. Charlie once again displaying his abject lack of human knowledge as he messages “I have socks”. His and Quill’s fish-out-of-water moments are some of the most fun bits of the show. Charlie googling human things he doesn’t understand and entirely losing the train of the conversation is one of my favourite things and entirely too relatable.
The discussion between those three resulting in Tanya naming the rift “The Bunghole of Time” never fails to make me laugh out loud.
The other standout scene in this episode for me is the final one between Ram and his dad (Aaron Neil). Ram comes clean about all his struggles and his father listens patiently, doesn’t judge or freakout. Instead he comforts and encourages his son in a genuinely touching scene.
Quill V The Establishment
Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) has a little side-quest of her own in this episode as her class is visited by the dreaded Ofsted inspector. I’m sure teachers the world over can empathise with Quill in this episode, especially when she yeets a stapler at the inspector’s head. Outstanding!
This is also where we get the first mention of the mysterious “Governors”. This was a through point in the series that sadly never got paid off when the show was cancelled.
Not quite perfect
There are a couple of moments in this episode that bug me. Firsly the fact that Ram only witnesses the dragon kill the cleaner because he’s gone out for a smoke. He’s supposedly dedicated to his football yet he smokes? At least that gets called out by Tanya later in the episode, but it still annoys me every time.
My other gripe with this episode is the dragon. In the early part of the episode it’s handled really wel. Brief glimpses that increase the menacing threat of the beast. Sadly in the later parts of the episode, when it attacks headmaster Armitage and then confronts the gang and we see it in its entirety, the CGI lets it down slightly.
Overall it’s a brilliant episode that does a great job of really throwing our gang of hapless teens in at the deep end of the battle against the denizens of the rift.
You can find our review of the previous episode here – For Tonight We Might Die Review.
We will be back at 8pm (UK time) on Sunday the 12th of April to live tweet episode 3 of Class, Nightvisiting, when Tanya takes centre stage. Join us on twitter and make sure to use #ClassDW.
