The Metaphysical Engine, Or What Quill Did – Class Review
The Class rewatch has sadly ended, but I still have the last two episodes left to review. So without further ado let’s take a look at episode 7 – The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did.
Synopsis
While the students are in detention, Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) goes on a metaphysical adventure to win back her freedom.
The Metaphysical Engine feels like the most “Doctor Who” of all the episodes of Class to me. Proper sci-fi stuff. Alien races, a race against time to achieve a particular objective, and some wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
The episode deals with, as the title says, What Quill Did during the hour in the previous episode (Detained) where the gang were locked in detention. Quill previously made a deal with Headmistress Ames to get the Arn removed from her brain and thus restore Quill’s free will. Putting the gang in detention freed Quill up to embark, with Ames, on a a risky mission to do just that.
With the assistance of a shapeshifter named Ballon (Chiké Okonkwo), Quill and Ames use the Metaphysical Engine to travel first to the Arn afterlife, then the hell of Ballon’s race, and finally the birthplace of the Quill goddess.
These three ports of call provide Ballon with all that he needs to perform the surgery on Quill to remove the Arn.
Belief
The main theme of this episode is belief – forming and challenging. As Ames says to Quill before they begin their journey at some point today Quill will begin to believe that what they are doing is really possible. Every realm they journey to is purely made of thought and belief. In Ballon’s hell he has to find belief in himself in order to be able to shift again. I found that quite thought-provoking. Quill’s spikey quips are what we see most often. To get this deeper look at what makes her tick is really interesting. I hate that we never got to explore it more in a second season.
Death after Life?
While the first two thirds of this episode are all about the big adventure, it has a much more intimate, personal third act. After successfully removing the Arn (which was GROSS), and all the other stuff they’ve endured, Quill and Ballon celebrate winning their various battles by having sex.
Afterwards they awake and find they are stuck in a desert – well, sort of. Ames tells them there was only enough juice left in the Metaphysical Engine to get one of them back. She leaves them with a gun and the instruction that one will have to kill the other, and tempts Ballon with the news his neice still lives on Earth. They fight and Quill is the survivor but only cos Ames rigged the gun. Quill was ready to die but instead lost the only person she’d made a real connection with.
A timey-wimey encounter with the souls of the Rhodians that are in the Cabinet with her (yeah, the desert is in the Cabinet of Souls) ensues. And when Quill finally emerges back in our world and we hear her roar “I am War Itself!” I never fail to get chills.
The final reveal, after she tosses Charlie the Arn and collapses, that she’s very suddenly pregnant always gets me. I’m right there with Matteusz “It can’t be!”
I love the way they handled this “hour”, splitting it into two and letting the kids have one hour and Quill have the other was brilliant. Other shows might have tried to cut back and forth between the two storylines. Doing so would have lessened the impact of both.
