#BBC class

[doortotomorrow]

APRIL: I've thought about you everyday since we were trapped in that classroom. Every single day. I've been afraid to love you. That's all it is, I've just been afraid. I'm not afraid anymore…I love you, Ram. I just wanted you to know that.

[intuitive-revelations]

Jumbled thoughts and theories on belief and metaphysical engines, the Nexus, and fate of the Web of Time...

"Do all those gods seriously exist (not just as alien fakes) in the DW universe? How did the Doctor supposedly meet them?"

Keep in mind, belief making something real is hardly a new theme for DW. The most obvious example for this would be belief in the Doctor being able to empower him in The Last of the Time Lords.

We also know that every story has a place in reality, with the Land of Fiction, not to mention the Doctor's own statement in The Gallifrey Chronicles:

"My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

But I hear you. Suppose, for example, we want a more concrete example of this applied to religion:

Look no further than the series I've long batted for: Class.

In "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did", Quill, Ballon and Dorothea literally travel into several afterlife realms using something called "the reliquary", or a "metaphysical engine".

DOROTHEA: This, as best we can tell, is a 'metaphysical engine'. QUILL: Metaphysics? Metaphysics aren't real. It's just thought. DOROTHEA: Everything in the universe is conserved. Everything. Even belief. Get millions of creatures believing something strongly enough for long enough and even space responds.

Quill even gets to meet (and fight) the goddess of her own people:

"Ok, so there is a device that can take you into a theoretical space where beliefs are real, you haven't answered how the Doctor is going about meeting these gods."

Is now a good time to mention that the metaphysical engine is bigger on the inside?

"Yeah, but so are a lot of things, even the Barber's ship..."

Except, there really is more here. Because the TARDIS itself is a metaphysical engine. Canonically. Explicitly.

In the First Doctor Short Trip "Every Day", the TARDIS actually ends up seemingly landing in a man's head, as he struggles to come to terms with his wife having an affair, which manifests as a time loop. Once it's broken, they suddenly find themselves far gone from the loop:

"What happened?" asked Ian, looking around in shock. One minute they had been in the house, the next they were on their way. "I don't know for sure," said the Doctor. "But my TARDIS, you see, is a metaphysical engine. It can travel through all the dimensions related to space and time. It's possible that, on this occasion, we entered the dimension of one man's mind. One man's imagination."

Other stories have similarly seen the TARDIS breach into metaphysical space, even at one point physically landing in the Doctor's own mind in the VNAs.

Some of the Doctor's other meetings with legendary, mythical, or fictional characters (even on-screen: the Devil, Robin Hood, Santa Claus etc.) start to also make a bit more sense, don't they?

This all perhaps also shouldn't feel that incongruous, considering we had the Doctor literally end-up in Bethlehem in time for the birth of Christ just this Christmas (even if that one wasn't itself by the TARDIS).

This, perhaps, also sheds light on how the Barber's plan really was going to work.

I mentioned in my live reaction that the "World Wide Web / Nexus" strongly resembled the idea of the Web of Time (with "signals" even being transmitted through it in a way resembling the Matrix). Well the Web of Time, in expanded universe lore, is partially constructed through something called the "Observer Effect", in which temporal probabilities become fixed in history, named after the real-life effect in quantum physics. Through this, history becomes fixed by those that perceive it - designed to enforce Time Lord dominance over history.

For an in-show example, think of the laws of fixed points established by The Angels Take Manhattan: if you read your own future, you fix it into being. This is one reason why the Time Lords ostensibly forbid Time Lords from interacting with one's own past or future, despite the many times we've seen this violated.

I'd make an argument that the Nexus, if it's not literally connected to the Web of Time in some way, effectively serves a similar purpose. Just as observers can shape history, the Nexus allows believers to shape reality, via the effect Dorothea mentioned previously. By controlling it, the gods secure their own existence, just as controlling the Web of Time secures that of the Time Lords. If it is destroyed, those stories are lost, just as history as we know it is transformed by the degradation of the Web of Time.

This may sound like a lot of fanwank, but I have a suspicion that this kind of thinking with regards to the Web of Time is good to keep in mind over the next few episodes.

I theorised after Episode 1 that the TARDIS trying to "pull" itself back to Earth via the Web of Time is what resulted in those various landmarks somehow ending up pulled into the middle of space between MissBelindaChandra-1 and the Earth. That these represented sort-of "node points" in the Earth's history as represented in the Web, and by continuing to pull when it couldn't arrive, the TARDIS had actually pulled them towards it, rather than the other way round.

One episode on, and we get the "vindicators", devices designed to do exactly what I just said!

DOCTOR: We land anywhere, and the vindicator casts out a signal, like a fishing line - whoosh! - to May 24th, 2025, and we use it to pull the TARDIS in like a hook. So we must land.

ANOTHER episode later, and it's revealed that Mrs. Flood (hey remember she said she literally wanted to seize God's kingdom?) actually wants the Doctor to be using the vindicators? We also discover, even more concerningly, that Earth's future history, despite its significance to the universe, has been completely erased.

Next week in Episode 4, we get a relatively grounded episode, that ends with someone "rejecting the Doctor's reality", who is then seemingly recruited by Flood.

Finally, this week, we get this: a story of someone determined to control / tear down a Web stretched over time and space.

Put all this together with the ongoing decline in Rassilon's established laws of rationality, which started after the devastation of Gallifrey in Series 12 and the creation of the Flux, but accelerated after the Doctor fell to the point of using superstition outside the bounds of the Time Lord noosphere in Wild Blue Yonder, and what we know about the final two episodes, including episode titles (which I won't repeat here for spoilers), and it quickly starts to seem like Mrs. Flood might be planning to tear apart the Web of Time.

This may admittedly seem like a bit too much for casual viewers, but the vindicator element at least I'm feeling pretty confident with. If this WILL actually connect to the Web of Time, we'll see, but today's episode didn't exactly dissuade me...

[ngatwa]

CLASS (2016): FOR TONIGHT WE MIGHT DIE

[zeitschluessel]

close enough, welcome back Class (2016)!

[felicitykings]

CLASS (2016) ↳ 1.05 Brave-ish Heart

[daughter-of-time]

All of time and space, everything that ever happened or will happen. Where do you want to start?

[bellamysgriffin]

get to know me meme >> Favorite Female Characters [33/?] April Maclean (BBC Class)

Let me look into your eyes. Let me know that I was brave. 

[soleta]

if you think Class was bad I must believe you just haven't watched it and are listening to Facebook Doctor Who fan propaganda. Class is literally fucking amazing

[mndvx]

patricknessbooks Very last minute partial Class reunion! @vivianforever_ sent her love and @ifadyelsayed called in. London is nice sometimes.

[khruschevshoe]

The fact that BBC class never got a season 2 is my Roman empire and always will be. With that ending? With April becoming shadowkin? With the fallout between Charlie and Matteusz and all of Charlie's guilt over using the Cabinet of Souls and losing everything left of his people? The sudden change in dynamic between Ms. Quill and Charlie/Quill saving Charlie's life? Ram's reaction to April becoming Shadowkin? Tanya and Ram dealing with the ramifications of telling Charlie to use the Cabinet of Souls? The fact that they STILL HAVEN'T PROPERLY DEALT WITH THE FALLOUT FROM WHEN THEY WERE TRAPPED WITH THE PRISONER AND THE TRUTH-GUILT ROCK? Feral. Absolutely FERAL, I am telling you. I'm never getting over this. It's been seven years and I am still NOT OVER IT

[bazwillendinflames]

Rest in peace Class you would have loved the mixing of supernatural villains, folk lore and science fiction

[lesbicosmos]

since the whole whoniverse is on iplayer, thought id finally watch class since it's the only one of the main spinoffs i haven't seen yet

im on ep4 and

IZZY WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE

[intuitive-revelations]

Royal Hope Hospital On-Screen Appearances

Doctor Who: Smith and Jones (2007)

Doctor Who: Turn Left (2008)

Class: Nightvisiting (2016) (right: episode prop art)

Doctor Who: Joy to the World (2024)

BONUS: Law & Order UK: Care (2009) (starring Freema Agyeman and Bradley Walsh, written by Chris Chibnall)

(...please ignore Law and Order's Royal Hope Hospital being based in King's Cross when DW's is clearly on the Thames in Lambeth)

[ngatwa]

CLASS (2016): NIGHTVISITING

[oldbutchdanielcraig]

one thing i'll never ever forget is how in the first episode of the flop doctor who spinoff class twelve shows up to coal hill and sees clara's name on the teacher board and has a prolonged moment in which he tries to figure out why that name means something to him. probably the top reason for my personal misery in 2016

[forabeatofadrum]

Summary: Matteusz got kicked out of his house and moves in with Charlie and Quill. He loves Charlie and he starts to form a friendship with Quill as well. But Charlie and Quill cannot stand each other, and their relationship worsens when the Shadow Kin try to invade Earth. Matteusz is stuck in the middle of all of this. His own beliefs get tested. Can he hold on to what he thinks while also caring for both?

Notes: Welcome to this fic. It's going to be quite a ride, and I put a lot of love in it. This fic idea stems from two things.

First, I adore a possible friendship between Quill and Matteusz. The show didn't give us much, but the fandom did and I absolutely love it. I wanted to explore a Quill and Matteusz relation in canon. Second, in the fandom, I have seen fan content where Charlie and Quill are in each other's lives, even after the events of the show and I wonder how that happened. This isn't shade. I have made such content (see 27 Suits or Dresses). But it has always made me wonder if it's realistic. What happened between Charlie and Quill runs deep. Can they even have a relationship after everything that has happened?

So those two things have led to this. What started out as a supposedly short fanfic about Matteusz's relation with Quill and Charlie turned into a deep dive into the moral philosophy and ethics of this show. (I even joked that I should've handed this in for my ethics class, instead of the paper that I wrote.). I swear, I wanted to keep it light and fun, but in order to explore the bond between these three characters, I felt the need to delve into what happened between Charlie and Quill and how Matteusz as a common friend plays a role in that. Class had a lot to say about it, which is why it is a shame that it got cancelled. This fic starts right after Nightvisiting, and ends beyond canon. I am not including the audio episodes, and I also acted as if The Arrival was stopped without the Classmates' knowledge and interference, so that they can have a peaceful life.

I am almost done with my note, I swear! I want to thank @bazwillendinflames for helping me with the title of this fic. Ellie sent me the song Allies or Enemies from The Crane Wives, since she thought it fit the story, and I know the "All's fair in love and war" is a famous quote outside of it, but the song reminded me of it. Go give it a listen!

And also, I want to give a shout out to Class: Ongoing, a fan continuation of Class. My fic didn't take the content of Class: Ongoing into account, but I did use the name Parsela as an "easter egg" of sorts.

Enjoy.

📖Read on AO3📖