#quietly retconning a problem is fine to just acknowledge that it is a problem

[why-is-it-always-autumn]

my least favorite kind of plot hole remains the kind where the writers Did Not Have To Do This, there was another way they could have written this situation to avoid the plot hole without adding characters/screwing up the runtime/going over budget/any doylist reason for plot holes to happen, but instead they’ve written this thing that’s completely impossible to make sense of from a watsonian perspective, proceeding to strain or break my suspension of disbelief and screw over any fic writer trying to stick exclusively to canon lore

[storiescanberewritten]

In Remembrance by Guy Adams

Ahhhh poor, unloved Class. I recently heard someone say, "Doctor Who is for kids, Torchwood is for adults, Class is for nobody." It always seemed that Class came about at completely the wrong time, just towards the end of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who when big changes for the franchise as a whole were on the way, both in front of and behind the camera. On top of this, the series was announced as a BBC Three exclusive in October 2015 and almost immediately afterwards in November it was announced that BBC Three would be relaunched as an online only channel. By the time Class was launched in October 2016 it was done relatively quietly online rather than being a big blockbuster event worthy of a Doctor Who spin off. Probably seen as the trailblazer of a new era for BBC Three, the series then failed to make the top 20 viewed programmes on the iPlayer at any time in its first seven weeks. The ratings when repeated on BBC One in horribly late night double bills were even worse. That can only be classed as a failed experiment (ho ho).

Regardless of any of this Class was always a strange concept, taking the iconic Doctor Who location of Coal Hill School/Academy and making it the centre of an ongoing Buffy style series featuring monsters, aliens and teen drama. I feel I enjoyed Class more than many others did, although it certainly had its problems (the over-arching Shadowkin storyline being mostly uninteresting was one of them) but the characters really grew on me over the series with the strength of each of the actors really shining through. Unfortunately Class was cancelled after the muted response from its potential audience, but as ever Big Finish audios are here to resurrect any tiny corner of the Doctor Who franchise that they possibly can. And we love them for it. Released last month, the two boxsets each feature three 45 - 60 minute stories set within the first series of Class.

As a whole the boxsets are really strong, avoiding anything but tiny references to the Shadowkin and instead telling more constrained, character driven stories that the actors can really get stuck into. What we are concerned with here on Stories Can Be Rewritten though is the final story of Volume Two, In Remembrance, a sequel of sorts to the hugely popular Seventh Doctor story from 1988, Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch (Ben will be popping up on this blog again very soon!) This audio adventure brings Ace (Sophie Aldred) and the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs) into the present day world of Class, with Ace encountering both Charlie (Greg Austin) and Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) as she wanders into Coal Hill Academy one night to exterminate a lone Dalek. Big Finish do seem to specialise in crossing over different eras of Doctor Who with each other, often with varying levels of success. Thankfully In Remembrance is one of the more satisfying examples of the trend.

Without going into too much detail of the plot of Remembrance of the Daleks, that story is set in 1963 around and about Coal Hill School and focuses on a civil war between two different factions of Dalek. In Remembrance sees one of these Daleks do a temporal shift into the future to find out how this all pans out and learn anything that might help its unit of Daleks be victorious. For the purposes of this story it is claimed that upon beating the Daleks in 1963, the Doctor and Ace picked up signals warning them of the time travelling Dalek and meant to check it out but got distracted by another adventure. Ace, having left the Doctor, spent time on Gallifrey, and now returned to Earth, remembers the Dalek is about to show up in 2016 and goes to investigate. Charlie manages to get caught up in the tear in time and sends himself back to 1963, leaving the brilliant combination of Ace and Quill to exchange hugely entertaining barbs at each other whilst trying to defeat the Dalek trapped in the school.

The set-up is fairly convoluted then, and relies on retcons to Remembrance of the Daleks and the ability of Ace to be in the right place at the right time in 2016, despite spending most of the last few years on an alien planet. It is absolutely worth it to get Ace and Quill together though because their world views are completely at odds with each other and they immediately start to wind one another up. The constant cynicism of Quill versus the open minded, fun loving Ace is a great match and there's joy for the audience as it dawns on Quill that Ace knows the Doctor, whom she states is "a pain, and not be relied on" and storms away. "Yep, she knows him", malignes Ace with a knowing tone. Sophie Aldred is on top form, even briefly managing to do a convincing impression of herself 30 years ago as she puts on a higher, chirpy voice in a small cameo of young Ace meeting Charlie in 1963. Charlie really does draw the short straw here, getting stuck alone in the past with nothing much to do except run away from Daleks and talk to himself. It's a bit of a waste of Greg Austin's talents to tell the truth, as he really shows his worth in Volume One's Tell Me You Love Me.

The only thing I can really pick on here is the trope of the over-talkative, slightly comic Dalek that seems to come up every so often. The Daleks really are more effective as an unstoppable destructive force. When they stop to have chats things can sometimes go awry. Admittedly, you often need to do this kind of thing to build up a story and stop all Dalek episodes just being exactly the same (as much as that is possible) but sometimes it works better than others. Here Quill ends up trying to repair the Dalek so that it can take her back to 1963 to rescue Charlie, but accidentally harms it in the process. "Arrrrgh! Be more careful!", the Dalek exclaims. Excruciating for me as well as the Dalek. Quill then goes on to mock the Dalek repeatedly which is fine and quite funny, but does mean the Dalek has to rise to her and acknowledge the silly things she is saying about it. Again, this kind of thing should really be above the Daleks, although there is a history there of Daleks being slapstick - a Dalek feeling all sorry for itself and deciding to self destruct because it loses it's captive in Death to the Daleks for example, or the Dalek emerging from underneath a sand dune at the end of episode one of The Chase, coughing and wheezing as it does so!! There's probably room in Doctor Who media for all forms of Dalek to be fair, but there were a couple of moments here were the Dalek seemed a bit too pathetic for my tastes. Having said that, there's also some interesting interplay between Quill and the Dalek, giving us a glimpse at how the Daleks think of themselves other than just the usual "we are the supreme beings!"

Overall the story is a really nice tribute to Remembrance and the 1963 scenes even have some excellent incidental music which sounds very similar to that used in the TV story. The sound effects of the Dalek guns and the exterminations are also those that were used in the late 80s, so it does a great job of putting you back in the mindset of the Seventh Doctor Era, with new twists and wrinkles added of course. With the 30th anniversary of Remembrance of the Daleks coming up in October of this year, it's very satisfying to have this little throwback to my favourite Doctor Who story. Here's hoping the Class crew can return again on audio in the future, maybe even exploring that Weeping Angels plot that was so cruelly teased at the end of Series One. And, with a bit of luck, Ace can join them in the battle too!