Nightvisiting by: Patrick Ness directed by: Ed Bazalgette: They Come To Your Window To Take You Away

Nightvisiting stars Greg Austin as Charlie, Fady Elsayed as Ram, Sophie Hopkins as April, Vivian Oparah as Tanya, and Katherine Kelly as Mrs. Quill.  It was written by Patrick Ness and directed by Ed Bazalgette with Patrick Ness, Steven Moffat, and Brian Minchin as Executive Producer.  It was originally broadcast on 29 October 2016 on BBC Three.

 

Interesting ideas that aren’t followed up upon seems to be the mantra that Class is trying to go through, instead deciding to go for spectacle over substance.  Nightvisiting is an episode that has me conflicted over my own thoughts.  It’s essentially a character study on how a few of the characters can deal with exclusion from others and how they dwell on the past.  Oddly enough it almost feels like it could be a Doctor Who story in the style of the Virgin New Adventures, but it isn’t a Doctor Who story.  The premise is a good one where one night a tear opens up in space and time and a vine like entity called the Lan Kin comes through, and takes on the appearance, personality, and memories of the dead.  They go to the homes their lost loved ones in the façade of asking for compassion and linkage, a way into an almost afterlife, but in actuality they feed on people’s grief.  They’re a metaphor for the often successful temptation to live in the past, coming back to haunt the present and I will give Ness this, the plot is the best of the first three episodes of Class.  The episode itself is split in thirds between Tanya, who sees the apparition of her dead father, Mrs. Quill, who sees her dead sister, and Charlie and his boyfriend Matteusz, who are busy having sex and having existential discussions about the meaning of love.

 

Tanya’s scenes are probably the best of the episode, but they don’t come without their faults.  The episode opens with a montage of the life of Tanya’s father to tell the audience how much of a loving family they are.  This really is an unnecessary indulgence as The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo already went into this, so we learn nothing new.  This causes the episode to have an extremely slow start even with Ed Bazalgette doing his style of choppy direction to try and increase the pace to no real success.  The episode would have been helped from the first montage being cut and just a little exposition about how it is the second anniversary of her father’s death and go from there.  This would have allowed the episode to have a better conclusion outside of having Tanya grab her father’s hand and just magic him away.  The ending again lets the episode down and that is a problem because in any story the ending is paramount to the success of a story.  If the ending is bad the story rarely can rise above average and this ending was just bad.  Outside of this, however, Vivian Oparah, who is working with some really bad dialogue, actually carries you through a lackluster script as you really believe her conflict.  She wants to believe this creature is her father, but is being held back by logic and reasoning.  Her young age actually makes the character feel more realistic as her world has been turned upside down in the previous episodes.  The dead don’t come back to life, unless it turns out they do.

 

Ness also has a problem where he doesn’t know what to do with Ram and April except try to develop April as a character and I guess force them into a relationship.  Really? Where did that come from?  It feels a lot as if the relationship was written in at the last minute to attract people to the series, but it really isn’t all that necessary.  We get some material on April’s father being criminally insane, but that’s about it.  Ram at least seems to have grown a bit in the last two episodes.  Mrs. Quill is really the only one who gets her own plotline as the Lan Kin appear as her dead sister which is an interesting idea of how to contrast the situations.  Mrs. Quill is the rational one knowing that this cannot be her sister, so acts in an almost Doctor like fashion, getting information out of the creature so she can defeat the menace.  It works as an interesting B plot, but could be taken out to focus more on Tanya.  Now finally I want to talk about the elephant in the room.  Charlie and Matteusz’s relationship.   The relationship presented definitely could work had Ness put a bit more focus on the two characters during the first episode, and I do compliment Ness for getting two actors with a bit of chemistry and having a truly alien discussion about ideas of love, but they are not characters.  They're just two members of an already cluttered cast that doesn't get enough time to rise above a cardboard cutout.  Ness still could do something interesting with them, but I’ll bet you Matteusz is going to be killed off in the finale as a plot device.  He’s just written with a sign over him saying “cannon fodder here”.

 

To summarize, Nightvisiting is still a very average mess of an episode that isn’t doing anything to make me wish to continue watching Class.  The ideas are there for great things, but Ness cannot seem to grasp how to write things realistically and is primarily relying on the actors’ abilities to make the show succeed.  About half the episode works and about half the episode fails spectacularly so I can’t justify giving it anything above 50/100.