#bbc class

get to know me meme >> Favorite Male Characters [42/?] Ram Singh (Class)

Class: There’s a tear in time and space at one school and the students and a teacher fight threats from other planets.

"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.

Why did I think that it was a good idea to watch Class for the first time

I'm now obsessed with a show from nearly ten years ago that was cancelled after eight episodes and almost nobody else gives a single shit about or even likes

official

Classic Who - The number of episodes can be intimidating at first but it is very worth it i think. It gives you context for a bunch of little callbacks and references in NuWho, and it’s very enjoyable on its own :)

Doctor Who TV Movie - Eighth doctor my beloved

*gestures vaguely at the entirety of DWEU and Big Finish*

Sarah Jane Adventures - Made for kids so it’s a lot more lighthearted than DW but it doesn’t treat the audience like it’s dumb. Comforting to watch i think

Torchwood - Focuses on Jack + his team and it is very grimdark. Sex! Murder! Blood!

K9 and Company - A pilot for a spinoff that never happened but it is still considered canon and explains how Sarah Jane ended up with a K9 unit

K9 - Australian Disney spinoff that isn’t made by the BBC but is supposed to take place in the same universe and is considered official. Strangely punk and anti-authoritarian which is pretty cool

Class - Darker than DW but lighter than Torchwood. Focuses on a group of students at Coal Hill and an awesome badass rude evil alien rebel teacher

Daleks! - A short animated series about a group of Daleks trying to escape a hostile entity and return to Skaro.

War Between The Land And The Sea - I haven’t watched this yet but it is an official spinoff featuring Kate dealing with Sea Devils i think

Wilderness Era reeltime/BBV films:

Wartime - Featuring Sergeant Benton, a UNIT soldier from 70s DW

P.R.O.B.E - A short series ft. Liz Shaw, one of the classic companions on her own adventures.

Auton, Auton 2: Sentinel, and Auton 3. No clue what happens here but i assume there’s autons.

Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarans

Daemos Rising

Mindgame + Mindgame Trilogy

Zygon: When Just Being You Isn’t Enough - I haven’t seen this but allegedly it’s very suggestive and weird so um. Yeah do with that information what you will.

Downtime - Features a BUNCH of classic companions and is the first appearance of Kate before Power Of Three was ever conceived!!

I haven’t seen any of these so i cannot speak for their quality, but they exist

You can also check out fan-made and fan-cast Doctor Whos, which are obviously not canon but they are fun and made by fans for fans

Doctor Who Fanfilm Series by DW2012; which already has multiple original doctors and companions; the actor for The Purple Doctor even wrote an official thing for Doctor Who! The lore actually goes crazy here

But if you want to watch the three major shows of the revival era, all of which feed off of one another and have a big crossover at one point--those being Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures, & Torchwood--you could originally watch them all easily on HBO Max, but now you'll need both Max and AMC+ to get that full experience. Not to mention that as far as I'm aware you can only still buy Class, another spin-off, in order to stream it, and if you're really digging deep the K9 show is on Tubi and Hoopla. The latest two seasons of DW are still on Disney. And the spin-offs Tales of the TARDIS and The War Between the Land and the Sea are still region locked in the UK. So the number of avenues have now increased where the big three were once just on the same streamer together. So until I hear that SJA and Torchwood at least are joining it, I'm not a big fan.

I don't mind if it gets a new streaming home, when the Gatwa era was announced I had really hoped it'd last awhile and maybe Disney would eventually end up with the earlier era of Who, alongside the others, but that was not to be.

And this is just discussing modern Who. Classic at least has a dedicated YouTube page, although the TV movie you have to buy it, and I don't remember if K9 & Company and Dimensions in Time have official easy to watch releases, although thankfully they're pretty easy to find on the Internet.