Welcome back to our Five Thoughts coverage of Deadly Class! This week’s episode works as a glorified house party, with plenty of eighties easter eggs, more character building, and some wonderfully cheesy dialogue. Plus – we get more fun Harry Potter style worldbuilding with King’s Dominion and the classes taking place within it, another animated scene and we find out Billy is the best guy?
Dive in, and be wary of spoilers.
1. Amicable Assassinatin’ Action.
Though a lot of this episode is dedicated to Shabnam’s house party, we do open with a few scenes that are closer in tone with the pilot episode. While we don’t get as much of the glorious eighties soundtrack at the beginning, which is instead replaced with moody, cinematic X-Men-like music, we do get to see Master Lin put his foot down and put the class through a life-threatening event to weed out the weak.
What occurs from here is a neat, Indiana Jones-esque sequence of the class trying to figure out how to escape or progress through the deadly maze Lin has trapped them in. Marcus gets his moment in the spotlight as he manages to pick a lock to get them through the first phase, but then we see the class trapped in a room with two bo-staff wielding attacks, whilst already drugged from the poison gas. The scene feels appropriate for a Russo brother-directed show, with the action being close combat, kinetic and stylish. However, the overall darker tone on Deadly Class doesn’t lend well to spotlighting characters in action and having them in an even more poorly lit setting helps even less. I love that it isn’t Marcus in the end who summons the strength to save everyone from the poison gas – it’s the thoroughly enjoyable Maria.
2. “Poetic” dialogue.
Continuing from last week, this series continues to feel heavily dramatic from the overly scripted and cheesy dialogue. Opening again with another set of interior monologue sets the tone for what you’ll be getting throughout the entire show – lots of self-centered teenagers who all manage to come up with perfect and witty comebacks to any situation.
A lot of the characters cycle through these perfectly timed conversations, some like Willie having more reason than others to show some dramatic flair, yet a lot of it comes back to Marcus snapping at any situation where someone is having a good time. The moment I felt was the tip of the iceberg, though, actually came from Saya. In an aside during the house party scene where Marcus and Saya are talking, Saya uses a painfully obvious metaphor in conversation with Marcus. She talks about how things like pain and nostalgia all get mixed in ‘like dye… once dropped in, no changing the color back”. As she says this, you can almost see the pain in the actress’ delivery, holding her head in shame as she delivers this painfully sweaty phrase.
3. More solid villain development.
To my surprise, Chico comes back as a continually developed antagonist in this episode, and the show portrays him as a terrifyingly chauvinistic, clingy and bitter foe. We get to see a little more of how Maria secretly despises him when in Lin’s maze at the start of the episode, we see her hesitate before administering Chico the antidote. Then comes some more development of his character, as he declares that instead of attending the house party, he and Maria will be enjoying a candle-lit dinner by themselves. Chico’s dominating and creepy attitude shines through here as he swirls his wine and talks about how he has loved Maria since he was a boy. We see his arc ultimately take off when he gets into the car with both Maria and an old friend, before shooting the latter straight in the head before a distraught Maria. It’s classical, terrifying villain building and I love it.
We also see some more continuing threads from the death of Rory, the rather small time villain from the pilot. His death is giving Marcus some serious post-traumatic stress, as Marcus continues to see him in places that he shouldn’t be, a specter planting seeds of self-doubt. It’s interesting for such an action-heavy show to have an antagonist for a character that is essentially crippling self-doubt, and yet it’s resolved in a particularly interesting way. Lin takes Marcus to Rory’s funeral, in which Marcus gets to spout everything that he hated about Rory and lose all guilt for taking his life.
Continued belowAlso, Shabnam is introduced in this episode, and despite being somewhat sympathetic in his comic introduction, the way his character is played here makes him immediately unlikeable.
4. Marcus is still the worst.
Holy crap, I think Marcus might be my least favorite character in the show thus far. Admittedly, this is in a series with a fairly diverse cast full of quirky figures, yet there are very few things that make Marcus compelling as a protagonist outside of his unending thirst to exact vague revenge on Ronald Reagan. Just before the maze scene, we see Marcus trying to fit in at school, making a comment on a Love and Rockets comic that a classmate is reading before said classmate promptly tells him to “suck a dick, wannabe”. To add to this, we find out that the alleged love triangle between him, Saya and Maria, was essentially both of the other characters manipulating Marcus to further their own plans, making me love them even more and him even less.
Once we get to the house party, Marcus slips into the perpetual bummer of the scene. He literally goes into a corner of the room at one point, puts on his headphones and starts to listen to The Smiths (Hey, they did show up!), to which Willie immediately questions him. Marcus also tries to school a pothead on what a gravity bong is, before being corrected that it is actually operated by pressure, getting schooled once again. Later on, he tries to debate with the same person at the party about why alcohol is better than marijuana.
At the very least, he does get a great scene in his resolution to Rory’s death. It’s somewhat redeeming, but I still remain steadfast that Marcus is the worst.
5. Billy, however, is the best!
At the start of this episode, I decided that I was quite partial to Billy, the punk rocker kid who has enough spunk to be able to put up with Marcus’ incessant whining. To every blunt point that Marcus makes, Billy is there to make a positive and often hilarious rebuttal. We also see his crush on Petra, the token goth girl of the show, develop more throughout, making Billy instantly relatable and interesting.
During the house party, Marcus tries to pump Billy up to essentially ask Petra out. As watchers, we should all know that Marcus shouldn’t be trusted telling anyone how to do anything. However, Billy is so swept up at the moment, with Petra being literal meters away from him, that he immediately goes and spills his guts to her, capping the confession off by saying he loves her. It makes Billy so endearing it made me cry out! Even more so that Petra somewhat understandably avoids the statement, before proceeding to hook up with the bizarre Russian stereotype Viktor. Billy doesn’t pursue her, instead choosing to woe beside the condom-inhabited fish tank with Lex trying to cheer him up. This is why poor Billy is the best guy.
What do you think? Is Billy truly the best guy? Do you secretly love Marcus? Post your heathen discussions in the comments!
