We’ve made it, friends! SyFy’s Deadly Class has now reached its finale, and they couldn’t let it go without a bang. Marcus and the gang get their final showdown with Fuckface and his family, and Lin fights El Diablo for his daughter’s life in a bout of desperation. The gang’s all here, and the tension is high folks.
Of course, this being the last episode of the season, be aware that you are bound to run into spoilers.
1. Mission: Unlikely
The episode starts off with a classic pump-up scene. As we saw from the end of the last episode, Marcus and the gang have rather non-discreetly arrived outside of Chester’s current base of operations. There’s a lot of discourse, and Marcus’ affair with Saya is still weighing heavily on his mind as he tries to talk to both Maria and Saya about their relationship.
The rest of the gang are having second thoughts about the operation, and especially their stakes in it. Why would they risk their lives for a grudge match between Marcus and his old bunk buddy? Fortunately, Marcus re-inspires them with a rather over-scripted pep-talk in which everyone then makes very planned, generic remarks. Which is lucky for him, because I still don’t think the argument that “we’re assassins, this is literally what we’re trained to do” still stands when they’re not receiving adequate compensation.
2. Hillbilly Chainsaw Massacre
All this doesn’t necessarily matter as the next part of the episode focuses on the fun part – the ridiculous action. I’d like to point out that before the actual fighting starts, we get shots of everyone hopelessly sneaking in save for Saya – she gets her own badass action shot, set with music and all, where she jumps through a window brandishing her katana and a fierce expression. Regardless, it’s revealed that Chester and his family have been expecting them all along, as they ambush them and instigate a brawl.
The highlight of the scene is definitely when one of the family comes screaming into the room with a chainsaw, only to accidentally miss their target and instead plunge his weapon into one of his own kin in a shower of blood and gore. As crazy as that is, however, the highest stakes scene and culmination of a season’s worth of brewing is the fight between Saya and Maria. Maria finds out that Saya “fucked him”, and the two angrily meet eyes with a flashing red filter and alarm sound a la Kill Bill. The fan/swordplay is fast-paced and tense and makes for a flashy piece of action TV.
3. Lin on the run
The other big sequence of this episode shows Master Lin on the run from El Diablo with his kid Naya, after the tragic death of his wife. There’s a great shot at the start of the episode as Lin escapes through a meat packing Chinese district, where he has allies. Diablo’s folks try to rush him and his daughter, but the allies execute a surprise attack, attacking with meat hooks and swords to great visual avail.
It’s in this that we see Lin truly at the end of his rope. For about half the season, we’ve seen Lin worry for the sake of Naya, who was previously thought of as dead by his sister Gao. Lin tries to hide from one of Diablo’s assassin’s with Naya, and we see Benedict Wong here really conveying the stress and worry of his situation to great effect, as the audience too can feel the desperation of trying to save his child’s life. There’s an odd scene interrupting this about Lin trying to get his daughter to hold her breath despite him telling her this in a loud whisper, but it doesn’t make the relationship any less meaningful.
4. Gao’s revenge
We slowly see Gao creep back after her conflict with Lin in the last episode. She appears in one sinister scene about halfway through the episode, meeting with Shabnam (dang snitch!) who tells her where everyone has gone. I’m also interested to see how Shabnam will take his parents having been imprisoned and killed in Chester’s care, but that’s a story for another season.
Gao eventually finds Lin and Naya, with Lin at the crux of exhaustion. Gao steps in, without her usual dominating dialogue, only a sinister gleam in her eye as she snatches Naya away from Lin. Yet, she doesn’t kill the child, rather chooses to take her back to the tower that Gao herself was forced to train and be raised in as a child. It’s sheer torture for Lin, knowing that this process will effectively kill the person his daughter once was and train her in life-threatening circumstances to be more like Gao.
Continued below5. Maria is a boss bitch
Sure, there are other moments I could’ve highlighted in the last moment of the season finale. Lex getting shot in final sequence is viable, and Saya choosing to alienate herself from the group, at last, is another contender. But few have had as rough a season as Maria has, and it’s cathartic to see her reach out and grasp agency for herself in the waning minutes of this episode. She has a brief talk with Saya after their fight, which illuminates the toxic nature of her relationship with Marcus, and moves to confront the boy she thought she loved.
Marcus is wandering the manor, which is something of an ethereal setting with the destruction and dead bodies, and is typically set to The Smiths (admittedly, one of their better songs). Maria finds him, to which he immediately jumps on the defensive and says he never asked for her love. She blocks him at every turn, however, revealing him for the ultimately self-centered character that he is, and dumping his ass. Marcus still tries to deny her independence, saying “it’s the last thing [he] wanted” and he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, but Maria ignores him, acknowledging that she’s broken but still better than all the lies he’s told her.
That is the season finale of Deadly Class! How did you guys feel about the show as a complete season? Was there anything you’d have liked to be done differently? Or would you also like to talk about how you are a firm Maria supporter? Let loose in the comments, and make sure to look out for the inevitable second season of our beloved school of troubled, horny, teenager assassins.
