Still waiting for this series to fully hit its stride but … patience, patience, and this episode has introduced some interesting possibilities.
As alien monsters go, the Shadow Kin don’t really grab me. So far they seem as two-dimensional as, well, shadows. And what is their motivation? They feel that they have been born into the wrong universe so want to slaughter everyone else in it? In contrast, the carnivorous petals have at least made their appearance in a nicely insidious and sinister way, but I have a horrible suspicion that it will lead to yet more gore next Saturday. I found it scarcely credible, though, that Matteusz was apparently the only one (other than Dorothea Ames) to notice anything unusual. Are city dwellers really so oblivious to the natural world that they would be unaware there was something odd about pink blossom accumulating in drifts, like cherry blossom in spring but out of season, and when there wasn’t a blossoming tree in sight, cherry or otherwise? One thing which might be significant is that, if the solitary blossom we saw floating on the wind at the beginning of the episode was the first to enter the world, then April was the first one to be bitten. Ms Ames said that they are not in any way sentient, so have they floated into the world by chance, or are they an instrument of something else?
@juniperfish
the new Head teacher and her beguiling rapport with Miss Quill. She definitely works for a dodgy branch of UNIT, right?
To me the Governors don’t have the right ‘feel’ for UNIT, dodgy or otherwise, and there are other reasons to rule this out (see below), but they could just possibly be from a dubious offshoot of Torchwood – or, as @tardigrade suggests, from an alien outfit with its own agenda. It would make sense, though, for an organisation dedicated to monitoring and countering alien incursions and aware that Coal Hill was a weak point in the fabric of space-time to take steps to have the school converted into an Academy administered by themselves. I don’t know if anyone else paused on Ms Ames’ folder on Charlie when she opened it, but it contained all the details we know so far about him and Miss Quill , and also confirmed the fact that they are of different species who had been at war for a long time. At the bottom of the visible part of the page was a reference to the intervention of the Doctor, but in terms which suggested that the compilers of the file were not closely connected to him – in which case, definitely not UNIT.
The revelation that the Cabinet of Souls might be used as an instrument of genocide is intriguing, but I have a suspicion that it might be more sinister than that. Suppose that Charlie was lying when he said the idea of the souls being able to take over the bodies of other beings was just a children’s’ story. It was implied that the bodies taken over might not necessarily be of the same species, in which case Charlie could turn out in the end to have ideas above and beyond his own survival and that of Miss Quill and to constitute a threat to Earth in his own right.
As for the teenage and alien sex; I saw April and Ram jumping into bed so precipitately as not so much Ram on the rebound, more an instinctive reaction to their consciousness of having survived danger and of still being under threat. It was a phenomenon noted during the second World War. Corakinus in his turn was aroused because of the link with April and his underling obliged, because that is what obsequious underlings do. Nevertheless 🙄
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