In King’s Dominion, the cliques are essentially pint-sized variations on real-world gangs, divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. Cue the Mean Girls–esque cafeteria sequence in which a fellow student helpfully teaches Marcus about the various cliques that run around the school. Most of all, there’s the homework in his AP Black Arts class: find somebody who deserves to die and kill them.īut before Marcus can get his hands bloody, Deadly Class has a lot more exposition-laden world-building to get out of the way. There’s a montage of Marcus trying to get his bearings in overwhelming classes like Hand-to-Hand Combat and Poison Lab (taught by none other than Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins). There’s the hard-assed teacher doing his best to intimidate the class. Much of the Deadly Class pilot doubles as a kind of orientation for the audience, acclimating us to the show’s heightened reality via a series of familiar new-kid-in-school tropes. The only difference? In this place, the dagger in your back is real.” As Marcus says: “It doesn’t matter where you’re from. And while the sheer lethality of the experience makes King’s Dominion unique, Deadly Class is also a sly commentary on how every high school experience feels both high-stakes and miserable. But to get there, he’ll need to survive four years at King’s Dominion - a school packed with other budding sociopaths. By graduation day, he’ll be able to change the world by slaughtering anyone he wants. At King’s Dominion, he promises, Marcus will learn the skills that will make him a uniquely effective killer. According to Master Lin, Marcus is special because he has the tendencies and temperament of a ruthless killer. That he’s meant for something greater.īut Deadly Class takes that common fantasy and gives it a nasty twist. There’s a kind of Harry Potter or X-Men-esque wish fulfillment built into Deadly Class: A seemingly ordinary kid gets plucked from an unusually tragic life and told that he’s different. So it’s at a particularly desperate moment in his life that Marcus meets Master Lin, a mysterious man with a tantalizing offer: A spot at King’s Dominion - a secret, elite academy for uniquely gifted teenagers, which will “harness the fire inside” of him. Now, the year is 1987 he’s living on the street, dodging cops, and surviving on discarded fast food he finds in garbage cans. He was sent to an abusive boys’ home, finally escaping after a fire that led to a number of fatalities. Both of his parents were killed in a horrific freak accident.
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