2 out of 5

Created by: Tom Rob Smith

Wow, what even is this series? It’s well intentioned, but rather woefully executed, and structured in a way that suggests it was intended for a series, but then dropped into mini-series status at some point; whether or not that’s the case, I’m setting the majority of this review from the perspective of the first 7 of 8 episodes, as the eighth is pretty disruptive, and doubles and triples down on all the weakest parts of the writing and concept.

We’ve always had “technology will take over the world!” fears, stemming back however many decades in fiction – if not longer, depending on how flexible your definition of technology is. Once we shifted to home-accessible networked bleeps and bloops, though, buzzwords started to become the bogeymen: “the net” of the mid-90s was the mysterious thing, then video-streaming was the danger in the 00s, then “dark web” became pretty spooky in the 2010s, then social media (and still the dark web, because, y’know, it’s dark) in the 20teens 2020s… Class of ’09 is that breed of fear-mongering, buzz-termed “sci-fi,” pretty much of the 2020 crowd, but in recent years we’ve had trademarked AI nonsense doing the rounds, so it’s got that as well. Also, remember Person of Interest? It’s kind of that as well. And then it’s also, when it wants to be, a thinkpiece about the inherent discrimination of any human run organization, with FBI guy Tayo (Brian Tyree Henry) using a newly developed crime-predictive technology developed by fellow special agent Hour (Sepideh Moafi) to try to wipe the agency’s slate clean of bias – the system notably treats everyone as an equal suspect.

Reusing the Terminator bit is fine; that’s a constant source for fiction. And attaching that to a social agenda is definitely incredibly interesting, this being the “well intentioned” aspect of the script. But I also mentioned that the show only does this when it wants to, and that’s the main problem with Class of ’09’s writing: there doesn’t seem to be any real story, or inherent reason for it to exist. It’s just a collection of ideas, given mystery box flair with a completely pointless past / present / future structure; if the main plot thread is about the corruptive force of humans on even “impartial” technology, that could’ve been told with choice flashbacks, and not centering the show around using makeup and wigs to age Henry, Kate Mara, and others up and down – from the past when they joined the FBI, to the present when the central technology is introduced, and to the future, when that technology goes all Minority Report on the world. All this does is add unnecessary time jumps to the narrative, and often with the most pithy of purposes, moreso forced justification than effective reveals of motivations or occurrences. And more than once, cliffhangers for characters are used in the past and present when we know they’re okay in the future; part of the list of ways in which the series’ creators just kind of fail to understand how to pace / structure things for TV.

Mara is quite excellent in the series; Henry, unfortunately, may be miscast, or was improperly motivated. His character has a burdensome position of having to be something of a villain – a proponent of the technology, when others are experiencing its flaws – while also the person putting a voice to the show’s racial commentary, and is also involved in several shootout scuffles. None of these things are necessarily in opposition to one another, but the way the show is written, his character does more about-face personality turns than anyone else, and, much like the patchwork nature of the story, these different aspects of his personality only loosely fit together – more conceptually than in practice. That the writers also weren’t risk-taking enough to trawl through comments on race or tech at more than an easily digestible, mass audience level means the dialogue of these super intelligent and capable FBI agents often sounds like news headlines. Mara uses a lot of body language to help mask this; Henry, a more stoic actor, isn’t necessarily suited to that, and so a lot of delivery falls flat.

Still, the show limps along with some appealing – if short-lived – peaks. While some plot threads from the first few episodes prove mostly pointless (you’re extracting one detail that’s important from amongst many ultimately unnecessary ones), the slowroll pacing of those eps gives the series gravitas, and the past / present / future setup (again, before you realize how shallow it is) provides some good “what happened in between?” shocks. It’s a few episodes in before the race stuff becomes more prominent, which is another asterisk, as it feels not organic to how the story was being told, but… it’s a very compelling angle that makes you think we’ll maybe be taking a different focus from hereon out. We won’t, not consistently, but, y’know, it felt good for a beat. This progression of minor victories was enough to keep me interested to see how things could wrap up, which accounts for your two stars for seven episodes.

The last episode… well. There’s probably some past / present / future joke about avoiding this episode, but I also can’t say I was necessarily surprised at it being mostly a cop out, just disappointed.