Okay, so all the Class kids get seriously put through the wringer over the course of eight short episodes, but for whatever reason, Ram is the first one who always comes to my mind when I think of raw deals on this show. (Really, though – there are no wonders of the universe for these teens, only horrors.) I don’t know if he’s my favorite of the younger characters, but I do find him the most interesting of the group (Ram-related spoilers.)
In the Breakfast Club that is the unlikely group of teens thrust together to defend Coal Hill from aliens, Ram is the archetypal jock jerk. He’s a school football (soccer) star, a popular kid who definitely considers himself above the others – were it not for the traumatizing events of prom night binding them together, he’d never associate with Charlie, April, Tanya, or Matteusz. In the pilot, we see him bullying Charlie, and while he’s friendly-ish with Tanya in a study-buddy capacity, it’s something he wants kept on the down low.
But yeah, then along comes that whole thing about aliens invading the prom. Right off the bat, Ram takes some severe hits. His girlfriend is killed by one of the Shadow Kin, and when Ram tries to fight back, he gets his leg sliced off (the Doctor gives him a fancy alien prosthetic before peacing out and leaving the five teenagers to deal with all this, but it’s not an immediate cure-all and messes with his skill on the field.)
Of the five, Ram is the most resistant to heeding the Doctor’s instruction to band together and defend the school against future threats. While it’s true that he has the least in common with the others, who are mainly outcasts and misfits, he doesn’t just avoid them out of concern for his social status. Rather, Ram is deeply traumatized by all that’s happened to them already and isn’t prepared in any way to deal with it. So, instead of trying to work through his PTSD and grief with his fellow classmates who also experienced the attack, he acts as though he can put it all behind him. Unfortunately for Ram, ignoring it won’t make the rift in the school go away, and awful things keep happening.
When he does come, however reluctantly, into the fold, Ram proves a valuable member of the team. Besides Quill, he’s probably the group’s most capable fighter, and even if his loyalty is a bit hard-earned, he doesn’t throw it away easily. Dude climbs through a tear in space-time to follow April to the Shadow Kin’s world and bring her home, that’s pretty ride-or-die for someone who didn’t want anything to do with her just a few episodes earlier.
Maybe what really makes me feel for Ram is that we’re conditioned to expect the real-world characters who get caught up in wild genre goings-on to be outsiders and loners, people who’ve never fit in who now suddenly find themselves in a position to be heroes. By contrast, Ram has everything going for him at the start of the series, and by the end of the pilot, most of that has been ripped away. His fall is further than most of the other characters because they’ve already been dealing with assorted hardships, whereas he’s used to life going his way. When instead the opposite proves to be true, it does so very decisively and horrifically, and he has no tools to deal with it. I think that’s why I’m quickest to say, “Man, poor Ram,” even though all the kids suffer multiple major traumas.
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