Courtney Woods Ellis George

• "Tales out of school" by Thomas Cookson

"Tales out of school" by Thomas Cookson 20/12/20

Courtney, the troublesome schoolgirl who much menaced both Clara and Capaldi's Doctor in Series 8, was privileged to experience two TARDIS journeys, in The Caretaker, and in Kill The Moon. For the purposes of this review, I'm therefore treating her as an official, albeit short-lived companion.

Even before she joins the TARDIS, there's a sense that she performed an important spiritual role in the adventures, at a distance. When Clara's being menaced by Deep Breath's clockwork android, she has flashbacks to being taunted by a classroom of misbehaving kids, and specifically Courtney exposing the idleness of her ultimatums. In her cruel, sociopathic way, Courtney inadvertently taught Clara something about resilience and character sometimes coming more from facing adversity than retreating into soft comforts.

Naturally it was not an endearing introduction to Courtney herself. In some ways, it was also a spoiling of the innocent, nostalgic view we maybe liked to have of Coal Hill School from An Unearthly Child, where we could imagine the children were well-behaved and loved their studies and where even a stranger nerdish misfit like Susan wasn't bullied into wanting to leave and considered it the happiest days of her life.

Now we were seeing it as a real modern London inner-city school populated by today's absolute sociopathic horrors. Of course, a school like this was probably just as full of sociopaths, thugs and wannabe-gangsters back in 1963 too. It's just the TV show allowed us to make-believe otherwise or focus on the ideal of school over the reality.

School has always been an important part of what has always slowly, like cascades of eroding waves, turned bad kids into responsible adults who come to lament the ways that the youth just have no respect anymore.

Which brings us of course to Courtney. A bad egg who is struggling to even make a positive academic effort and presents a plethora of behavioural problems. She is also given a chance to travel in the TARDIS and become exposed to this rather fannish, evangelical New Who idea that travelling with the Doctor makes people become better. And in something of an overreach by Moffat and his clumsy application of identity politics, she is predicted to overcome her projected bad grades and become president of the USA.

In her first encounter with the Doctor and the TARDIS, she is shown as curious and inquisitive and willing to perform a chore with the Doctor simply because she's finally found something to do that doesn't bore her. To a degree, she can't quite fathom the Doctor and yet wants to. As early as The Caretaker, she was talked of hopefully as being possibly the closest thing we might get to a modern (albeit slightly more apolitical) Ace.

Her first journey doesn't go well, and something of her bravado exterior collapses as she throws up. For us, it's a vindicating moment of showing she's not as tough as she thinks or wants others to believe. Likewise for her, it's a plausible enough incentive for her to want to prove herself again to overcompensate.

This, unfortunately brings us to Kill The Moon. And I say unfortunately because, rather than have that implicit motivation for her to rejoin the Doctor to prove she has what it takes, they have to go and spell it out.

We see of course how for Clara, there is a need to stress sensitivity training when dealing with kids like Courtney. In principle, I understand why it was introduced as a bulwark of sorts against the kind of adults who liked to take their frustrations against the youth out on the weaker, meeker ones.

In some ways, it might've been more realistic if we'd seen that two-sided view of Clara. That when she's in the job, she has a higher calling to exercise responsible kid gloves with the children, but in private discussions could've admitted she can't stand the little horror but her job dictates they both have to be nice to her anyway.

The problem is, I just don't believe Courtney's dialogue when she says she was genuiney wounded by the Doctor's words, telling her she wasn't special. In a show like Skins, it might've actually worked, where we would see a youth like her going wild and finally in a violent confrontation that root grievance would finally come out as to why they were doing all this. But it just feels like being told an infodump about an episode of Skins we never got to see. It feels done in a horribly blaze, preachy way to tell us 'this is how you adults hurt us'.

Everything about Courtney has felt uncompromisingly authentic until this. I said at the time I would've loved it, if it turned out to be a conniving pity-ploy by Courtney, but that's not what we get.

Indeed the opening teaser is something of a false promise, revving us up for a story in which maybe it's actually Courtney who will be the trapped, en-webbed victim they might have to condemn to death to save Earth. A dilemma the audience might've potentially cared about.

Admittedly, for the first half Courtney works very well as a companion. She's a believable peril-monkey, she's resourceful in using the disinfectant spray to repel the spiders, and her cheeky moment of uploading her adventure to get Instagram hits without care for causality is nicely in character too.

Okay, here's the real problem, which I was late to finally crystalize in my review of the episode. Once the main dilemma is revealed about the hatching baby creature, Courtney makes for an unbelievable mouthpiece for sparing the creature and caring about the little baby. It feels like one of the worst 'it's from mouth of babes, so it must be true', preachy moments in all of New Who. Worse than in Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, worse than in The Witch's Familiar, and even Orphan bloody 55. It feels like it's selling us the idea of Courtney's maternal, sensitive soul in one sudden, indigestible course and like we're really being told that we have to care because she does.

The more I think about it, the more I think it would be more realistic for Courtney to have the youthful, macho gamer mindset of 'It's an alien, just kill it!' and Clara having to argue against more than one voice here. It would've made the story feel a lot less one-sided. It's what really makes the episode feel like a liberal-minded overreach, that's based on telling the younger viewers what they're supposed to think and feel, and ergo what the more sensible adults are supposed to look shameful for not agreeing with.

It may sound there like I'm being disparaging about gamers and the gaming industry. I feel a need here to say that gaming can be very cathartic. It can also be enlightening. For me, Ocean Software's version of the game Platoon says more about the horrors of war than anything in Season 21. Likewise, Samantha Swift's Archaeology games are educational, fun and really spark the desire to explore ancient civilizational cultures.

But, typically, games are about going for the most quick, practical approach. Something that Doctor Who's often about not doing. Doctor Who at least in theory has a refreshingly different approach to the 'kill anything ugly' mindset of They Live or Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.

New Who was now nearly ten years old, and had succumbed to the 'mouth of babes' idea. It was made by the kind of fans who had grown deeply ashamed of other fans like they were an embarrassing older relative with out-dated views they'd rather keep up in the attic. Therefore the cultish attitude developed that anything the kids said they liked about the show proved us fans wrong.

Sure, to a degree I get it. It does bother me that (with the possible exceptions of The Five Doctors and Remembrance of the Daleks) the franchise became more fan-aimed in the 80's and 90's, and the kids got very much left behind, and very easily needn't have been. But now it seems the makers are cynically creating their own mouthpieces of babes.

Sometimes it seemed Moffat's worst ideas (Let's Kill Hitler, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe) were based entirely on his kids feeding him ideas of what they think would be really cool, rather than making any sense.

Kill The Moon's another egregious example of a story that's supposed to sound like a cool "what if..." premise to the kids, over and above whether the science at all holds up enough for the gravitational consequences of the dilemma to even matter.

It makes sense Courtney is here, as said child viewpoint of the kind of story made for her age demographic. But again, she seems only here to mouthpiece and parrot what the author wants us to think. She's there to preach to us about the value of life and empathy rather than be who Courtney honestly is.

It might even have made some sense were this Courtney's eighth TARDIS journey, and she'd come to somewhat appreciate the moral universe the Doctor was operating in and why his values were important. But coming this soon, it's too much. Frankly, I think nothing killed the episode for fans more than this.

Courtney, I would see as a youth who'd see the situation in the light of game scores and statistics. And that it would just make more sense for her that she would see killing one creature to save millions on Earth as an obvious answer.

I'm not saying her age and delinquency makes it impossible for her to empathize with the alien monster. At aged 13, I rewatched monster B-movies and clearly saw the monster was often misunderstood and persecuted by the small-minded violent responses of man's military.

It might originally have made sense that Courtney herself would feel disenfranchised, and identify with the raging, alienated, misunderstood creature who's struggling to communicate, against military authority figures too closed minded to understand it or her.

But let's not forget Courtney would know that in this future Earth, her own parents and family might still be alive, and killing this creature might be the only way of saving them. Was this really thought through by the showrunner who once penned the line "there's not a child alive who wouldn't tear apart the whole world to save his mummy?"

In my Sea Devils overview, I described how a character's response to a perceived threatening monster can change instantly just by hearing them scream in pain, thus commanding their empathy. Similarly, maybe it would've made more sense if Courtney was all gung-ho about killing the creature, until it actually happens. If the moment Courtney hears it screaming in agony as the first bombs hit it, suddenly she finds herself begging for them to stop, with tears in her eyes. That could've been a character-changing moment for her. There was a lot in the episode that suggested the writing was going to be that smart, and much of the feeling fans have of being cheated by the final product comes from that.

In hindsight, it feels like Courtney's time in the TARDIS ended too prematurely. I'd be tempted to say it happened just when we were beginning to like her, but unfortunately it feels instead like it happened just when the writers panicked about the fact she was leaving soon and were thus quickly trying to force us to like her.

It feels like we knew what Courtney was before she became that preachy mouthpiece and were denied the chance to see who she would naturally have developed into and what could've become of her, if the writing had stayed good.

We'd rarely had a mischievous rascal as a companion before, and for a brief time it looked like that might genuinely get interesting.