On heroes and monsters

Actors make unlikely heroes. We imbue them with the characteristics of the roles in which we love them best. Sometimes when we find out that they're not really like that, there can be a sense of loss, even of betrayal.
Nicholas Courtney passed away last night, according to several sources. To me, he was always the Brigadier. To me, he fought monsters, and he always won. Not always the way the Doctor would have liked him to win, but the way he knew best. To me, he saved the world.

But in real life, Nicholas Courtney also fought a monster, the monster that everyone who encounters it has to fight for him- or herself, a many-headed beast that can never be ultimately defeated, only fought to a standstill: depression. It attacks without mercy, and its method is to persuade us that the world would be better without us, and that is the hardest of all battles to fight. No matter how loved we are told we are, no matter how proud we may be of the things we've done, it's hardest of all to believe that when we are finally gone, there will not be, somewhere, a secret sigh of relief as the world shrugs off a useless burden.

Nicholas Courtney won that battle, I don't know how many times. He saved the world, for as long as he could, from being a world without him. I'm proud to call him a hero, and sad that I will never see or hear him again except in recordings. I'm sad that there will (probably) be no more Scarifyers, in which he played Inspector Lionheart with courage and a sly wit that the world will miss. I'm even sad that he will now never appear in nuWho itself, though he did turn up in the Sarah Jane Adventures, and I'll have to try and see that episode at some point.

And I will continue to fight, for as long as I can, to his memory and in his honour, to save the world from being a world without me.

(Sorry about that.)