I thought about making this a Character Highlight post, since none of the characters on Class really connect with me the way that plenty on new and classic Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures have. But then, I figured Quill is my favorite on Class, so why not go for the Favorite Characters write-up instead? Some Quill-related spoilers.
At first blush, Andrea Quill is a teacher at Coal Hill School, but it’s pretty much immediately clear that this isn’t exactly the case. There’s her total contempt for her students for one thing, as well as her complete disinterest in teaching and the way she only barely bothers to pretend she’s a human. In actual fact, she’s an alien, the last of the Quill race. She’s in hiding in London with Charlie, who’s similarly the last of the Rhodians. This commonality doesn’t bring them together, however. Quite the contrary – both their races were lost in a war in which the Quill rebelled against the Rhodians, and Charlie, the surviving Rhodian prince, keeps Quill with him as a prisoner and a forced bodyguard. (Note: some of the language may wind up getting confusing, since this character, although she does have an alien name, goes by Quill on the show, the same name as her species. For clarity’s sake, “Quill” refers to the character and “the Quill” refers to the race.)
Once a rebel warrior, Quill is now Charlie’s slave. She’s been subjugated with an arn, a mind parasite the Rhoadians used to control prisoners among the Quill. With the arn in her head, Quill is bound to Charlie and made to serve him. Under his orders, she can only fight when his life is in danger and she can’t use weapons at all (maybe not the best limitation to place on a bodyguard, but when that bodyguard happens to be your enslaved sworn enemy, precautions are probably a good idea.)
Naturally, this places Quill in a loathsome situation. Obviously, she can’t attack Charlie however much she wants to, she can only use her warrior skills at the behest of her captor, and if this life becomes truly unbearable for her, she wouldn’t even be able to kill herself, since she can only harm people/creatures that are trying to kill Charlie (which, again, she herself is physically unable to do.) For a proud warrior, it’s humiliating to be psychically muzzled in this way, and for someone burning with a desire to avenge her people, it’s rage-inducing to be forced into servitude under the sole survivor of the race who wiped them out. It’s an injustice and indignity she doesn’t take lightly.
On a day-to-day level, this manifests itself in general seething and contempt, especially once Charlie starts getting together with the other teen characters to protect the school from Coal Hill’s alien Hellmouth (just go with it.) In addition to bearing a murderous hatred for Charlie, she thinks the humans are utterly beneath her, a fact she reminds them of whenever she gets the opportunity. More particularly, though, Quill is a schemer. She’s always on the lookout for technicalities she can exploit to work around the constraints of the arn – can’t use a weapon to fight this alien creature? okay, she’ll just steal a bus and ram it – and her constant quest is to figure out how to free herself. If there’s a way for her to recover who she once was, she’s determined to find it.
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