Ace (Doctor Who)
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| Doctor Who character | |
|---|---|
 Dorothy ("Ace") |
|
| Ace | |
| Affiliated with | Seventh Doctor |
| Race | Human |
| Home planet | Earth |
| Home era | 20th century |
| First appearance | Dragonfire |
| Last appearance | Survival |
| Portrayed by | Sophie Aldred |
Ace (given name Dorothy) is a fictional character played by Sophie Aldred in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A 20th-century Earth teenager from the London suburb of Perivale, she is a companion of the Seventh Doctor and a regular in the programme from 1987 to 1989.
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[edit] Character history
Ace first appears in the 1987 serial Dragonfire, where she is working as a waitress on the planet Iceworld. She had been a troubled teen on Earth, having been expelled from school for blowing up the art room as a "creative statement". Gifted in chemistry (despite failing it for her O-levels), she was in her room experimenting with the extraction of nitroglycerin from gelignite when a time storm swept her up and transported her to Iceworld, and far in her future. There, she meets the Doctor and his companion Mel. When Mel leaves the Doctor at the conclusion of the serial, he offers to take Ace with him in the TARDIS, and she happily accepts.
Ace has suffered traumatic events in her childhood, including a bad relationship with her mother and the racist firebombing of her friend Manisha's flat. Consequently, Ace covers up her own fears and insecurities with a streetwise, tough exterior. Her weapon of choice, disapproved of by the Doctor (who nonetheless finds it useful on occasion), is a powerful explosive she called "Nitro-9", which she mixes up in canisters and carries around in her backpack.
Affectionately giving the Doctor the nickname of "Professor", she is convinced that the Doctor needs her to watch his back, and protects him with a fierce loyalty. In turn, the Doctor seems to take a special interest in Ace's education, taking her across the universe and often prompting her to figure out explanations for herself rather than giving her all the answers.
Under the Doctor's tutelage, Ace fights the Daleks in 1963 (Remembrance of the Daleks) and the Cybermen in the present day (Silver Nemesis), encounters the all-powerful Gods of Ragnarok in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the sadistic torturer called the Kandy Man in The Happiness Patrol, and many other dangers. She also faces the ghosts of her own past in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Over time, she begins to mature into a confident young woman, and her brash exterior ceases to be a front.
What the Doctor is aware of, but Ace is not, is that her arrival on Iceworld was no accident but part of a larger scheme conceived by Fenric, an evil that had existed since the beginning of the universe, a plan that stretches across the centuries. Ace is a "Wolf of Fenric", one of many descendants of a Viking tainted with Fenric's genetic instructions to help free it from its ancient prison, and a pawn in the complex game between it and the Doctor. After Fenric is defeated, Ace continues to journey with the Doctor.
The circumstances of Ace's parting of ways with the Doctor are not known, as the series went on hiatus in 1989 with the end of the very next serial, Survival. A painting seen in the extended version of the serial Silver Nemesis suggests that at some point in her personal future Ace will end up in 18th or 19th Century France. This idea is further explored in the novelisation of The Curse of Fenric (which contains an epilogue not included in the televised serial in which the Doctor visits an older Ace in 1887 Paris) and the Virgin New Adventures.
The production team's intent was to have Ace eventually enter the Prydon Academy on the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey and train to be a Time Lord. The story, Ice Time by Marc Platt, was never made as the series ceased production. When the Seventh Doctor is next seen in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, he is travelling alone, with no reference to what had happened to him or Ace in the interim.
[edit] Other appearances
Ace and the Seventh Doctor appeared twice more on television after Doctor Who was cancelled. The first was in 1990, in a special episode of the BBC2 educational programme Search Out Science. In this episode, the Doctor acts as a quiz show host, asking questions about astronomy; Ace, K-9 and "Cedric, from the planet Glurk" are the contestants. The last appearance of Ace on British television was in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. Neither of these appearances is generally considered canonical.
The character is extensively developed in the New Adventures, a BBC-licensed series of novels from Virgin Books continuing on from Survival. Ace becomes more and more frustrated with the Doctor's manipulations, eventually leaving his company in Love and War by Paul Cornell. She joins Spacefleet and fights the Daleks for three years, later rejoining the Doctor and his new companion Bernice Summerfield in Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans, older and more hardened. This development in the character was the result of a deliberate decision by Darvill-Evans as the editor of the line at Virgin to change Ace and her role in the ongoing narrative. It is first revealed in Blood Heat by John Mortimore that Manisha had died in the firebombing of her flat.
Ace's relationship with the Doctor remains strained for some time, but by No Future (also by Cornell) they have resolved their differences. In Set Piece by Kate Orman, Ace leaves the Doctor again to become Time's Vigilante, using a short-range time hopper mounted on a motorcycle to patrol a particular segment of time; in effect doing what the Doctor does, but on a smaller scale.
Other spin-off media give contradictory versions of Ace's eventual fate. The comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine has Ace being killed off just prior to the events of the 1996 television movie (Ground Zero, DWM #238-#242). In the webcast audio play Death Comes to Time, Ace inherits the mantle of the Time Lords when they become extinct. These contradictory fates were all in stories licensed by or, in the last case, made by a part of the BBC (BBCi), and there is fan debate as to which, if any, should be considered canonical. Ace's fate has yet to be referred to in the new Doctor Who television series of 2005, making her one of the few companions whose departure from the TARDIS has yet to be chronicled on television.
Ace's first name is Dorothy. Production notes suggest that it was intended that her last name would be Gale, an allusion to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, given the fact that she was transported to Iceworld via a time storm. The novels (and, following their lead, Big Finish audio plays), however, have given Ace the last name of McShane. A sequence of BBC Books' Past Doctor Adventures set after Survival and written by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry used the "Dorothy Gale" name, as the authors were unaware of the name used in the New Adventures. This was eventually resolved to some exent when the novel Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski gave her full name as Dorothy Gale McShane, a version later taken up by the audios.
Sophie Aldred has voiced Ace for several audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, alongside Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and, in some stories, Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield or Philip Olivier as Hex. In one of these stories, The Rapture, Ace discovers that she has a brother named Liam, of whom she had no previous knowledge. As the more experienced traveller, Ace has developed a slightly flirtatious mentor-teacher relationship with Hex. How the audio plays tie in with the other media is not clear, and the continuity of the various lines may not match up with each other.
In 1996, Virgin's Doctor Who Books imprint published a hardback by Sophie Aldred and Mike Tucker entitled Ace!: The Inside Story of the End of an Era (ISBN 1-85227-574-X). This book gives details of each serial featuring the character Ace, complete with many photographs and concept art. It also contains a list of other spin-offs in which the character of Ace appears and some of the conventions which Sophie Aldred attended, along with some information about the planned Season 27, including Ace's departure.
In 1998, BBV produced a number of audio adventures starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as "The Professor" and "Ace". The plays were not licensed by the BBC, but the duo were clearly intended to be the same characters, to the extent that the BBC intervened, causing BBV to change the character names to "The Dominie" and "Alice".
The Reeltime Pictures video Mindgame features Sophie Aldred as "the Human", imprisoned with a Sontaran and a Draconian. From dialogue, it is possible this character is Ace during the years she spent as a mercenary in the New Adventures.
[edit] List of appearances
[edit] Television
- Season 24
- Season 25
- Season 26
- 30th anniversary special
[edit] Audio dramas
- The Fearmonger
- The Genocide Machine
- The Shadow of the Scourge
- Dust Breeding
- Colditz
- The Rapture
- The Dark Flame
- The Harvest
- Dreamtime (Doctor Who audio)
- LIVE 34
- Night Thoughts
- The Veiled Leopard
- The Settling
- No Man's Land
- BBCi webcast
[edit] Novels
- Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel
- Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks
- Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson
- Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell
- Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible by Marc Platt
- Cat's Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel
- Cat's Cradle: Witchmark by Andrew Hunt
- Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
- Love and War by Paul Cornell
- Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans
- Lucifer Rising by Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane
- White Darkness by David A. McIntee
- Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis
- Birthright by Nigel Robinson
- Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore
- The Dimension Riders by Daniel Blythe
- The Left-Handed Hummingbird by Kate Orman
- Conundrum by Steve Lyons
- No Future by Paul Cornell
- Tragedy Day by Gareth Roberts
- Legacy by Gary Russell
- Theatre of War by Justin Richards
- All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane
- Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks
- Strange England by Simon Messingham
- First Frontier by David A. McIntee
- St Anthony's Fire by Mark Gatiss
- Falls the Shadow by Daniel O'Mahony
- Parasite by Jim Mortimore
- Warlock by Andrew Cartmel
- Set Piece by Kate Orman
- Head Games by Steve Lyons
- Happy Endings by Paul Cornell
- The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones
- Lungbarrow by Marc Platt
- Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry
- The Hollow Men by Martin Day and Keith Topping
- Matrix by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry
- Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry
- Prime Time by Mike Tucker
- Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans
- Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski
- Heritage by Dale Smith
- Loving the Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry
- The Algebra of Ice by Lloyd Rose
- Atom Bomb Blues by Andrew Cartmel
[edit] Short stories
- "Question Mark Pyjamas", by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (Decalog 2: Lost Property)
- "Stop the Pigeon", by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (Short Trips)
- "uPVC", by Paul Farnsworth (More Short Trips)
- "Monsters", by Tara Samms (Short Trips and Sidesteps)
- "Storm in a Tikka", by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (Short Trips and Sidesteps)
- "Virgin Lands", by Sarah Groenewegen (Short Trips: Zodiac)
- "Hymn of the City", by Sarah Groenewegen (Short Trips: The Muses)
- "Cold War", by Rebecca Levene (Short Trips: Steel Skies)
- "Ante Bellum", by Stephen Hatcher (Short Trips: Past Tense)
- "Echo", by Lance Parkin (Short Trips: Life Science)
- "A Rose By Any Other Name", by Jim Mortimore (Short Trips: Life Science)
- "The Ghost's Story", by Trevor Baxendale (Short Trips: Repercussions)
- "Last Rites", by Marc Platt (Short Trips: Monsters)
- "These Things Take Time", by Samantha Baker (Short Trips: Monsters)
- "Categorical Imperative", by Simon Guerrier (Short Trips: Monsters)
- "A Yuletide Tail: Part One", by Dave Stone (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
- "A Yuletide Tail: Part Two", by Dave Stone (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
- "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast", by Dan Abnett (Short Trips: A Day in the Life)
- "The Heroine, The Hero and the Meglomaniac", by Ian Mond, (Short Trips: A Day in the Life)
- "Presence", by Peter Angelhides (Short Trips: The History of Christmas)
- "The Anchorite's Echo", by Scott Andrews (Short Trips: The History of Christmas)
| Companions of the Seventh Doctor | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season 24 | Season 25 | Season 26 | Movie | |||||||||
| 148 | 149 | 150 | 151 | 152 | 153 | 154 | 155 | 156 | 157 | 158 | 159 | Movie |
| ←Melanie | ||||||||||||
| Ace | ||||||||||||
