Ace (Doctor Who)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Contents

[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 when she was 13. Following the latter event, needing to lash out, she burnt down a local abandoned Victorian house named Gabriel Chase after sensing an evil aura there and was put on probation. 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. However, the Doctor becomes more mysterious, single-minded and calculating after taking her on, and though he acts with her best intentions at heart, his higher motives and morality, as well as his strong tendency to manipulate events and people, including Ace, result in several difficult moments in their relationship.

Under the Doctor's tutelage, Ace fights the Daleks in 1963 (Remembrance of the Daleks) and the Cybermen in 1988 (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, enabling parts of her own timeline, including her birth, in the process. 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, in which Ace is returned by the Doctor to Perivale but ultimately chooses to leave again with him. 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 and the Virgin New Adventures. The novelisation contains an epilogue not included in the televised serial, in which the Doctor visits an older Ace in 1887 Paris.

If the series had continued, 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, in which this would happen, was never made. 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 after rejoining The Doctor in Deceit.
Ace after rejoining The Doctor in Deceit.

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.

Ace was also featured in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip sporadically, one of the few television companions to appear in it.

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. She shows up in later books, notably Head Games, Happy Endings, and Lungbarrow.

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

Big Finish Productions
BBCi webcast

[edit] Novels

Virgin New Adventures
Past Doctor Adventures
Telos Doctor Who novellas

[edit] Short stories

[edit] External links

The TARDIS Index File has information related to:
v • d • e
Companions of the Seventh Doctor
Seasons ← Season 24 Season 25 Season 26
Serials 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159
Companions ← Mel (NA →)
Ace (NA →)
v • d • e
Companions of the Seventh Doctor (New Adventures)
Novels 1 - 8 9 10 - 12 13 - 35 36 - 38 39 - 42 43 44 - 48 49 50 51 - 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
Companions ← Ace Ace Ace Ace Ace Ace
Bernice Bernice Bernice Bernice
(←) Mel Jason Jason Jason Jason
Roz
Chris