Ace (Doctor Who) - Character History

Character History

Ace is a 16-year-old who first appears in the 1987 serial Dragonfire, where she is working as a waitress in the frozen food retail complex of Iceworld on the planet Svartos. 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 A-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 suffered traumatic events in her childhood, including a bad relationship with her mother Audrey (the daughter of merchant seaman Frank William Dudman and his wife Kathleen, who served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II) 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 covered up her own fears and insecurities with a streetwise, tough exterior. Her weapon of choice, disapproved of by the Doctor (who nonetheless found it useful on occasion), was a powerful explosive she called "Nitro-9", which she mixed up in canisters and carried 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 Seventh Doctor's increasing tendency to manipulate events and people (including her), even with what appears to be the best of intentions, results 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 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, coming to terms with them and, ironically, creating them in the latter case thanks to the paradoxes of time travel. 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.

Originally in The Curse of Fenric writer Ian Briggs planned to reveal in Part One that Ace was no longer a virgin, however Producer John Nathan-Turner forced Briggs to cut this. Instead, at one point in the story, Ace offers to distract a guard so that the Doctor can free a prisoner. When the Doctor asks how she plans to divert the guard's attention she replies that she is "not a little girl." She proceeds to lead the guard away from his post by intriguing him with a combination of slightly suggestive innuendo towards the guard and cryptic musings about the Doctor's machinations. The scene suggests that she is aware of both her developing sexuality and the Doctor's manipulative tendencies. Briggs, who had created the character of Ace, had stated in Ace's character outline for Dragonfire that she had slept with Sabalom Glitz on Iceworld.

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 Prydonian 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 made as to what had happened to Ace.

However, in the The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor, Sarah Jane reveals to her companions that she has done research on some of the Doctor's companions. She mentions "that Dorothy something — she runs that charity, 'A Charitable Earth' ("ACE"). She's raised billions." In the same episode, the Eleventh Doctor reveals that his Tenth incarnation looked in on each of his former companions as he prepared for regeneration at the end of "The End of Time".