OOC: Hipster!Ace wore a fez before it was cool; sod your bandwagons.
In fine Fandom tradition, this was liberally cribbed from my app, yes. Largely because the contortions I put my brain through trying to sum up almost 50 years of Doctor Who canon and pseudo-canon might cause one of those aneurysms that aren't the funny kind if I tried to do it again in different words.
Doctor Who In 50,000 Words Or Less
Attempt #1:
Once upon a time, the BBC made the horrible faux pas of premiering a new science fiction show the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which doomed it to only 27 seasons, a failed spin-off pilot, three movies, three or four lines of novels and audio adventures whose canon frequently conflicts with both the show and each other, a comic book series, a web-series, two RPGs, a continuation of the tv series that picks up 20 years later and is currently filming its 7th season, and three non-failed TV spin-offs in Torchwood, the Sarah-Jane Adventures, and the Australian-produced K-9. Let’s talk about all of those, shall we?
...Okay, let’s not.
Attempt #2:
Twice upon a time, there was a grumpy old man called the Doctor who lived in a London scrapyard with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman. Except:
--- He didn’t really live in the scrapyard (he lived in a semi-sentient time-space ship parked in the scrapyard and disguised as a police telephone box)
--- He wasn’t really all that old (700-ish, but that’s not even middle-aged for a member of his species)
--- Doctor is mostly what he called himself since he never gave anyone his real name
--- His granddaughter’s name wasn’t really Foreman (they just took that off the scrapyard sign),
--- “Man” is a bit debatable (he’s not human, and though he’s always appeared male, later canon indicates via references to other members of his race that he doesn’t have to remain the same gender)
--- Let’s not get started on fandom’s conflicting opinions about whether Susan was even really his granddaughter, since the show says so but some of the books say Time Lords don’t reproduce that way, while others say...
Um, shall we give that another go?
Attempt #3:
Thrice upon a time, there was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who disliked his people’s policy of non-intervention in the cultures and history of other worlds and found most of his contemporaries to be stuffy and boring.
So he stole (or, if you take her side of the story, was stolen by) a semi-sentient space-time ship and took off to bounce around the universe with his granddaughter. Since his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space, which is technobabble for “bigger on the inside than the outside”) was in for repairs when she stole him, there was a whole lot of bouncing, sometimes where he intended to go, and sometimes not. Sometimes he got stuck in London scrapyards, and sometimes when he finally got things working again, he accidentally kidnapped people (starting with his granddaughter’s history and science teachers) and yanked them along for the ride.
Eventually his granddaughter left to get married -- mostly because he locked her out of the TARDIS and forced her to stay behind -- but the Doctor went on bouncing through space and time (grumpily; that part wasn’t debatable), picking up new traveling companions, meeting new alien races and pissing them off, until he ended up getting himself dead.
Oh, except wait, he didn’t, because surprise! Time Lords, in addition to having two hearts and a handful of vague, plot-dependent psychic abilities, can regenerate all their cells into a completely new actor body, when physical trauma happens to them that would kill most other people. The body changes, the memories remain (if sometimes a bit shaken up depending on the trauma), and the personality... shifts. He’s still the same person, but each different incarnation tends to have a slightly different outlook on life and way of interacting with people. Otherwise known as “he got a lot less grumpy when he ditched the long white hair.”
Since that first regeneration, he’s gone through 10 more bodies (if you don’t count the movies with the pink Daleks which are super-non-canon, or the alternate 9th Doctor from the webseries, or the weird glowing mummy-dude who showed up to warn 4 that he was shortly going to turn into 5, or the distillation of all his evil created sometime between 12 and 13 who may never really happen because wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey, or the alternate dimension where some future version of him is apparently going to be Merlin which would be awesome for AU Weekend if I were actually playing the Doctor but I'm not, so... I’ll stop now.)
He’s also gone through around 50 more traveling companions. (And a few non-traveling ones, during a brief period when he was stranded on Earth in the late 60's.) Many (though not all) of those companions were from Earth, because the Doctor has some weird fetish admiration for our tiny, backwater planet, and also because it’s hard to get non-human actors for a BBC salary and a job description of “bounce around the universe saying what’s-that-Doctor a lot and pretending these rubber monsters look real.”
40 years later and with slightly better special effects now, the Doctor and his companions are still bouncing. Just a bit less bouncily these days, because somewhere in the no-man’s-time between the series that ended in 1989 and the one that started in 2005, there was a horrible war between the Time Lords and a genocidal, power-hungry race called the Daleks. (Not the pink ones. Probably.) Both Gallifrey and most of the Daleks were destroyed -- by the Doctor -- leaving him as the last of the Emo Time Lords. Except for that one there and maybe her and him and that other one who may or may not have survived because of reasons.
Sigh. Or we could just go with this. Which rightly points out that the current producer's attitude to the concept of "canon" in a show about an almost-immortal time-traveler who's repeatedly established in text that history can be changed is "....Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha."
Ace: Just Call Me The Latest One, And I Can Get My Own Blanket
Lancelot Ancelyn: My lord Merlin.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Merlin?
Lancelot Ancelyn: Oh, he has many names.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: He has many faces. And he has many companions. This must be the latest one.
Brigadier Winifred Bambera, Actually In Charge: We've checked the perimeter. Doctor Warmsly is staying with the vehicles.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Oh, thank you, Bambera. Oh, see if you can get a blanket for this young lady, will you?
Brigadier Winifred Bambera, Actually In Charge (sarcastically): Yes, sir. Perhaps I should make some tea, too.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: *nods approvingly* Well, are you all right, Miss?
Ace, Former King of the Britons For Five Minutes, Soaking Wet From Having Pulled Excalibur From The Stone When The Stone Was, You Know, Underwater (even more sarcastically): Just call me the latest one, and I can get my own blanket.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Oh dear. Women. Not really my field.
The Doctor: Don't worry, Brigadier. People will be shooting at you soon.
Dorothy Gale McShane, aka Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, has the dubious distinction of having been the current television companion when the series was cancelled in 1989. This means that she’s also the only companion to never get a formal exit from the Doctor’s life. Various (and conflicting) fates were written for her in comics, novels, and audio adventures, but the only mention we’ve seen of her on TV came as a throwaway line in the Sarah Jane Adventures about “that Dorothy something” who now runs a highly successful charity called A Charitable Earth. (A...C...E... getitgotitgood?) A formal introduction, on the other hand? Yeah, we get that.
The 7th Doctor and his then-companion Melanie Bush land on the planet Svartos, where 16-year-old Ace is working as a waitress in a cocktail bar the Mos Eisley cantina a cafe in Iceworld, the ever-exciting tourist colony located on Svartos’ frozen dark side. Oh, sorry, I meant never-exciting; it’s an alien refrigerator and freezer dealership. Ace (real name Dorothy, but that’s totally naff and she never uses it) is bored, grumpy, horrible at customer service (a snotty woman demanding another milkshake because hers has too many lumps instead gets the lumpy one dumped over her head), and oddly conversant with stereotypical 1980’s teenage Cockney slang for somebody on the other side of the galaxy and unspecified centuries in the future.
All of this, it turns out, is because she’s really a stereotypical 1980’s teenage Cockney. Ace grew up in the not-so-great London suburb of Perivale with a not-so-great family life* and a dead best friend courtesy of a racist firebombing when the two of them were 13. The perfect recipe for a disillusioned teenage misfit whose likes include dinosaurs, motorbikes, rock-climbing, kids, terrible music, flipping the two-finger salute at anything resembling authority, blowing shit up, and dreaming of getting out there among the stars to meet strange new alien races and piss them off. (Among the many decorations plastered on her bomber jacket are NASA patches for Atlantis, Challenger, Enterprise and Columbia. Also a Thunderbirds fan-pin and a Bell Atlantic safe driver badge. Ace apparently needs a lot of stinking badges.)
After failing her Chemistry A-Levels and getting kicked out of school for blowing up the art room (they didn’t understand how semi-accidentally tossing a handful of nitroglycerin into Class 1-C’s prize pottery pig collection was a creative act), Ace landed a crappy job as a waitress in a cocktail bar cafe in Perivale. She hated every minute of it -- until a random** cyclone Time-Storm blew into her bedroom while she was doing an experiment with yet more explosives, and whisked her off to Oz Iceworld.***
Yay, space! Yay, aliens! Yay.... crappy job at a cafe! With snotty customers and a jerkoff boss, and no way to get home or really anywhere else. Not like a kid from Earth in 1987 has any salable skills in galactic space besides blowing shit up and dumping milkshakes over people’s heads.
So when the Doctor and Mel come along and get themselves involved in helping shady smuggler Sabalom Glitz look for Iceworld’s famous hidden treasure, Ace is jumping for joy at the chance to join the party (when she’s not busy calling Glitz a male chauvinist bilgebag for telling her she can’t join the party).
At the end of the day when the treasure turns out to be not so treasury and Iceworld itself turns out to be a spacecraft that can detach itself from the planet, Mel takes off with Glitz in said spacecraft, and the Doctor offers to give Ace a lift home via the scenic route: “a quick trip around the 12 Galaxies and home in time for tea?”
That’d be a yes. Or actually an “Ace!” complete with literal jumping for joy. An excitable girl, our Dorothy, when she’s in a good mood.
“Home in time for tea” turns out to take at least two years, with detours to:
--- A certain scrapyard and school in 1963 London, shortly after the original Doctor buggered off with Susan and her teachers in tow, and now overrun with non-pink Daleks.
--- Windsor Castle in the present, because what young girl’s life could be complete without shooting gold coins at alien cyborgs with a slingshot and spotting an 18th Century portrait of herself on Queen Elizabeth’s wall.
--- A future Earth colony where unhappiness is punishable by candy-coated death.
--- An evil circus where creepy clowns fail to entertain some really bored Norse gods.
--- An Arthurian invasion from another dimension. (Ace gets to pull Excalibur from the stone, but she hands it off to pseudo-Lancelot with a cheery “Here, you can be King of England.”)
--- A haunted house in Edwardian Perivale -- which turns out to be the same one that 13-year-old Ace burned down in 1982, after her friend Manisha’s death. “Any regrets?” the Doctor asks her once she’s broken down and confessed what happened back then. “Yeah, I wish I’d blown it up instead.”
--- The coast of Northumberland in 1943, smack in the middle of secret military experiments that result in the release of Evil From Beyond The Dawn Of Time, as such things usually do.
We pause for a brief SPOILER-FILLED digression into [Evil From Beyond The Dawn of Time]Evil From Beyond The Dawn of Time:
Once upon a time beyond the dawn of time, the Doctor fought an entity made of pure badness and trapped it in a flask by beating it at chess, as one does. At some point down the line, a Viking got hold of the flask and named the being inside Fenric, after the Norse legends. For his troubles, the evil force repaid the man by killing his crewmates and messing with his DNA so that all of his descendants could be manipulated by Fenric, even while locked inside his none-too-comfy bottle.
Those descendants -- dubbed the Wolves of Fenric -- spread out all over the world, but showed up for an unexpected family reunion on the coast of Northumberland in 1943. There was even one from the far future when the earth has become a polluted wasteland -- and one from not quite so far into the future when the polluted wasteland was mostly confined to Perivale. Fenric, you see, was good at whipping up Time-Storms.
He wasn’t bad at chess, either. Ace -- whose infant mother and widowed grandmother were present in 1943 as well -- was his pawn all along, deliberately tossed into the Doctor’s path to eventually draw him into another face-to-face conflict with Fenric.
Luckily for Ace-slash-the-world, the Doctor was still the better player; he’d been aware of who she was since he met her, and spent two years building her into somebody who knew her own mind and could break away from being a chess piece.
Or, depending on how cynically you look at it, he spent two years making sure Ace would turn out to be his piece, not Fenric’s. He certainly manipulated her enough himself, by shoving her into situations he knew she’d have emotional issues with, and withholding information left, right and center. However you look at his motivations, though, it worked. Too well, for a moment at the end, when her faith in him was so strong that it held back the vampire-like creature (that Wolf from the far future) who was all set to destroy Fenric.
Despite that faith being temporarily broken by the Doctor revealing that he’d known all along (true) and that otherwise he’d never have become friends with a social misfit and emotional cripple like her (not remotely true), it bounced back harder than ever afterward. When Evil From Beyond The Dawn Of Time is involved, Ace is reasonably quick to accept apologies. (At least apologies stammered in the 7th Doctor’s adorable, inexplicable Scottish accent.)
Right, back home in time for tea: they finally do make it to modern-day Perivale , and find out why most of Ace’s old teenage friends seem to have disappeared off the planet -- that’d be because they disappeared off the planet, kidnapped and hunted by cat-people.
But by this time, Ace has grown so close to the Doctor and the traveling life they’ve made that once the luckier of her friends have been rescued, it’s the TARDIS she’s talking about when she finally says, “Let’s go home.”
The two of them walk into the sunset and off the airwaves, to the strains of “There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace - we’ve got work to do!"
The end, except for five thousand books and audio adventures and comics that I’m not touching with a ten foot pole, despite the fact that half of them are currently sitting in my garage. This Ace is coming from the tv series -- or technically before it -- and that’s what I’m considering canon for her. (See way above for ahahahah at the concept of Doctor Who canon in general.) I’ll use information from other sources to fill in backstory holes and maybe for future plotty, if it’s useful and doesn’t conflict with the show (...and isn’t incredibly freaking stupid) but that’s about it.
So, Ace: she’s a square-jawed, fresh-faced tomboy with a baseball bat and a bomber jacket with her name on the back (which she'll wear near-constantly at first, until it gets too hot) who doesn’t trust anyone over 30 except when she does. She hates clowns, dead things, cleaning her room (sorry, future roomie, for her extreme slobbiness), haunted houses, sexists, racists, people who betray her, her name, getting called “the latest one” instead of her name, and her mother. She loves blowing shit up, space travel, blowing shit up, bacon sandwiches, blowing shit up, giving people silly and/or insulting nicknames depending on whether she likes them (the Doctor and Mel are Professor and Donut; Glitz on the other hand is Bilgebag), blowing shit up, depressing songs about people who get killed by trains, blowing shit up, the Upper Cretaceous Age, blowing shit up, surprising people with her toughness, blowing shit up, occasionally wearing girly clothes because don’t pretend you know her mm’kay, blowing shit up, having mad chemistry with every girl her own age she meets (and about a third of the boys), blowing shit up, people who betray her (...because seriously, it happens a lot), blowing shit up, and somewhere way down underneath it all, her mother.
Oh, and also blowing shit up.
__
*(She hates her mum and the show hints by omission that her dad’s no longer in the picture. The Virgin New Adventures novels say he died when she was still too short to be able to see into his hospital bed; the Big Finish audios say he left when she was four. I refuse to grant blanket canon-for-my-Ace status to either of those sources, but I lean leavingward rather than dead.)
**(Spoiler: not really, no.)
***(Which is why the show writers thought they were being funny when they made her first name Dorothy, and the novel writers thought they were being funnier when they made her last name Gale. Sadly for the funny novel writers, the less-funny novel writers from the other publishing company had already made her last name McShane, so that continuity error was eventually fixed by shifting Gale to her middle name. The More You Know.)
__
And She's Coming From...
Before she meets the Doctor, but after she’s Time-Stormed off to Iceworld. While I could simply have Fenric’s time-meddling drop her off in Fandom instead of on Svartos, I want to work with an Ace who’s already met and pissed off aliens and knows time-travel is possible. That’s who she is when we meet her in canon: bored, cranky, and disappointed that her escape from Earth ended up just as claustrophobic and dead-end as Perivale. I’d like Fandom to be the cool, exciting place full of adventure that Iceworld ended up not being, rather than her first exposure to weirdness.
So, for the purposes of getting her to Fandom, this is an Ace who’d been stuck on Iceworld for a while and finally tries to recreate the experiment that (she thinks) called up the Time-Storm in the first place. Rather than let her blow her head off and lose his chess piece, Fenric snatches her up again and deposits her in Fandom, which is possibly an even better place for eventually running into the Doctor, considering how many times the man’s visited the island.
Other Random Shite
Ace has demonstrated a vague sensitivity to Bad Feeling About This vibes from places where there is or was a strong evil force, possibly because she’s a Wolf of Fenric. What this comes down to in a practical RP sense is that weird coincidences might happen to her when a plot requires it because there’s a godlike entity screwing around with her timeline, but she’s mostly a normal human who’s a bit freaked by haunted houses and evil circuses.
Skills-wise, she’s not great with standardized tests but very good at any sort of chemistry that leans toward blowing shit up. (You’re shocked, I know.) She’s developed her own not-yet-patented explosive called Nitro-9, which is “just like ordinary nitroglycerin but it packs more of a wallop,” and she doesn’t feel properly dressed if she’s not carrying at least a few cans.
She’s also decent with computers, a quick learner when it comes to space technology, a deadeye with a slingshot, an enthusiastic mechanic, a scary but effective driver, a rock-climber, a football fan, and a packer of the most ridiculously useful backpack-of-holding ever. (SRSLY, there’s rope-ladders, Nitro-9, thermoses of hot coffee, slingshots, changes of clothes, and possibly a partridge in a pear tree in that thing.)
She’s explosion-happy, trouble-prone and likely to smart off to teachers; I’m totally cool with her getting called to the carpet for any of that. She’s also definitely one of those students who’d be hiding weapons in her room, but since her weapons of choice are sports equipment and re-purposed deodorant cans, they should stay under the radar easily enough. Otherwise, Ace is a social misfit of the I Mean Well But Normal Grownups Just Don’t Understand Me variety, not the malicious kind. In Fandom, that’s pretty much the girl next door.
And if you call her Dorothy, you
a) are a staff member and/or her roomie or big sib, who are the only ones likely to know her real name without her telling you
b) are someone she trusts a lot and actually told, in which case you know she hates it
c) will get an earful and a lot of glaring and/or die painfully (by which I mean she'll threaten to kill you painfully, but will really just give you an earful and a lot of glaring, and maybe a milkshake over the head), depending on who you are
Ace Links
At Wikipedia
At the TARDIS Index File
At the Beeb
At the Comic Book DB
Ace’s badge-filled jacket in excruciatingly awesome detail
Peekatures
Mmm, teal deer stew. QuestionscommentsLOLs?
Also, Bestest And Most Adorable Companions Photo Ever, establishing that a) Karen Gillan is a gorgeous mutant from the planet of giants, and b) goddamn, Sophie Aldred, how are you 50 and still that cute?
Doctor Who In 50,000 Words Or Less
Attempt #1:
Once upon a time, the BBC made the horrible faux pas of premiering a new science fiction show the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which doomed it to only 27 seasons, a failed spin-off pilot, three movies, three or four lines of novels and audio adventures whose canon frequently conflicts with both the show and each other, a comic book series, a web-series, two RPGs, a continuation of the tv series that picks up 20 years later and is currently filming its 7th season, and three non-failed TV spin-offs in Torchwood, the Sarah-Jane Adventures, and the Australian-produced K-9. Let’s talk about all of those, shall we?
...Okay, let’s not.
Attempt #2:
Twice upon a time, there was a grumpy old man called the Doctor who lived in a London scrapyard with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman. Except:
--- He didn’t really live in the scrapyard (he lived in a semi-sentient time-space ship parked in the scrapyard and disguised as a police telephone box)
--- He wasn’t really all that old (700-ish, but that’s not even middle-aged for a member of his species)
--- Doctor is mostly what he called himself since he never gave anyone his real name
--- His granddaughter’s name wasn’t really Foreman (they just took that off the scrapyard sign),
--- “Man” is a bit debatable (he’s not human, and though he’s always appeared male, later canon indicates via references to other members of his race that he doesn’t have to remain the same gender)
--- Let’s not get started on fandom’s conflicting opinions about whether Susan was even really his granddaughter, since the show says so but some of the books say Time Lords don’t reproduce that way, while others say...
Um, shall we give that another go?
Attempt #3:
Thrice upon a time, there was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who disliked his people’s policy of non-intervention in the cultures and history of other worlds and found most of his contemporaries to be stuffy and boring.
So he stole (or, if you take her side of the story, was stolen by) a semi-sentient space-time ship and took off to bounce around the universe with his granddaughter. Since his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space, which is technobabble for “bigger on the inside than the outside”) was in for repairs when she stole him, there was a whole lot of bouncing, sometimes where he intended to go, and sometimes not. Sometimes he got stuck in London scrapyards, and sometimes when he finally got things working again, he accidentally kidnapped people (starting with his granddaughter’s history and science teachers) and yanked them along for the ride.
Eventually his granddaughter left to get married -- mostly because he locked her out of the TARDIS and forced her to stay behind -- but the Doctor went on bouncing through space and time (grumpily; that part wasn’t debatable), picking up new traveling companions, meeting new alien races and pissing them off, until he ended up getting himself dead.
Oh, except wait, he didn’t, because surprise! Time Lords, in addition to having two hearts and a handful of vague, plot-dependent psychic abilities, can regenerate all their cells into a completely new actor body, when physical trauma happens to them that would kill most other people. The body changes, the memories remain (if sometimes a bit shaken up depending on the trauma), and the personality... shifts. He’s still the same person, but each different incarnation tends to have a slightly different outlook on life and way of interacting with people. Otherwise known as “he got a lot less grumpy when he ditched the long white hair.”
Since that first regeneration, he’s gone through 10 more bodies (if you don’t count the movies with the pink Daleks which are super-non-canon, or the alternate 9th Doctor from the webseries, or the weird glowing mummy-dude who showed up to warn 4 that he was shortly going to turn into 5, or the distillation of all his evil created sometime between 12 and 13 who may never really happen because wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey, or the alternate dimension where some future version of him is apparently going to be Merlin which would be awesome for AU Weekend if I were actually playing the Doctor but I'm not, so... I’ll stop now.)
He’s also gone through around 50 more traveling companions. (And a few non-traveling ones, during a brief period when he was stranded on Earth in the late 60's.) Many (though not all) of those companions were from Earth, because the Doctor has some weird fetish admiration for our tiny, backwater planet, and also because it’s hard to get non-human actors for a BBC salary and a job description of “bounce around the universe saying what’s-that-Doctor a lot and pretending these rubber monsters look real.”
40 years later and with slightly better special effects now, the Doctor and his companions are still bouncing. Just a bit less bouncily these days, because somewhere in the no-man’s-time between the series that ended in 1989 and the one that started in 2005, there was a horrible war between the Time Lords and a genocidal, power-hungry race called the Daleks. (Not the pink ones. Probably.) Both Gallifrey and most of the Daleks were destroyed -- by the Doctor -- leaving him as the last of the Emo Time Lords. Except for that one there and maybe her and him and that other one who may or may not have survived because of reasons.
Sigh. Or we could just go with this. Which rightly points out that the current producer's attitude to the concept of "canon" in a show about an almost-immortal time-traveler who's repeatedly established in text that history can be changed is "....Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha."
Ace: Just Call Me The Latest One, And I Can Get My Own Blanket
Lancelot Ancelyn: My lord Merlin.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Merlin?
Lancelot Ancelyn: Oh, he has many names.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: He has many faces. And he has many companions. This must be the latest one.
Brigadier Winifred Bambera, Actually In Charge: We've checked the perimeter. Doctor Warmsly is staying with the vehicles.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Oh, thank you, Bambera. Oh, see if you can get a blanket for this young lady, will you?
Brigadier Winifred Bambera, Actually In Charge (sarcastically): Yes, sir. Perhaps I should make some tea, too.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: *nods approvingly* Well, are you all right, Miss?
Ace, Former King of the Britons For Five Minutes, Soaking Wet From Having Pulled Excalibur From The Stone When The Stone Was, You Know, Underwater (even more sarcastically): Just call me the latest one, and I can get my own blanket.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired: Oh dear. Women. Not really my field.
The Doctor: Don't worry, Brigadier. People will be shooting at you soon.
Dorothy Gale McShane, aka Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, has the dubious distinction of having been the current television companion when the series was cancelled in 1989. This means that she’s also the only companion to never get a formal exit from the Doctor’s life. Various (and conflicting) fates were written for her in comics, novels, and audio adventures, but the only mention we’ve seen of her on TV came as a throwaway line in the Sarah Jane Adventures about “that Dorothy something” who now runs a highly successful charity called A Charitable Earth. (A...C...E... getitgotitgood?) A formal introduction, on the other hand? Yeah, we get that.
The 7th Doctor and his then-companion Melanie Bush land on the planet Svartos, where 16-year-old Ace is working as a waitress in a cocktail bar the Mos Eisley cantina a cafe in Iceworld, the ever-exciting tourist colony located on Svartos’ frozen dark side. Oh, sorry, I meant never-exciting; it’s an alien refrigerator and freezer dealership. Ace (real name Dorothy, but that’s totally naff and she never uses it) is bored, grumpy, horrible at customer service (a snotty woman demanding another milkshake because hers has too many lumps instead gets the lumpy one dumped over her head), and oddly conversant with stereotypical 1980’s teenage Cockney slang for somebody on the other side of the galaxy and unspecified centuries in the future.
All of this, it turns out, is because she’s really a stereotypical 1980’s teenage Cockney. Ace grew up in the not-so-great London suburb of Perivale with a not-so-great family life* and a dead best friend courtesy of a racist firebombing when the two of them were 13. The perfect recipe for a disillusioned teenage misfit whose likes include dinosaurs, motorbikes, rock-climbing, kids, terrible music, flipping the two-finger salute at anything resembling authority, blowing shit up, and dreaming of getting out there among the stars to meet strange new alien races and piss them off. (Among the many decorations plastered on her bomber jacket are NASA patches for Atlantis, Challenger, Enterprise and Columbia. Also a Thunderbirds fan-pin and a Bell Atlantic safe driver badge. Ace apparently needs a lot of stinking badges.)
After failing her Chemistry A-Levels and getting kicked out of school for blowing up the art room (they didn’t understand how semi-accidentally tossing a handful of nitroglycerin into Class 1-C’s prize pottery pig collection was a creative act), Ace landed a crappy job as a waitress in a cocktail bar cafe in Perivale. She hated every minute of it -- until a random** cyclone Time-Storm blew into her bedroom while she was doing an experiment with yet more explosives, and whisked her off to Oz Iceworld.***
Yay, space! Yay, aliens! Yay.... crappy job at a cafe! With snotty customers and a jerkoff boss, and no way to get home or really anywhere else. Not like a kid from Earth in 1987 has any salable skills in galactic space besides blowing shit up and dumping milkshakes over people’s heads.
So when the Doctor and Mel come along and get themselves involved in helping shady smuggler Sabalom Glitz look for Iceworld’s famous hidden treasure, Ace is jumping for joy at the chance to join the party (when she’s not busy calling Glitz a male chauvinist bilgebag for telling her she can’t join the party).
At the end of the day when the treasure turns out to be not so treasury and Iceworld itself turns out to be a spacecraft that can detach itself from the planet, Mel takes off with Glitz in said spacecraft, and the Doctor offers to give Ace a lift home via the scenic route: “a quick trip around the 12 Galaxies and home in time for tea?”
That’d be a yes. Or actually an “Ace!” complete with literal jumping for joy. An excitable girl, our Dorothy, when she’s in a good mood.
“Home in time for tea” turns out to take at least two years, with detours to:
--- A certain scrapyard and school in 1963 London, shortly after the original Doctor buggered off with Susan and her teachers in tow, and now overrun with non-pink Daleks.
--- Windsor Castle in the present, because what young girl’s life could be complete without shooting gold coins at alien cyborgs with a slingshot and spotting an 18th Century portrait of herself on Queen Elizabeth’s wall.
--- A future Earth colony where unhappiness is punishable by candy-coated death.
--- An evil circus where creepy clowns fail to entertain some really bored Norse gods.
--- An Arthurian invasion from another dimension. (Ace gets to pull Excalibur from the stone, but she hands it off to pseudo-Lancelot with a cheery “Here, you can be King of England.”)
--- A haunted house in Edwardian Perivale -- which turns out to be the same one that 13-year-old Ace burned down in 1982, after her friend Manisha’s death. “Any regrets?” the Doctor asks her once she’s broken down and confessed what happened back then. “Yeah, I wish I’d blown it up instead.”
--- The coast of Northumberland in 1943, smack in the middle of secret military experiments that result in the release of Evil From Beyond The Dawn Of Time, as such things usually do.
We pause for a brief SPOILER-FILLED digression into [Evil From Beyond The Dawn of Time]Evil From Beyond The Dawn of Time:
Once upon a time beyond the dawn of time, the Doctor fought an entity made of pure badness and trapped it in a flask by beating it at chess, as one does. At some point down the line, a Viking got hold of the flask and named the being inside Fenric, after the Norse legends. For his troubles, the evil force repaid the man by killing his crewmates and messing with his DNA so that all of his descendants could be manipulated by Fenric, even while locked inside his none-too-comfy bottle.
Those descendants -- dubbed the Wolves of Fenric -- spread out all over the world, but showed up for an unexpected family reunion on the coast of Northumberland in 1943. There was even one from the far future when the earth has become a polluted wasteland -- and one from not quite so far into the future when the polluted wasteland was mostly confined to Perivale. Fenric, you see, was good at whipping up Time-Storms.
He wasn’t bad at chess, either. Ace -- whose infant mother and widowed grandmother were present in 1943 as well -- was his pawn all along, deliberately tossed into the Doctor’s path to eventually draw him into another face-to-face conflict with Fenric.
Luckily for Ace-slash-the-world, the Doctor was still the better player; he’d been aware of who she was since he met her, and spent two years building her into somebody who knew her own mind and could break away from being a chess piece.
Or, depending on how cynically you look at it, he spent two years making sure Ace would turn out to be his piece, not Fenric’s. He certainly manipulated her enough himself, by shoving her into situations he knew she’d have emotional issues with, and withholding information left, right and center. However you look at his motivations, though, it worked. Too well, for a moment at the end, when her faith in him was so strong that it held back the vampire-like creature (that Wolf from the far future) who was all set to destroy Fenric.
Despite that faith being temporarily broken by the Doctor revealing that he’d known all along (true) and that otherwise he’d never have become friends with a social misfit and emotional cripple like her (not remotely true), it bounced back harder than ever afterward. When Evil From Beyond The Dawn Of Time is involved, Ace is reasonably quick to accept apologies. (At least apologies stammered in the 7th Doctor’s adorable, inexplicable Scottish accent.)
Right, back home in time for tea: they finally do make it to modern-day Perivale , and find out why most of Ace’s old teenage friends seem to have disappeared off the planet -- that’d be because they disappeared off the planet, kidnapped and hunted by cat-people.
But by this time, Ace has grown so close to the Doctor and the traveling life they’ve made that once the luckier of her friends have been rescued, it’s the TARDIS she’s talking about when she finally says, “Let’s go home.”
The two of them walk into the sunset and off the airwaves, to the strains of “There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace - we’ve got work to do!"
The end, except for five thousand books and audio adventures and comics that I’m not touching with a ten foot pole, despite the fact that half of them are currently sitting in my garage. This Ace is coming from the tv series -- or technically before it -- and that’s what I’m considering canon for her. (See way above for ahahahah at the concept of Doctor Who canon in general.) I’ll use information from other sources to fill in backstory holes and maybe for future plotty, if it’s useful and doesn’t conflict with the show (...and isn’t incredibly freaking stupid) but that’s about it.
So, Ace: she’s a square-jawed, fresh-faced tomboy with a baseball bat and a bomber jacket with her name on the back (which she'll wear near-constantly at first, until it gets too hot) who doesn’t trust anyone over 30 except when she does. She hates clowns, dead things, cleaning her room (sorry, future roomie, for her extreme slobbiness), haunted houses, sexists, racists, people who betray her, her name, getting called “the latest one” instead of her name, and her mother. She loves blowing shit up, space travel, blowing shit up, bacon sandwiches, blowing shit up, giving people silly and/or insulting nicknames depending on whether she likes them (the Doctor and Mel are Professor and Donut; Glitz on the other hand is Bilgebag), blowing shit up, depressing songs about people who get killed by trains, blowing shit up, the Upper Cretaceous Age, blowing shit up, surprising people with her toughness, blowing shit up, occasionally wearing girly clothes because don’t pretend you know her mm’kay, blowing shit up, having mad chemistry with every girl her own age she meets (and about a third of the boys), blowing shit up, people who betray her (...because seriously, it happens a lot), blowing shit up, and somewhere way down underneath it all, her mother.
Oh, and also blowing shit up.
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*(She hates her mum and the show hints by omission that her dad’s no longer in the picture. The Virgin New Adventures novels say he died when she was still too short to be able to see into his hospital bed; the Big Finish audios say he left when she was four. I refuse to grant blanket canon-for-my-Ace status to either of those sources, but I lean leavingward rather than dead.)
**(Spoiler: not really, no.)
***(Which is why the show writers thought they were being funny when they made her first name Dorothy, and the novel writers thought they were being funnier when they made her last name Gale. Sadly for the funny novel writers, the less-funny novel writers from the other publishing company had already made her last name McShane, so that continuity error was eventually fixed by shifting Gale to her middle name. The More You Know.)
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And She's Coming From...
Before she meets the Doctor, but after she’s Time-Stormed off to Iceworld. While I could simply have Fenric’s time-meddling drop her off in Fandom instead of on Svartos, I want to work with an Ace who’s already met and pissed off aliens and knows time-travel is possible. That’s who she is when we meet her in canon: bored, cranky, and disappointed that her escape from Earth ended up just as claustrophobic and dead-end as Perivale. I’d like Fandom to be the cool, exciting place full of adventure that Iceworld ended up not being, rather than her first exposure to weirdness.
So, for the purposes of getting her to Fandom, this is an Ace who’d been stuck on Iceworld for a while and finally tries to recreate the experiment that (she thinks) called up the Time-Storm in the first place. Rather than let her blow her head off and lose his chess piece, Fenric snatches her up again and deposits her in Fandom, which is possibly an even better place for eventually running into the Doctor, considering how many times the man’s visited the island.
Other Random Shite
Ace has demonstrated a vague sensitivity to Bad Feeling About This vibes from places where there is or was a strong evil force, possibly because she’s a Wolf of Fenric. What this comes down to in a practical RP sense is that weird coincidences might happen to her when a plot requires it because there’s a godlike entity screwing around with her timeline, but she’s mostly a normal human who’s a bit freaked by haunted houses and evil circuses.
Skills-wise, she’s not great with standardized tests but very good at any sort of chemistry that leans toward blowing shit up. (You’re shocked, I know.) She’s developed her own not-yet-patented explosive called Nitro-9, which is “just like ordinary nitroglycerin but it packs more of a wallop,” and she doesn’t feel properly dressed if she’s not carrying at least a few cans.
She’s also decent with computers, a quick learner when it comes to space technology, a deadeye with a slingshot, an enthusiastic mechanic, a scary but effective driver, a rock-climber, a football fan, and a packer of the most ridiculously useful backpack-of-holding ever. (SRSLY, there’s rope-ladders, Nitro-9, thermoses of hot coffee, slingshots, changes of clothes, and possibly a partridge in a pear tree in that thing.)
She’s explosion-happy, trouble-prone and likely to smart off to teachers; I’m totally cool with her getting called to the carpet for any of that. She’s also definitely one of those students who’d be hiding weapons in her room, but since her weapons of choice are sports equipment and re-purposed deodorant cans, they should stay under the radar easily enough. Otherwise, Ace is a social misfit of the I Mean Well But Normal Grownups Just Don’t Understand Me variety, not the malicious kind. In Fandom, that’s pretty much the girl next door.
And if you call her Dorothy, you
a) are a staff member and/or her roomie or big sib, who are the only ones likely to know her real name without her telling you
b) are someone she trusts a lot and actually told, in which case you know she hates it
c) will get an earful and a lot of glaring and/or die painfully (by which I mean she'll threaten to kill you painfully, but will really just give you an earful and a lot of glaring, and maybe a milkshake over the head), depending on who you are
Ace Links
At Wikipedia
At the TARDIS Index File
At the Beeb
At the Comic Book DB
Ace’s badge-filled jacket in excruciatingly awesome detail
Peekatures
Mmm, teal deer stew. QuestionscommentsLOLs?
Also, Bestest And Most Adorable Companions Photo Ever, establishing that a) Karen Gillan is a gorgeous mutant from the planet of giants, and b) goddamn, Sophie Aldred, how are you 50 and still that cute?