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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 travelled with the Seventh Doctor and was a regular in the programme from 1987 to 1989.
Ace first appeared in the 1987 serial Dragonfire, where she was 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 relative future. There, she met the Doctor and his companion Mel. When Mel left the Doctor at the conclusion of the serial, he offered to take Ace with him in the TARDIS, and she happily accepted.
Ace was easily the most independent of all the Doctor's companions. Suffering from traumatic events in her childhood, including a bad relationship with her mother and the death of her close friend Manisha due to a racist firebombing, 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 cannisters and carried around in her backpack.
Affectionately giving the Doctor the nickname of "Professor", she was convinced that the Doctor needed her to watch his back, and protected him with a fierce loyalty. In turn, the Doctor seemed 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 fought the Daleks and the Cybermen, encountered the all-powerful Gods of Ragnarok, the terrifying Kandyman, and many other dangers. She also faced the ghosts of her own past in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Over time, she began to mature into a confident young woman, and her brash exterior ceased to be a front.
What the Doctor was aware of but Ace was not, was 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 stretched across the centuries. Ace was 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 was defeated, Ace continued 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. When next we saw the Seventh Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, he was travelling alone, with no reference to what had happened to him in the interim. 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. A painting seen in the extended version of the serial Silver Nemesis suggested that at some point in her personal future Ace would end up in 18th or 19th Century France.
The spin-off media give contradictory versions of Ace's eventual fate. The Virgin New Adventures and BBC Books novels, for example, state that Ace left the Doctor (in the novel Set Piece by Kate Orman) to become Time's Vigilante, doing what the Doctor did but on a smaller scale. The comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine had Ace being killed off just prior to the events of the 1996 television movie. In the webcast audio play Death Comes to Time, Ace inherits the mantle of the Time Lords when they become extinct. Which of these outcomes are canonical, if any, is debatable. It remains to be seen if Ace's fate will be referred to at all when the new Doctor Who television series begins in 2005.
Ace's first name is Dorothy. Production notes suggest that it was intended that her last name was Gale, an allusion to The Wizard of Oz, given the fact that she was transported to Iceworld via a time storm. The spin-off media, however, have given Ace the last name of McShane, with some suggesting that her middle name is Gale, or Gail.
Sophie Aldred reprised the role of Ace in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. She has also voiced Ace for several audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, alongside Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor.
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