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Oct 23, 2022 · Published: Sunday, 23 October 2022 at 8:35 pm. Amidst multiple regenerations, a flurry of returning friends and foes and many, many plot twists, Doctor Who 's centenary special found the time to ...
- Morgan Jeffery
- 23 min
Feb 5, 2020 · The Doctor and Ace were then at each other’s throats throughout the novel Nightshade from Mark Gatiss (Cold War). Nightshade saw Ace falling for a young man, Robin Yeadon. After Robin’s mother is killed, Ace consoles him. She planned to leave the Doctor and stay behind in the sleepy village of Crook Marsham.
In the comics, Ace died. In the VNAs, she basically outgrew the Doctor and wanted to strike out on her own, rather than falling out with him. In the Sarah Jane Adventures, there’s no explanation for why she left, but she runs a charity on 21st century Earth.
- Overview
- Biography
- References
- Personality
- Behind the scenes
- External links
Ace was a companion of the Seventh Doctor. Her real name was either Dorothy Gale or Dorothy Gale McShane.
Initially a brash and reckless teenager, Ace matured significantly into a strong, independent adult over her many years of TARDIS travel and other experiences, who was capable of surviving on her own. Born on Earth, Ace was a central player in fighting the return of Fenric and battled many of the Doctor's most infamous foes alongside him, including the Daleks, the Cybermen, and the Master. Her timeline was complicated; during an encounter with the Quantum Anvil, she saw her future fracture into various different but all valid possible outcomes. Amongst these futures were continued travels with the Doctor, a life in 1887 France, and becoming a Time Lord after attending the Academy on Gallifrey.
Within that version of her future, she was given a TARDIS of her own and she became an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency. Eventually, due partially to the erupting Time War, Ace had her memory erased by Irving Braxiatel, who also further meddled with her personal history. She was returned to Earth, where she set up a charity - A Charitable Earth - dedicated to helping Orphans.
In 2022, Ace met fellow former companion Tegan Jovanka upon Kate Stewart requesting help at UNIT; allowing her to meet the Thirteenth Doctor and help stop the Master once again. Afterwards, Ace joined a Companion support group stated by Graham O'Brien to share her stories about the Doctor; even helping comfort Yaz, who had just left the Doctor before her regeneration.
Before travelling with the Doctor
This section's awfully stubby. Her cameo as "Dorothy something" in Dorothy was born on 20 August 1970 (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation, Falls the Shadow, Set Piece, Relative Dementias) to Audrey Dudman (TV: The Curse of Fenric) and Harry McShane. (AUDIO: The Rapture) She was named after the main character of The Wizard of Oz because her mother (AUDIO: The Settling) and maternal grandmother were fans of the film. Audrey claimed that Ace's grandmother found it took her away from all her miseries. (PROSE: Love and War) Ace had a younger brother named Liam, who was born in 1974. However, she did not recall her brother's existence until later meeting him in Ibiza as he was taken by their father to live with him after her parents' separation. (AUDIO: The Rapture) She was a member of the Church of England (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters) but was not very religious. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark, AUDIO: Fiesta of the Damned) In February 1971, she was visited as an infant by the Seventh Doctor, who apologised to her for his future manipulation of her at Gabriel Chase and in relation to Fenric. (PROSE: Ace of Hearts) Ace was a Brownie, one of the lower tiers of Girl Guides. She was kicked out after she turned a summer camp's fairy marquee into a makeshift Molotov cocktail. (PROSE: Survival) As a child, Ace holidayed in Spain on several occasions. (AUDIO: Fiesta of the Damned) Some of her mother's boyfriends would often offer to take care of Ace in order to get on her good side, taking her to pubs to buy her fish and chips and a fizzy drink while they would ignore her to spend time with their friends. In these instances, Ace would play darts and steal people's beers. The boyfriends, however, would sometimes start arguing with her after getting too drunk, at one instance giving her a black eye. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys) Naturally aggressive but also clever, Ace was skilled at using her knowledge of chemistry despite failing it for her O-levels, making bombs filled with an explosive of her own devising called Nitro-9. (TV: Dragonfire) She suffered several traumatic events in her childhood in Perivale, London. These included a bad relationship with her mother and in 1983 the firebombing of her friend Manisha Purkayastha's flat by Neo-Nazis. Manisha either nearly died (PROSE: Timewyrm: Apocalypse) or did die, prompting an angry Ace to set fire to Gabriel Chase, an abandoned mansion said to be haunted by an ancient evil. (TV: Ghost Light, PROSE: Blood Heat) Ace was a troubled teen on Earth, setting off fire alarms at school to miss double French lessons (AUDIO: Revenge of the Swarm) and ultimately being expelled for blowing up the art room as a "creative statement." (TV: Battlefield) She studied The Tale of Beowulf, but only paid attention due to the fighting. (AUDIO: Black and White) She discovered her love of speed and danger when a friend let her drive his car, and she took it up to 80 on the motorway. (PROSE: At Childhood's End) Ace was a fan of the pop singer Johnny Chess. She found a picture of him with his shirt-off which was published in Teen Beat to be very attractive. (AUDIO: Maker of Dreams) Chess was the son of the First Doctor's former companions Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation, Byzantium!) In the mid-1980s, while working in McDonald's, Ace briefly met the Fifth Doctor's companion Tegan Jovanka. (PROSE: The Crystal Bucephalus) Working in a fast food chain, Ace encountered the Ergon. Assuming it to be her friend Barry Groves wearing a chicken costume, she gave it a box of fries, which the Ergon took back to the anti-matter universe for his master Omega. Ace later recalled this encounter to the Doctor, who was privately amused but did not explain himself to her. (PROSE: Anti-Matter with Fries) Ace got her nickname when she joined a teenage gang from Putney to spite Midge. The other members were King, Queen, Jack, and Joker. (PROSE: Teenage Kicks) In 1987, at the age of 16, Ace and a friend named Julian Milton planned to run away together and packed supplies and clothes. (PROSE: Love and War) According to one source, Ace's father had a stroke while she was in Margate with Julian, and he died shortly after she returned. (PROSE: Lucifer Rising) In either the early summer (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters) or 15 September 1987, (PROSE: At Childhood's End) while she was in her room experimenting with the extraction of nitroglycerin from gelignite, a time storm swept her up and transported her to the deck of Sabalom Glitz' spacecraft, the Nosferatu, which was docked at Iceworld in the far future. Trapped on Svartos, she got a job as a waitress and formed a friendship with Glitz, (TV: Dragonfire) Sometime later, whilst working for Anderson in Iceworld's ice cream parlour, she met the Seventh Doctor, whom she referred to as "Professor", and his companion Melanie Bush, whom Ace nicknamed "Doughnut". Ace's career as a waitress ended when Stellar's mother complained to Ace about lumps in her milkshake, resulting in Ace pouring the drink over her head and Ace getting fired by Anderson. When Mel left the Doctor at the conclusion of their battle with Kane, he offered to take Ace with him in the TARDIS, and she enthusiastically accepted. (TV: Dragonfire)
Early travels
While exploring the TARDIS, Ace found the TARDIS zoo and inadvertently released a dodo. The pursuit led Ace to a gigantic wardrobe, where she found a mirror reflecting a vampire-like figure. Before the Doctor could explain further, the dodo knocked over the mirror, and the figure vanished. Ace then returned the dodo to the zoo. (PROSE: Echo) Under the Doctor's tutelage, Ace fought the Daleks and faced Davros in November 1963, destroying one Dalek with an anti-tank rocket and damaging another with a baseball bat upgraded by the Hand of Omega so it delivered blasts of energy strong enough to smash Dalek eyestalks off and damage transmats. During this adventure, her portable stereo was destroyed by a Dalek, something that pleased the Doctor as it was a dangerous anachronism. The Doctor explained to her if someone technically minded found the stereo and discovered how it worked, the microchip revolution could take place 20 years too early, causing damage to the timeline. She also met and came to like Mike Smith. However, she quickly hated him when she found out he was working for the Daleks. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) During this adventure, she met Charlie Smith after he travelled back in time, but only met him briefly. After leaving Earth, the Doctor and Ace traced the Dalek which went to 2016 but got distracted before following it. An older Ace later suggested, to the best of her memory that the TARDIS had been attacked by a Bandril timeship (AUDIO: In Remembrance) She opposed Helen A and her sadistic government, which required people to be happy on pain of death, and worked with Susan Q to undermine her rule over the colony. (TV: The Happiness Patrol) Visiting the Psychic Circus on Segonax, she helped defeat the Gods of Ragnarok (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) and stopped the Cybermen from getting hold of the Nemesis statue in 1988. During this encounter, she killed multiple Cybermen with gold coins fired from her catapult and destroyed a Cyber-shuttle using Nitro-9. She admitted to the Doctor she didn't like Cybermen. At the same time, Ace learnt several of the most chaotic events in Earth's history - the First World War and Hitler's invasion of Poland, for example - were down to the statue. (TV: Silver Nemesis) Ace was sent undercover by the Doctor to Gideon Vale, posing as a maid where she met Rachel Jensen again, though she couldn't do the duties properly. She helped Rachel in her investigation, knowing that Rachel could hack a security door. They managed to get into a vault which contained a lot of nuclear warheads. She was then imprisoned. After escaping she stopped the Vale's private army by cancelling out the mind control. She got annoyed when the British Army started to shoot at them on their way to stopping The Light. She drove a motorcycle with the Doctor riding pinion to get to the launch site to stop the launch of the missiles. (AUDIO: 1963: The Assassination Games) In a timeline created by the Decayed Master, she met the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown. She gave the Sixth Doctor the nickname of "Joseph," a reference to the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He did not understand the reference, though Peri found it amusing. Although the Sixth Doctor did not seem to be particularly pleased with his future self's choice of travelling companion, Ace got along well with Peri, who was surprised to learn that she referred to the Seventh Doctor as "Professor." Ace lost all memory of this encounter when the timeline was erased. Immediately after this, she and the Doctor visited Bob Dovie at 59A Barnsfield Crescent in Totton, Hampshire on 23 November 1963. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
Darker turn
At this stage, the relationship between the Doctor and Ace took a darker turn. At least initially, he had been trying to educate her, not merely have adventures with her. His style of teaching, however, was occasionally unorthodox. At times he lied to her or at least withheld certain truths, so she would face the demons of her past and emerge as a stronger person. (TV: Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric) She later met Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, helping UNIT defeat the Destroyer and Morgaine in Carbury in 1997. (TV: Battlefield) The Doctor forced Ace to face demons from her past, taking her to Gabriel Chase, arriving a century before she had burnt it down. There, she discovered that the presence in the house of the entity known as Light was what she had felt when compelled to burn the house down. (TV: Ghost Light) While visiting Maiden's Point in 1943, Ace learned that her arrival on Iceworld was not an accident, but part of a larger scheme conceived by one of the Doctor's greatest enemies, a cosmic evil known as Fenric. Ace was a Wolf of Fenric, one of many descendants of a Viking tainted with Fenric's genetic instructions to free it from its ancient prison. Fenric had transported her to Iceworld by time storm and had made her a pawn in the complex game between it and the Doctor. The Doctor appeared to have been aware of this from their first meeting, although Ace was not. After Fenric was defeated, Ace continued to journey with the Doctor. (TV: The Curse of Fenric) Ace returned to Perivale where she found that most of her old friends had gone missing. She thought they had moved on, but they had been taken to the Cheetah Planet as prey for the Cheetah People. The Tremas Master, an old enemy of the Doctor, was using them to get off the planet. Ace, after managing to get the mental influence of the Cheetah virus under control (though the Doctor noted that a part of the Cheetah Planet would "always live on inside her"), she returned with two of her friends and went off to travel with the Doctor again. They made their way back to the TARDIS, which she now called "home", (TV: Survival) although they found it taken over by the Master, who whisked them along to a destination of his choosing as part of a scheme. She tried to physically attack the Master, though the Doctor kept her at bay. When the Master damaged the TARDIS controls and ran off into another room, the Doctor resolved that they would see where they ended up. (PROSE: How did this creep get in here, Professor?)
A version of the teenage Ace appeared in a "hellscape" dream the Eleventh Doctor created while the mind parasite Mr Waites fed off the worst thing Doctor could imagine. In the dream, the Doctor worked in the Mediation Section of the Department of Commonality. He turned away Ace when she was being sent to a correction unit for spraying something on ...
Ace covered her fears and insecurities with a tough, streetwise 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 in her backpack. She also wielded a baseball bat for a brief time before it was destroyed. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
She was convinced the Doctor needed her to watch his back and was fiercely loyal to him. (TV: The Curse of Fenric) In turn, the Doctor took a special interest in Ace's education, taking her across the universe and prompting her to come to her own conclusions rather than giving her all the answers. (TV: Ghost Light)
During her early travels with the Doctor, Ace would often set out to do something and when she was successful at it she would jump up and yell "Ace!". (TV: Dragonfire)
Ace enjoyed dinosaurs, (TV: The Happiness Patrol, PROSE: Living in the Past) motorbikes, (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) scrambled eggs, hot buttered toast, kedgeree, kidney, sausage and bacon for breakfast. (TV: Ghost Light) She also enjoyed coffee (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) and lemonade. (TV: Battlefield) She preferred the Beatles to Elvis Presley. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
Ace suffered from coulrophobia, a fear of clowns. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) She also objected to racial prejudice, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks; Ghost Light) and was a feminist who objected to chauvinism. (AUDIO: The Veiled Leopard, No Man’s Land; PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys)
Ace was quite compassionate under her tough exterior. She comforted any upset person, such as Judith Winters, who was mentally broken after her experience being controlled by the Renegade Dalek's Supreme, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) Bellboy, who was torn over the Psychic Circus's fall since being taken over by the Gods of Ragnarok, (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) and Squeak when the Tremas Master's kitling killed her cat. (TV: Survival) She felt sorry for Helen A losing Fifi even though she'd led Terra Alpha with an iron fist. (TV: The Happiness Patrol) She tended to Karra even though she was a Cheetah Person. (TV: Survival) She was happy on the idea of humans and Silurians making peace. (PROSE: Blood Heat)
Ace's name
Ace's full name was never revealed on the television series, in which she was usually referred to by her nickname. Her surname was not established until original novels featuring the character were published, but her first name, Dorothy, was referred to on screen in the television story Dragonfire. Production notes suggest that it was intended that her last name would be Gale, given the fact that she was transported to Iceworld via a time storm, much like Dorothy Gale, transported to Oz by a tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.[source needed] The novels (and, later, the Big Finish audio dramas) gave Ace the last name of McShane. The Past Doctor Adventures set after the television story Survival and written by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry used the surname Gale, as the authors were unaware of the name used in the New Adventures. This was eventually resolved to some extent when the novel Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski implied that her full name was Dorothy Gale McShane, a version later taken up by the audios.
Ace's farewell
Ace is the only televised companion whose departure from the Doctor's company has not been definitively established in any media. Instead, there are a number of conflicting accounts. If Doctor Who had continued as a television series after Season 26, script editor Andrew Cartmel had planned that Ace go to attend university on Gallifrey where, despite her human heritage, she would have trained as an apprentice Time Lord. She would have left halfway through Season 27. Beginning with the novelisation of The Curse of Fenric, spin-off media have put forward conflicting scenarios of how Ace finally departed the company of the Doctor. The TV movie Doctor Who did not explain, rationalise, or even address her apparent absence from the TARDIS. In The Sarah Jane Adventures television story Death of the Doctor, a reference was made to a former companion of the Doctor named "Dorothy", who was running an organisation known as "A Charitable Earth". Sophie Aldred has stated that she does not believe that this would be Ace's chosen profession unless the charity was nothing more than a front for UNIT. However, this was eventually confirmed to be Ace in the Big Finish audio drama In Remembrance, which hinted at its conclusion that the organisation was more than just a simple charity. This implication was later supported by At Childhood's End. At Childhood's End also offers a possible explanation of sorts for the vast amount of conflicting accounts by implying that contact with the Quantum Anvil has fractured Ace's personal timeline into multiple possible ones. Russell T Davies revealed in issue 445 of Doctor Who Magazine that he hoped to have Aldred return as Ace in The Sarah Jane Adventures, both in the present day and potentially also in flashback sequences. The death of Elisabeth Sladen, however, prompted the premature conclusion of the series. Davies was later able to nod to this idea in some fashion for the webcast Farewell, Sarah Jane, by having Ace appear as one of the many guests at Sarah Jane's funeral and ultimately departing the funeral as the new owner of K9.
Doctor Who: Legacy
In the story of Doctor Who: Legacy, the Seventh Doctor is separated from Ace by a time paradox.
•Dorothy "Ace" McShane at the Doctor Who Legacy wiki
Apr 9, 2021 · Ace is one of the more unusual Doctor Who companions. With a love of explosives and a mysterious backstory, she left the series in 1989 and more many years her fate remained a mystery. Ace, the most explosive of the Doctor Who companions. (C) BBC Studios. Of course, this wasn’t how it was meant to go.
Ace (. Doctor Who. ) Ace is a fictional character played by Sophie Aldred in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. [4] A 20th-century Earth teenager from the London suburb of Perivale, she is a companion of the Seventh Doctor and was a regular in the series from 1987 to 1989 and returned in 2022. [5]
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Oct 18, 2022 · Setting a Template for Future Companions. If Tegan’s presence gave the TARDIS crew a much needed kick up the backside, Ace (aka Dorothy McShane) literally blew the bloody doors off with her ...
