Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane was a companion of the Seventh Doctor.
Biography
Before travelling with the Doctor
Dorothy Gale McShane was born on 20 August 1970 (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation, Falls the Shadow, Set Piece, Relative Dementias) to Audrey Dudman and Harry McShane. (TV: The Curse of Fenric, AUDIO: The Rapture)
Ace had a younger brother named Liam, who was born in 1974. She did not learn of her brother's existence until meeting him on Ibiza on 14 May 1997. (AUDIO: The Rapture)
She was named after the main character of The Wizard of Oz because her mother (AUDIO: The Settling) and maternal grandmother (PROSE: Love and War) were fans of the film. Her mother, Audrey, claimed that her mother, Kathleen, found it took her away from all her miseries. (PROSE: Love and War)
She was a member of the Church of England (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters) but was not very religious. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark)
In February 1971, the Seventh Doctor visited an infant Ace to apologise to her for his manipulation of her at Gabriel Chase in relation to Fenric. (PROSE: Ace of Hearts)
In the mid 1980s, while working in McDonald's, Ace briefly met the Fifth Doctor's companion Tegan Jovanka. (PROSE: The Crystal Bucephalus)
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 and the racist firebombing of her friend Manisha Purkayastha's flat. Manisha died, prompting an angry Ace set fire to Gabriel Chase, an abandoned mansion said to be haunted by an ancient evil. (TV: Ghost Light, PROSE: Blood Heat)
Ace set off fire alarms at school to miss double French lessons. (AUDIO: Revenge of the Swarm) She studied The Tale of Beowulf at school, but only paid attention due to the fighting. (AUDIO: Black and White)
She was a troubled teen on Earth, expelled from school for blowing up the art room as a "creative statement." (TV: Battlefield)
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)
Later that year, 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 Iceworld, she got a job as a waitress and formed a relationship with Glitz (TV: Dragonfire), to whom she lost her virginity. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Some time 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 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 lead 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)
Ace relaxes after having defeated the Cybermen and Nemesis (TV: Silver Nemesis)
Under the Doctor's tutelage, Ace fought the Daleks and faced Davros in November 1963. During this adventure, her portable stereo was destroyed by a Dalek. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks). She saved the Psychic Circus on Segonax from the Gods of Ragnarok. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) She stopped the Cybermen from getting hold of Nemesis in 1988 (TV: Silver Nemesis) and opposed Helen A and her sadistic government, which required people to be happy on pain of death. (TV: The Happiness Patrol)
At this stage, the relationship between the Doctor and Ace took a darker turn. At least initially, he was 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 a stronger person. (TV: Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric)
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, cosmic evil known as called 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 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)
She later met Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, helping UNIT defeat the Destroyer and Morgaine in Carbury in 1997. (TV: Battlefield)
In another alternate 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 Sixth Doctor did not seem to be particularly pleased at 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)
Ace returned to Perivale where she found that all her old friends had gone missing. She thought they had moved on, but they had been taken to the Cheetah World as prey for the Cheetah People. The Tremas Master, an old enemy of the Doctor, was using them to get off the planet. Ace returned with two of her friends and went off to travel with the Doctor again. (TV: Survival)
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)
Later travels
Adventures with Raine Creevy
Ace disguised as the captain of the Space Vessel Vancouver with the Doctor. (AUDIO: Earth Aid)
As it turned out, he was trying to shape her mind to the point that she would be able to attend the Time Lord Academy. The Doctor's manipulation of her was ultimately for the benefit of Time Lord observers who were assessing her potential. Ultimately, however, she refused this academic opportunity and continued to travel with the Doctor. (AUDIO: Thin Ice) Following this decision, she also travelled for a time with Raine Creevy, with whom she had a somewhat prickly relationship. (AUDIO: Crime of the Century, Animal, Earth Aid)
After Raine
Some time later she discovered a plan made by the Master involving Duchamp 331 in the 26th century, and met Bev Tarrant for the second time. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)
Following a brush with Nazis in Colditz Castle in October 1944, (AUDIO: Colditz) the Doctor took Ace to Ibiza on 14 May 1997 to "relax" following her ordeal. While there, she discovered that she had a younger brother named Liam McShane. (AUDIO: The Rapture)
Adventures with Hex
Whilst in London in 2021 investigating with the Doctor for evidence of "xenotech" — alien technology being used on humans, which was in fact Cyber-Technology — she met Hex, a nurse working at St Gart's Hospital. Following their adventure, she convinced him to join her and the Doctor, taking him under her wing. (AUDIO: The Harvest)
The TARDIS materialised in a wood, where Ace accidentally fell into a lake. Taking her to a nearby cabin, the Doctor discovered a series of murders and that the people there were experimenting with time. Ten years earlier, a girl had been killed as a result of a misdiagnosis and the scientists were trying to send a message back to warn their past selves. This interference with the timeline caused the girl to become alive again in a state of zombie-like limbo. To correct their mistake, the Doctor travelled back and undid the damage. (AUDIO: Night Thoughts)
The Doctor and his companions went for breakfast on London's South Bank, but soon discovered that both London and the TARDIS weren't real. Voyaging through the depths of the "fake TARDIS", the Doctor found he and his companions had been entrapped by a vortex predator. They eventually located the real TARDIS and escaped back into the real universe. (PROSE: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast)
The Doctor sent Ace and Hex to Monte Carlo in 1969 to recover the Veiled Leopard diamond. (AUDIO: The Veiled Leopard)
Reunited with the Doctor, the trio arrived in Egypt in 1902 where they met a young Time Lady named Jane Templeton who had been stranded for centuries on Earth trying to find her TARDIS. She accidentally transgressed the laws of time by becoming a god to the locals. The Doctor informed Jane that her TARDIS was dying. Afterwards, Jane flew her TARDIS into the sun, but rejected the Doctor's help to save her life. (AUDIO: False Gods)
The Doctor travelled to the island of Mendavelia in 33 AD to help solve a code, but fell into a trap laid by the Order of Simplicity. He was infected with a virus that drained the intelligence from the brain. Using the intellect of primitives, the Doctor freed himself. (AUDIO: Order of Simplicity)
The TARDIS crew attempted to track down an alien artefact that controlled others into telling the truth. Ace met a child version of her mother while the Doctor and Hex followed Joey, the person who stole the artefact from the Forge. (AUDIO: Casualties of War)
The Doctor, Ace and Hex encountered a being from a dimension made out of language and communication — Nobody No-One. This being followed him into a top secret facility and proceeded to cause chaos until the Doctor captured him inside a book only for him to escape again. (AUDIO: The Word Lord)
The Doctor, Ace and Hex landed on Bliss, a jungle planet under Dalek attack. While Ace and Hex helped in the battle with the Daleks, the Doctor discovered that a local professor had combined larvae and Piranha-locust DNA to create a new species known as the Kiseibya. The Ki-sabia fed on metal and were created to save mankind from the Daleks, but quickly became uncontrollable. They decimated the Dalek forces easily. The Doctor planned to blow up the station and slaughter this new species, but in the end, Beth, a former prisoner of the Daleks stayed behind to finish the job. (AUDIO: Enemy of the Daleks)
During an adventure in 1854, the exterior of the TARDIS turned white after the HADS was activated by cannon fire, and Hex was fatally shot, (AUDIO: The Angel of Scutari) so the Doctor and Ace returned him to Earth in 2025, where, after an adventure involving Nimrod and the Forge, it was revealed to Hex that the Sixth Doctor was involved in his mother's death. (AUDIO: Project: Lazarus)
The Doctor left Hex and Ace for a while, growing a Black TARDIS, and began travelling alone in it. (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters)
While he was travelling his Black TARDIS, he sent the White TARDIS, containing Hex and Ace, to 1989 in an alternative timeline. He gave them the mission to investigate the Elder Gods, who created this timeline. They managed to defeat the Elders Gods, and restore the original timeline, just in time for a Black TARDIS to arrive and retrieve them. (AUDIO: Protect and Survive)
When they entered the Black TARDIS, they discovered Sally Morgan and Lysandra Aristedes already there. Upon discovering this, they realised that the Doctor was travelling in both TARDISes, simultaneously. Hex, Ace, Sally and Lysandra then arrived in 5th century Denmark, where they met Beowulf, and faced an alien called Garundel. They discovered that the Doctor was previously in this location, but was kidnapped by an unknown enemy. After following the Doctor's clues and instructions, they retrieved an artefact called Weyland's shield, restored the original and destroy the Black TARDIS, on their way to locate the Doctor. (AUDIO: Black and White)
The TARDIS crew located the Doctor in a pocket universe which was under the control of Fenric. After releasing the Doctor, it was revealed[by whom?] that Fenric was playing a game against another Elder God called Weyland for control of Weyland's shield, which could grant omnipotence to an Elder God. It was also discovered that the TARDIS crew had been pawns of Weyland, used to help him win the game against Fenric, and Hex was destined to become the quintessential pawn in Weyland's plan, who prevented his death after being shot in Scutari. However, Hex managed to banish Weyland, and stop the game, but became possessed by Fenric. Hex sacrificed himself to prevent Fenric from permanently taking control and gaining power, saving the Doctor, Ace, Sally and Lysandra. (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters)
Leaving the Doctor
Ace battles with a Dalek, blasting through its armour. (COMIC: Metamorphosis)
Ace gradually became more and more frustrated with the Doctor's manipulations. (PROSE: Nightshade)
After Ace said goodbye to Julian at his funeral, the Doctor took the TARDIS to the planet Heaven in the year 2570. Ace met the young Traveller, Jan Rydd, and fell in love with him. Along with the psychic, Christopher, she helped free the Doctor from being trapped in Puterspace by the Vacuum Church and wanted Jan to travel with her in the TARDIS. However, Jan was infected by Hoothi fibres. Through the Doctor's manipulations, Jan put Ace to sleep with a drug and tried taking a shuttle on his own to the Hoothi sphere, but Máire woke Ace. They followed Jan.
On board the shuttle, Máire betrothed Ace and Jan to be wed. Thinking that they would set the shuttle on a collision course with the sphere, Ace and Máire ejected their pods. Jan instead ignited the sphere with his pyrokinesis, killing three of the four Hoothi and sacrificing himself.
Landing on Heaven, Ace spoke to the part of the Hoothi group mind containing Julian, killing the last Hoothi and freeing the dead minds from the group mind. Angered by him causing Jan's death, Ace left the Doctor. (PROSE: Love and War, AUDIO: Love and War)
In Spacefleet
Now living in the 26th century, Ace joined Spacefleet and fought Daleks and other intergalactic threats. She encountered Bombardier Daleks and tried to steal the power from a Special Weapons Dalek after it vaporised a Red Crescent ship full of children, pitying it as it begged her to kill it. (PROSE: Lucifer Rising) She also spent three weeks in a mine on a nameless alien world, was chased by a creature with six arms, (PROSE: Falls the Shadow) took part in the Ramos Offensive on Lan Beta and was stationed on Verdanna. (PROSE: Parasite)
Three years later, combat-hardened and cynical, she rejoined the Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, (PROSE: Deceit) attempting to gather information for IMC. (PROSE: Lucifer Rising)
Travels with Bernice Summerfield
Ace's relationship with Bernice was at first less than cordial, possibly out of jealousy, but the two eventually became friends. While in 1976 London, with her relationships with Bernice and the Doctor at breaking point, Ace accepted the offer of the misguided renegade Time Lord the Monk to join with him as his companion and accomplice. However, she meant to betray the Monk all along. By this time she had finally gotten over the death of Jan. (PROSE: No Future)
Life after the Doctor
Ace on her Time Bike. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
After their ordeal with the Robot Ants, Ace left the Doctor again to become Time's Vigilante. She used a short-range time hopper mounted on a motorcycle to patrol a particular segment of time, basing herself in Paris in 1887. (PROSE: The Curse of Fenric, Set Piece) She later attended Bernice's wedding to Jason Kane. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
At a later point, she was sent by the Doctor to follow Harmonious 14 Zink to Erratoon and was imprisoned with an unnamed tracer who had taken human form. There, her memory was wiped by the robotic constables. The Doctor restored her memory with the help of the TARDIS. (AUDIO: The Prisoner's Dilemma)
Ace was eventually admitted to the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey, where she was given the planet of Talmeson to watch over. Visiting Earth to catch up with her mother, she discovered that she had died from cancer. When she returned, she discovered that Talmeson had been wiped out by the Daleks, prompting her to wipe out the Daleks by time locking Skaro using an Omega device. When the Doctor found out that Ace had gone missing, he sent Bernice Summerfield to find her. (AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro)
Ace later saved Benny from the being trapped in a pyramid on Mars. (AUDIO: The Pyramid of Sutekh) Taking her to find the Eye of Horus for the Doctor, the pair found that it wasn't in Sutekh's tomb. She used her thieving skills to try and steal it from a museum, but discovered that it was already stolen. Ace and Benny tracked it down to Graull's bank where they used it to release Isis. (AUDIO: The Vaults of Osiris)
She eventually returned to Gallifrey and completed her academy training and joined the the Celestial Intervention Agency. She undertook many missions for them, often to avert civilisations from discovering time travel, but was annoyed that her TARDIS had a working chameleon circuit, making it difficult to find in the field, and wished it could just appear to be an old police box.
On one such mission, she arrived back to her TARDIS to find Rexx who wanted to give her a mission as her companion to discover origin of an anomaly near Earth. Rexx took her to the site of the anomaly and found the Hand of Omega there. Rexx though that Ace couldn't be trusted as she was loyal to Romana. He used Ace as Romana had given her certain privalages since she had travelled with the Doctor and had her hypnotised as she had affinity with the Hand due to a previous adventure with the Doctor. He planed to then have Omega inhabit her in a bid to help him escape. Coordinator Narvin was sent by Lady President Romana to find her and tracked her to Greater Henge on Earth before they were both taken through the black hole into Omega's domain. When they arrived Omega released his control on Ace. When Romana arrived in this domain she enabled Ace to help stop the realm collapsing. Omega stole her TARDIS, because it was known to the CIA. She escaped from the domain, with Romana and Narvin piloting the Type 160 but when it ran out of power she was stranded just after escaping the black hole with Narvin after Romana was saved by Irving Braxiatel. (AUDIO: Intervention Earth)
Alternate fates
Ace, still apparently a teenager and accompanying the Seventh Doctor, died in an explosion she set to kill one of the three Lobri. (COMIC: Ground Zero)
Alternative timelines
In an alternative timeline, Ace was killed by Chad Boyle in December 1978 when he hit her on the head with a brick. Boyle was subsequently recruited by the Timewyrm. This timeline was negated when the adult Ace prevented Boyle from attacking her younger self. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation)
In another alternative timeline, Ace was killed by Kurtz in Colditz Castle in October 1944. The laser technology contained in her Walkman was used by Nazi scientists to refine uranium and create nuclear weapons. They subsequently bombed New York City and Moscow, forcing the surrender of the United States and the Soviet Union and winning the war for Germany. This timeline was negated by an alternative version of the Eighth Doctor who, while posing as a German scientist named Johann Schmidt, fabricated a "flight log" for the TARDIS and manipulated Elizabeth Klein into travelling back in time to Colditz in October 1944 on the pretext of retrieving the Doctor so that he could teach her to pilot the TARDIS. Her lover Major Jonas Faber saw through Schmidt's trickery but was too late as Klein had already decided to disobey his orders and make the trip into the past. Unfortunately for Klein, her arrival in Colditz alerted the Seventh Doctor to the impending alteration of history and he and Ace were able to prevent it. (AUDIO: Colditz, Klein's Story)
In an alternate timeline where the computer was never invented, it is strongly implied[by whom?] that Ace became a young woman known as Dee, who worked with the amnesic Eighth Doctor to try and topple the corrupt Star Chamber that ruled Britain. (PROSE: The Domino Effect)
Undated events
- At some point, Ace was taken to the Black Archive by UNIT to have her record as a companion of the Doctor taken. Her memories of the visit were subsequently erased and she was sent on her way. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
References
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 Sector of the Department of Commonality. He turned away Ace when she was being sent to a correction unit for spraying something on a school wall. He said it was "out of [his] hands". (COMIC: John Smith and the Common Men)
Personality
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.
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)
She believed that the Doctor had the "deepest, saddest eyes." (AUDIO: The Prisoner's Dilemma)
Ace once told the Doctor that she loved him. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders)
She did not want to have children. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders)
The Doctor expressed a belief that she would either become a renegade Time Lord or Lord President of the High Council. (AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro)
Behind the scenes
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. 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 gave her full name as Dorothy Gale McShane, a version later taken up by the audios.
Ace's farewell
A Doctor Who Magazine promotional image showing a recreation of the depiction of Ace seen in the Virgin books of the 90s.
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 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 or rationalise her absence.
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. [1]
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.
Miscellany
- Ace was the last companion of the Doctor to be a minor, up until Courtney Woods, who was 15. Ace was 16 when she joined the Doctor.
- According to Rona Munro, the writer of Survival, there was to be a lesbian subtext to the relationship between Ace and Karra. This raises the possibility of Ace being the first LGBT companion on screen. (DOC: Cat-Flap)
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