Ace (Doctor Who)
Doctor Who companion
Ace 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 is a companion of the Seventh Doctor and was a regular in the series from 1987 to 1989 and returned in 2022. She is considered one of the Doctor's most popular companions.
Ace appeared in ten stories (32 episodes), and was the final companion in the original run of the classic series.
Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel said that the character was written to be a "fighter and not a screamer". In the television series Ace reveals that her real given name is Dorothy. Her family name is never explicitly stated in the series but spin-off media refer to her as Dorothy Gale, Dorothy McShane and Dorothy Gale McShane.
Character history
The streetwise teen character was developed by Andrew Cartmel, strongly influenced by a female space engineer in Love and Rockets.
Ace is a 16-year-old human who first appears in the 1987 serial Dragonfire, where she is working as a waitress in the frozen food retail complex of Iceworld on the planet Svartos. She had been a troubled teen on Earth, having been expelled from school for blowing up the art room as a "creative statement".
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This entry incorporates text from “Ace (Doctor Who)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.