Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (30 page)

The Seventh Doctor

The Expanded Universe

With the non-cancellation of the television series in 1989, it was only a matter of time before something was done to continue the Doctor’s adventures. The comic strips in
Doctor Who Magazine
waited for no man and proceeded with companionless adventures, but what of Ace, who was last seen walking towards that big cup of tea in the sky?

Enter Virgin Publishing!

WH Allen, under the Target imprint, had been printing novelisations of the television stories since the early 1970s, and had often broached the idea of publishing original novels based on the series. Only two ever surfaced under the
Companions of Doctor Who
umbrella title;
Harry Sullivan’s War
and
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma
. But this all changed in 1991, by which time Virgin had purchased WH Allen, when they got the rights from the BBC to publish original
Doctor Who
novels – and so the
New Adventures
were born.

For several years these were the only ongoing stories to feature the Doctor and Ace (interlinked with comic strips at one point), but Big Finish came along in 1999 and launched a new series of audio dramas featuring the Fifth to Seventh Doctors. At first it was a simple matter of linking the two products together, but as time went on it became quite clear that the tales of the Doctor and Ace performed in the Big Finish dramas no longer gelled with those published by Virgin, and latterly by BBC Books.

Over at Virgin, Ace was replaced by original-to-prose companion Professor Bernice Summerfield (a character who proved so popular that she continues to this day, having adventures with Big Finish, twenty years later). Bernice was the first new companion created for Virgin, while at Big Finish the Doctor and Ace were joined by their own brand new companion, Thomas Hector Schofield (Hex, as he was known).

As later companion, Amy, would go on to say; this is where it gets complicated…

As we saw in the Sixth Doctor’s Expanded Universe, the character of Mel is well served, the writers enjoying developing her into a strong and well focused character, in a way she never got to be on television. They also enjoyed delving into how Mel joined the Doctor, and fixing the issue surrounding the final moments of
The Trial of a Time Lord
. The writers of the Seventh Doctor Expanded Universe also take it upon themselves to explore what happens to make her leave so suddenly with Glitz at the end of
Dragonfire
.

Before that, though, there is the small matter of her travels with the Seventh Doctor. She doesn’t appear in many EU stories with the Seventh Doctor, only appearing in two novels and a handful of audio dramas. Very little new is learned, however, but she does appear in a story that shares a lot of similarities with the 2008 episode
The Fires of Pompeii
– even the title.
The Fires of Vulcan
was released in 2000, and like in the later television episode, it is set during the moments leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the death of all those in Pompeii. Learning that they are stuck in a time paradox, the ash-shell of the TARDIS having been discovered in 1980, the Doctor realises they are destined to die with Pompeii. It is Mel who forces the Doctor to consider a way out of the paradox. In a short story called
Special Weapon
s, 1999, Mel meets a young man called Oliver during World War II. Still shocked by the death of Pex in the television story
Paradise Towers
, Mel tries to convince him not to fight the Germans, worried he will die needlessly, but regardless of Mel’s words he still intends to join the army the following year.

In
Heritage
, published in 2002, we discover that in another timeline Mel never left the TARDIS with Glitz, but instead she stayed on Heritage where she died in the sixty-first century. However, in the novel
Head Games
, 1995, we do meet Mel some years after she left with Glitz. She explains she parted company with Glitz after six months, and tried to hitch-hike across space, ending on the planet Avalone where she got stuck. The Doctor tells her that he knew she was there, but he thought she had settled. In truth she tried for Earth again, but got kidnapped by the evil ‘Dr Who’ who imprisoned her in the Land of Fiction. She is disgusted by the way the Doctor has changed since she left, and even though Ace attempts to explain why they have needed to get ‘harder’, she refuses to speak to the Doctor again. She discovers that he manipulated her to leave him on Iceworld because he knew she was not the kind of companion he needed. Ace agrees to get Mel back home using her time hopper.

The last we see of Mel is in the two-part short story
Missing
published in 1999. Here we learn that Mel often sent her parents postcards whenever the Doctor brought her near her own time, and that they have missed her dearly. She talks to Detective Inspector Bob Lines (previously in the novel
Business Unusual
), who offers to take her the rest of the way home.

Ace, in the Expanded Universe, becomes one of the most storied companions ever. It seems she lives at least three different lives, which are not always easy to reconcile. Her first Expanded Universe life is in the Virgin
New Adventures
, and for four years in the comic strip of
Doctor Who Magazine
which ran concurrently with the novels (from
Fellow Travellers
to
Cuckoo
[
issues #164 - 210]
), which see her becoming Time’s Vigilante, while her second is in the comic strip
Ground Zero
that leads to her death, and the third is her audio adventures in which she teams up with Hex and goes through a very different maturing process to that witnessed in the
New Adventures
. Other than a multitude of short stories, the novel authors seem to be disinterested in exploring her journeys with the Doctor during the television seasons, even though there are plenty of gaps to explore, notably between seasons (see the previous chapter for more information on these gaps). Much like
The
New Adventures
and Big Finish, the BBC Books tend to explore her life post-
Survival.
This causes a problem in trying to reconcile them with the Virgin material, since the
New Adventures
begin after
Survival
and tell Ace’s story in a way that allows for no other material. It is, therefore, probably easier to place the BBC Books with the Big Finish audios that lead up to the introduction of Hex. As such, we shall look at those books after the
New Adventures.

Before that, though, a very quick look at the two novels that do take place during the television series. The first thing of note is that the earlier book, chronologically at least,
Relative Dementias
(2002), explains the two surnames of Ace. Throughout the
New Adventures
and the Big Finish audios it is accepted that her real name is Dorothy McShane (first established in the 1995 novel,
Set Piece
), however in Prime Time (2000) her name is given as Dorothy Gale. To make some kind of sense of this,
Relative Dementias
has Ace explaining that her first and middle names come from
The Wizard of Oz
(as revealed in
Love and War
this was her grandmother’s favourite film), thus making her full name Dorothy Gale McShane. In this book we are also shown that she has learned some basic TARDIS operational procedures, enough to cross her own timeline, and has already learned about regeneration. In
The Hollow Men
(1998) we discover that Ace suffers from hay fever and has a very strong dislike for the countryside (which follows, since in
Relative Dementias
she says that at heart she is not a country girl). She carries with her some putty and a small metal disc which, when combined, form to make a powerful explosive. She also screams, when a scarecrow breaks through a door, for the first time since she was ten years old.

Ace Timeline #1: The New Adventures

Ace’s first Expanded Universe timeline, the
New Adventures
, presents a version of
Doctor Who
that has grown up with its audience, and explores her growing mistrust of the Doctor, developing his manipulation of her life – first seen in television stories such as
Ghost Light
and
The Curse of Fenric
, and it soon became a case of sex, guns and lock ‘n’ load…

Ace’s television journey makes it quite clear that there are some major issues between her and her mother. With so many hints it is hardly a surprise that her past is explored in so much detail during the
New Adventures
– some might say in
too
much detail. Her mother didn’t care much about Ace’s school life, and was absent so much that the school arranged for her to get a social worker. Often her mother’s various boyfriends would look after her, which tended to mean Ace being around a lot of booze. She usually calls her mother by her name, Audrey, while Audrey tended to call the young Ace ‘Dorry’. At school she was called Dotty, and was the object of bullying from Chad Boyle (in one reality he even kills her). Fourteen-year-old Ace idolised singer Johnny Chess (the son of ex-companions Ian & Barbara Chesterton), and after he rejected her attention she resolved to never like someone again without getting to know them first.

Following on from
Survival
, Ace is initially much the same as she was onscreen, fiercely loyal to her ‘Professor’ and always the first to throw herself into any adventure. Still her love of explosives continues, and in
Timewyrm: Exodus
she creates nitro-9a, much more stable than the previous brand, but half the weight and half the explosive quality. In that story she also takes up arms for the first time, shooting guns and blowing several Nazis away to protect the Doctor. She considers the Doctor her best friend and only family, but in
Timewyrm: Apocalypse
the first chink in their relationship appears, after Ace learns that the Doctor knew Raphael – a young man befriended by Ace on Kirith – would die, and does nothing to prevent it. She finds herself very angry about this, certain the Doctor could have done something. It is the first of many such actions that will, ultimately, pull them apart. Nonetheless she still trusts the Doctor, after visiting his mind in
Timewyrm: Revelation
and learning how tortured he is by his past lives. At this point she is, apparently, in her early twenties, which possibly ties in with the obvious gap between seasons twenty-five and twenty-six. She is sure she is going to travel with the Doctor forever, but this changes in
Nightshade
when she meets Robin Yeadon in 1968.

She falls deeply in love with Robin, a proper innocent, deeply emotional love, and when she decides it is time to stop travelling and remain with Robin, the Doctor refuses to let her go. He
accidentally
materialises the TARDIS on an alien world instead of back on Earth. Ace later meets a much older Robin again in Cheldon Bonniface 2010, in
Happy Endings
, and learns that he spent five months waiting for her before moving on to London. In an odd twist, by 2010 Robin is dating Audrey McShane, Ace’s mother, and the two get engaged.

In
Cat Litter
(in
issue #192
of
Doctor Who Magazine
) Ace finds her bedroom deleted by the TARDIS and a new room appears – she wonders why, and the Doctor warns her that something dangerous is coming. Not long after, on the planet Heaven, in
Love and War
, Ace meets a traveller called Jan Rydd. They fall in love, but unlike Robin it is more of a mad, passionate love (one suspects it could be a rebound on Ace’s part – certainly by
Lucifer Rising
she doubts her love for Jan and thinks it was an act of rebellion against the Doctor) and they get engaged. Jan is killed by the Hoothi (supposedly mentioned in
The Brain of Morbius
,but it was misheard by author Paul Cornell – should be the Muthi) – an act the Doctor had a huge part in. Ace is beyond unforgiving of the Doctor, even more so when she discovers he had always planned on sacrificing Jan. She accuses the Doctor of being jealous of Jan and how she was going to leave the Doctor for him. She departs the Doctor’s company, taking with her a device called a tesseract to remind herself of Jan. The Doctor keeps Ace’s bomber jacket, knowing that she will need it again one day.

For Ace it is three years until she next meets the Doctor in
Deceit
, by which time she has become part of Earth’s Spacefleet, Special Weapons division. She is hardened and bitter, violence and sex being her currency. She discovers that the Doctor psychically drove her away from him in
Love and War
because he was infected by a protoplasmic virus which infected him on Tír na n-Ôg (
Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark
), and he left the tesseract with her so she could contact him when the time was right to remove the virus. She remains with the Doctor to keep him honest, but Bernice Summerfield (an archaeologist who joined the Doctor on Heaven) is unsure about her. Ace, while travelling with the Doctor, was infected with a virus that boosts her immune system and prevents her from getting ill. She now considers the twenty-sixth century her home. While visiting Haiti in 1915 (
White Darkness
) Ace is made to confront her violent tendencies. She shoots a man called Richmann in self defence and continues shooting, emptying her gun, angry and upset over her wounded friend. She throws the gun away in fear of her own future. The violence gets worse in
Shadowmind
when she wipes out the entire command crew of the
Broadsword
, who are possessed by the Umbra, and considers it the worst thing she has done.