The Tylers
Rose Tyler
Before There Was Who
Rose Tyler Before There Was Who
Rose Marion Tyler led a normal life prior to meeting the man who would change her life forever...
Rose lived with her hairdresser mum, Jackie. The pair resided at Flat 48, Bucknall House, Powell Estate, SE15 7GO and the only travels Rose had been on was a school trip to France and an annual holiday to South Wales with her mum.
Her father Peter Tyler died when Rose was only 6 months.
She began dating Mickey Smith at the age of 14 and was suspended from school at 15 for inciting the school choir to go on strike!
Rose left school at 16 after sitting her GCSEs. She then had an ill fated affair with a musician called Jimmy Stone with whom she lived with albeit briefly. The romance didn't last long and Rose soon returned home to Jackie and Mickey.
Jackie called in a favour from her ex boyfriend and managed to get Rose a job as a shop assistant working in a London department store called Henrik's.
The Doctor
When Rose met the Doctor in Rose, she was working as a shop assistant at Henrik's department store in Regent Street, London. She also had a boyfriend named Mickey Smith and lived in a council flat with her mother Jackie. Rose left school without taking her A-levels but did win the bronze medal in an under-sevens gymnastics competition at her junior school. Her father, Pete Tyler, died in 1987 in a car accident, the year after Rose was born.
Rose Tyler One night after the shop closed she encountered mannequins coming to life in the basement of the building. The Autons were about to dispose of her when the Doctor saved her life, although he went on to destroy the building in the process, depriving Rose of her job. She went on to aid the Doctor in tracking down the hiding place of the Nestene Consciousness that was animating the Autons and subsequently helped defeat its plans of world conquest. She then joined the Doctor on his travels in the TARDIS.
In her travels with the Doctor, Rose (among other things) saw the end of the world, encountered the Doctor's oldest enemy and learned about the consequences of tampering with history. The Doctor even modified her mobile phone to be able to communicate across time and space, among other functions. She nicknamed it the "Superphone".
During the 2005 series, the words "Bad Wolf" followed the Doctor and Rose around, the phrase being scattered like clues through the places that they visited. In The Parting of the Ways, it was revealed that Rose was the Bad Wolf — the words were a message that she had left to herself in time and space when she absorbed the energies of the time vortex to save the Doctor and the Earth from the Daleks. The Doctor had just returned her home to place her out of harm's way, but "Bad Wolf" was a reminder that it was possible to get back to him. This led her to the point where she would absorb the energies, creating a predestination paradox and making it possible not just to destroy the Daleks but to leave those clues.
However, the energies she absorbed were destroying her body. The Doctor took those energies into himself, sacrificing his ninth incarnation and regenerating before Rose's eyes into the Tenth Doctor.
Rose was initially disconcerted at the Doctor's transformation, and was even more distressed when the Doctor fell into a post-regenerative coma, unable to stop the threat of a Sycorax invasion. However, when the Doctor recovered and defeated the Sycorax, Rose happily accepted his new face and manner (The Christmas Invasion).
In Tooth and Claw she was made a dame by Queen Victoria, making her Dame Rose of the Powell Estate. Immediately afterwards, however, Victoria banished the two from the British Empire. When the Doctor, Rose and Mickey accidentally travelled to a parallel Earth, Rose met an alternate version of her father, Pete Tyler, who had become a success (Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel). At the end of that story, Mickey elected to stay on that parallel Earth to fight their Cybermen and Rose thought she would never see him again.
However, in the 2006 series finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, the Cybermen managed to invade Rose's universe along with the Daleks. Although Rose and the Doctor managed to remove both enemies from Earth, Rose ended up being trapped on the parallel Earth, albeit reunited with Pete, Mickey and Jackie, who had also followed. The Doctor managed to send one last signal through the cracks between universes, sharing a tearful farewell with her. He told Rose that she had been declared dead in the invasion. Rose in turn revealed that she was working for that universe's version of the Torchwood Institute due to her experience with aliens.
Jackie Tyler
It wasn't just Rose Tyler's life that was effected by her relationship with the Doctor, her loving mum Jackie, her loyal boyfriend Mickey and even her dad Pete, who had died when she was just a baby all had their lives changed forever.
Jackie Tyler was born February 1, 1967. Jackie is a single mum, following the death of her husband Pete. She workd from her on the Powell Estate in London as a hairdresser.
Jackie first met the Doctor after the department store at which Rose worked was destroyed. When the Doctor arrived at the flat Jackie and Rose share, Jackie attempted to flirt with the Doctor, to little avail. This first encounter set the stage for a sometimes antagonistic relationship between the two. During the final phase of the Auton invasion, several Autons attacked Jackie, but her life was spared when Rose and the Doctor managed to destroy the physical form of the Nestene Consciousness.
Jackie appeared briefly in The End of the World, when the Doctor enabled Rose's mobile phone to call Jackie from five billion years in the future. From Jackie's point of view, this phone call took place before the events of Rose.
When Rose left with the Doctor in the TARDIS, she intended to be back within hours. However, when Rose returned to London in Aliens of London, she discovered that twelve whole months had elapsed. Out of her mind with worry, Jackie had in the intervening year organised a poster campaign to search for her missing daughter, and even accused Rose's boyfriend Mickey of murdering her. When Rose returned, Jackie was furious with the Doctor for taking her away. Jackie also could not understand why Rose would not tell her where she had been, but discovered the truth when she saw the TARDIS. She was also nearly killed by a Slitheen disguised as a policeman, and began to truly appreciate how dangerous Rose's new lifestyle was when the Doctor ended the Slitheen's plans by calling a missile strike down on 10 Downing Street where he and Rose were trapped at the time.
While Jackie appears flighty at times, she genuinely loves her daughter and is extremely concerned for her safety, particularly given the life the Doctor and Rose lead. Even though her attitude towards the Doctor softened from hostility to grudging acceptance, she continued to worry about Rose and waited for her daughter's return.
A younger Jackie, appeared in Father's Day. Despite Rose's idyllic image of her parents' marriage, the relationship she saw when she travelled with the Doctor back to 1987 was stormy, and Jackie was threatening to divorce Pete. However, these fights were short-lived, and it was clear that both Jackie and Pete loved each other despite the arguments. After Pete's death, Jackie would tell Rose about her father, painting a picture of Pete as the ideal husband he was not.
The present-day Jackie made another appearance in the 2005 series finale, The Parting of the Ways. When the Doctor sent Rose back to her own time, Jackie was initially glad to have her daughter home again. However, she eventually helped Rose open the TARDIS console and return to help the Doctor. When she next appeared in The Christmas Invasion, her relationship with the Doctor was warmer than it was with his earlier incarnation: the Tenth Doctor was more open and friendly than the Ninth, and she seemed to trust him more.
Jackie features in five episodes of the 2006 series and made a brief appearance in the first episode New Earth. Coduri appeared as the Jackie Tyler of a parallel Earth in Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel. The "real" Jackie also made an appearance in the penultimate scene of the latter episode. Jackie appeared in Love & Monsters, where she expressed how hard and lonely it was to be left behind by her daughter, but promised that she would defend the Doctor and Rose for as long as she lived.
In Army of Ghosts she was caught up in the events of the Cyberman invasion when she was unwillingly taken along in the TARDIS to Torchwood Tower. Eventually Jackie ended up being transported to the parallel universe to live out her life, and started a new relationship with the alternate Pete. As of the end of Doomsday, she is three months pregnant with Pete's child and is living with Mickey, Rose and Pete as a family once more.
Pete Tyler
Pete Tyler was born on September 15, 1954 and died on November 7, 1987 in a hit-and-run accident when Rose was about six months old.
In Father's Day, Rose asked the Doctor to take her back to 1987 so she could witness her father's death. Jackie had told Rose as a child that her father had died alone, and Rose wanted to be there for him. When she was faced with the reality of what she was seeing, however, Rose impulsively rushed forward and saved Pete from being run down, changing history and causing a temporal paradox that damaged time. This attracted the destructive Reapers, who began to "sterilise" the wound in time by devouring everything in sight.
Pete eventually figured out that Rose was his daughter, and on listening to her describe what an ideal father he had been, also realised that Rose was lying to cover up the fact that he was supposed to be dead. The presence of Rose awakened Pete's paternal instincts; to save everyone and restore history, he deliberately stepped in front of the car that should have killed him. His sacrifice dismissed the Reapers and put time back on track, although history did change to a small extent — this time the driver did not flee the scene, and Rose was there to hold Pete's hand while he was dying. Pete died with a smile while looking on his daughter's face.
Although Pete was gone, it was his persistent spirit and a penchant for (as Jackie put it) "mad ideas" that Rose inherited. These pushed her to keep trying even when all hope seemed lost in the season finalé The Parting of the Ways, and save the world again.
A parallel Earth version of Pete Tyler appeared in the 2006 series episodes Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel and Doomsday. In this universe, not only is Pete still alive, but his Vitex health drinks have become hugely popular, and he is rich and successful (although he privately admitted to the President of Great Britain that they are just fizzy drinks). However, he and Jackie had not had children, although they had a pet terrier named Rose and were separated. In addition, his company had been bought by Cybus Corporation, leaving him relatively powerless.
The first assault of the Cybermen was at his mansion, on the occasion of Jackie's fortieth birthday. At first believed to be one of Lumic's minions, Pete revealed that he had in fact been a mole (under the name of Gemini) secretly broadcasting information about Lumic's dealings on an encrypted channel. He believed he was getting it to the Security Services, but was disappointed to discover he had in fact been communicating with Ricky Smith's small-time resistance group, the Preachers. He agreed to infiltrate the Cyber-factory and was horrified to discover that Jackie had been converted into a Cyberman.
Escaping from the burning factory, Pete was eventually responsible for severing a rope ladder which Lumic (now the Cyber-Controller) was using, sending Lumic falling to his apparent death. Rose tried to tell Pete about her origins, but he was unable to handle this information, quickly slipping away to help deal with the mess Lumic had left.
In the 2006 series finale, Doomsday, Pete had apparently moved into a position of leadership in the People's Republic. The surviving Cybermen from Lumic's factories had invaded the Doctor's universe thanks to a breach between realities caused by the passage of a Dalek void ship. Using technology from his universe's version of the Torchwood Institute, Pete, Mickey Smith and Jake Simmonds travelled to the Doctor's universe to help defeat the Cybermen. It became apparent, however, that constant travel between the worlds was damaging both universes, and only the Doctor could seal the breach.
Initially, Pete was ambivalent about the fate of the Doctor's world, Rose and that world's version of Jackie, but was ultimately unable to shake his concern for them. He met Jackie when he crossed over, swiftly forming a new relationship with her after an initial awkwardness, and later rescued Rose from falling into the breach. Following the sealing of the breach, all three Tylers were a family again on the parallel Earth, along with Mickey. When last seen, he and Jackie were expecting another child.
Mickey Smith
Early life
Mickey was born circa 1981. In at least one version of Mickey's life history, thanks to the agency of time travel, he met the adult version of Rose in 1987, whom the Doctor had transported to that time period. As a result, he "imprinted" on her and when they met again, he had a strong connection to her.
However, as time changed during the event, so we do not know if this happened to the main Mickey or an alternative version.
His father, a key cutter, left him at an early age, so that he ended up living with his grandmother, Rita-Anne Smith.
Mickey Smith was the boyfriend of Rose Tyler before she has her head turned by the Doctor and his time travelling adventures.
Mickey's father, Jackson Smith, left for Spain when he was very young. Mickey's mother could not cope with raising him alone and left him to be raised by his blind grandmother, Rita-Anne; however, Mickey's mother remained a sufficient part of Mickey's life that when Rose believed Mickey to be dead, she said, "I'll have to tell his mother." A few years prior to the events of Rose, Rita-Anne died after slipping on a damaged carpet and falling down the stairs. Mickey felt responsible for her death as he did not repair the carpet, despite frequent reminders.
When Rose, while investigating the Doctor, went to visit a conspiracy theorist named Clive, Mickey was captured by the Nestene Consciousness, which created a living plastic facsimile of him to gather intelligence about the Doctor. Kept a captive by the Nestenes to maintain the duplicate, he was overwhelmed by the revelation that alien life existed and was in a state of paralysed panic throughout most of the Doctor and Rose's final confrontation with the Nestenes.
Mickey's initial cowardice (and his panicky description of the Doctor as an "alien... a thing") did not impress the Doctor, and when the Doctor offered to take on Rose as his newest companion, he pointedly said that Mickey was not invited. While mere days passed for Rose in the TARDIS, a year had passed in London when she returned in Aliens of London. In the interim, she had been declared missing. Mickey was suspected of Rose's murder and interviewed by the police on five occasions but was not arrested due to lack of evidence. Mickey had also spent the year unearthing information about the Doctor and waiting for Rose to return, taking over the www.whoisdoctorwho.co.uk website formerly run by Clive.
Although still dismissive of Mickey (deliberately calling him "Ricky" and terming him "Mickey the Idiot"), the Doctor had to rely on him when the Doctor and Rose were trapped inside 10 Downing Street during the events of World War Three. Mickey's actions in that story, bravely defending Rose's mother Jackie from the Slitheen and helping end the alien threat, earned him a degree of the Doctor's respect. At the conclusion of the story, the Doctor offered Mickey a place aboard the TARDIS but he declined, asking the Doctor not to tell Rose that he had done so. The Doctor in turn gave Mickey a compact disc containing a computer virus that would wipe out all mention of him on the Internet, but according to his website, Mickey was undecided as to whether to use it.
A younger (around six years old) version of Mickey appeared in the episode Father's Day played by Casey Dyer, where he met the time travelling Rose in 1987, although he was not made aware of the role she would play in his future. The present-day Mickey reappeared in Boom Town, where he told Rose that he had started dating Trisha Delaney, although whether this was true or merely to make Rose jealous and return to him is not certain. Although he bitterly walked away from Rose at the end of that episode, he was willing to help Rose get back to the Doctor in the 2005 series finale The Parting of the Ways.
Mickey returned in the 2005 Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion, and also briefly appeared at the opening of New Earth. After The Christmas Invasion he took a more proactive stance in investigating extraterrestrial threats to Earth, alerting Rose and the Doctor to strange events at a local secondary school in School Reunion. At the end of that episode, he joined the TARDIS crew as a regular companion, although he expressed the worry that he was a third wheel and taken for granted, comparing himself to "the tin dog" (K-9).
When visiting a parallel Earth in Rise of the Cybermen, he was mistaken for and met his counterpart, Ricky Smith, leader of the resistance group called the Preachers. He also met the parallel version of Rita-Anne, who had not died. Ricky was killed by the Cybermen before Mickey's eyes, and something inside him changed as a result. Mickey went on to become instrumental in defeating the Cybermen.
As the Doctor and Rose were about to leave, Mickey announced he was staying behind to assist the Preachers in mopping up the remaining Cybermen and look after the parallel version of Rita-Anne now that Ricky was gone. As the Doctor stated that travel between parallel universes was impossible, it seemed that Mickey would not be seen again. However, he appeared in Army of Ghosts, infiltrating the Torchwood Institute under an assumed name. The Cybermen of the parallel Earth, on the verge of defeat, had followed an interdimensional craft through to Mickey's own universe, and he was the first member of the Preachers to follow them, armed with parallel Torchwood technology. He also appeared more confident and self-assured than he had been previously, but he still did not expect the Daleks to emerge from the void ship. He soon became part of the fight against the Dalek and Cyberman armies. At the conclusion of Doomsday, Mickey returned to the parallel universe and the breach was sealed. Mickey is currently living with Rose, Jackie, and Pete.
Sarah Jane Smith: Roving Reporter
by Kevin W. Parker
Based on the official biography, as published in Doctor Who Magazine (Holiday Special, 1992).
Sarah Jane Smith was born on the 28th of May, 1956, in Liverpool, England. She was the only child of Nigel Collins Smith, a local businessman, and Alice Trent Smith. Tragically, her parents were to play only a limited part in her life, as in 1961 they were both killed in an automobile accident. Five-year-old Sarah Jane was taken under the care of her aunt, Lavinia Smith, the noted virologist, and grew up under the wing of that strong female figure.
Everyone who knew her as a child remembers her as quite a tomboy, always interested in exploring and continually allowing her curiosity to get the better of her. She developed an odd coterie of friends, often preferring the company of adults to those her own age. Her aunt has remarked:
She always seemed to be around the grownups, asking questions about what they were doing and frequently making a nuisance of herself. And she preferred the more unusual characters: one of her favorites was an elderly chap who was rumoured to have been a poacher in his younger days, though he was never caught at it. He even taught her how to use a rifle, a skill she was quite pleased with.
Doctor Smith took pains to give her charge a suitable education, eventually sending her off to Caterham School for Girls, a reputable but forward-looking establishment whose headmistress had views on the place of women in society that accorded with that of both Smiths. Young Sarah Jane made her mark at the school in three respects: as an excellent student with a gift for communicating, as one of the fastest field hockey players, and as something of a maverick, inclined to simply ignore any rules that didn't make sense to her.
After finishing at Caterham, she went on to the University of Nottingham, which also brought on a surprising (to her, anyway) change in her social life:
I had always been rather an ugly duckling, with a fat face and no figure to speak of, plus I didn't concern myself much about my appearance. But I decided if I were going to university I had to be a bit more of a lady, and so I tried to dress up and take care of myself a bit better. And I think now that I must have blossomed quite a bit that summer. So I started at Nottingham and the boys were all after me, which was quite a new experience. I didn't twig why for a while. At first I thought it was just that university blokes had better taste!
Her first real romance came when she met Andrew Lofts, an ambitious student one year ahead of her whose goal was to become a television journalist. However, she does not credit Lofts for her choice of journalism as a career. Her aunt had encouraged her to go into science, as she had done, but young Sarah Jane had other ideas.
I had nothing against science, and I think I could have been good at it, but it just didn't seem right. I was always more interested in people. Since I knew I could write, journalism just seemed to be the obvious choice.
She became engaged to Andrew during his last year at Nottingham; however, this did not last:
Andy was an enthusiastic supporter of women's lib in the abstract, but he never realised that it applied to him, too. When he graduated, he thought I should leave school and help him with his career. I had other plans.
After three years of dedicated work on the university magazine, she had been rewarded with the position of editor for her final year. Going with Lofts would have meant losing that opportunity as well as not completing her degree. After much soul-searching, she chose to break the engagement. (Lofts went on to become a very successful television reporter, specializing in the Middle East. He was killed a few years ago while covering the civil strife in Beirut.)
She graduated with honors and went into a rather peripatetic apprenticeship, doing stints at various local newspapers. She began with a small Liverpool weekly, then opted to get away from familiar ground and moved to Scarborough. A year there, then two years in Manchester, and she took on the big time, moving down to London.
She remembers this as one of the most challenging periods in her life. Her job on one of the Manchester dailies had not given her the opportunities she craved, since her editor kept pushing her toward the women's pages when her interest, as now, lay more in the direction of investigative reporting:
I wasn't about to write women's stuff unless it was from a feminist angle. That was still quite controversial and my editor there would have none of it. Finally, I became fed up with the situation, lost my temper, and handed in my notice on the spot. I was hoping to move to London eventually, but in retrospect I should have done more in the way of preparation and networking.
It was very difficult at first, but she scratched and scrabbled for the odd freelance assignment, and was beginning to achieve some success.
But at this point Sarah Jane's career takes a most unusual turn. As one of her more adventurous attempts to get a story, she actually impersonated her aunt and managed to worm her way into a top-security government research centre. The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) was providing security there at the time, and somehow she ended up working with them. Several UNIT members remember her quite clearly, as with then-Captain Michael Yates:
She appeared quite suddenly, attaching herself to the Doctor and quickly becoming very much a part of the team. She was very interested in everything that was going on, asking all sorts of questions. I remember it was very difficult looking into those big hazel eyes and keeping my mouth shut when I was supposed to!
And Warrant Officer Benton:
I probably shouldn't say this, but my first impression of her was what beautiful teeth she had. What a thing to notice about a bird, eh? Seriously, she was always polite and curious. Not everyone takes much notice of us enlisted men, but it never seemed to matter to her.
Her exact duties have never been described, though she acquired the title of assistant to the chief scientific advisor. This position was evidently quite important to her, as she devoted far more time to it than to her budding journalistic career, a choice which set back her progress in the latter by several years. She received only a few assignments during this period, in particular one for the Metropolitan to research local resistance to property speculators, but was inconsistent about completing them. This lack of reliability lost her much face with her editors.
Again, details are sketchy about this period in her career, but it was clear that she was leading an exciting life. Though her job was so secretive that she virtually vanished from the face of the earth for most of the duration, she materialized on several occasions, generally ones when all hell was breaking loose.
Incidents she was spotted at include: the 1979 evacuation of London, some mysterious events at a monastery near Norwich, the downfall of the Scientific Research Society, the 1980 chain of accidents to the North Sea oil rigs, the shocking return of Guy Crayford to the Space Research Centre in Devesham, the peculiar happenings in and near the estate of eccentric millionaire Harrison Chase, and the series of freak accidents that disabled the nuclear power facility in Nunton.
This last adventure seemed to give Miss Smith her fill of excitement. It didn't help that she had almost simultaneously been hospitalized due to an accident in a nearby quarry. It was the spring of 1981, and she retired from active duty.
However, she remained close to UNIT and in fact developed a romantic relationship with the UNIT medical officer at the time, Harold Sullivan.
I think I was a bit shell-shocked, so to speak, after I left UNIT. I was looking for a bit of stability in my life, and Harry is as stable as they come.
Lieutenant Sullivan also has fond memories:
Sarah's a ripping girl, and I was very flattered with her interest in me. She seemed to need me at the time, but I think we both knew, deep down, that it wouldn't last.
They parted as good friends and have remained so to this day.
On the professional side, it was time to recuperate and mend fences with her various editors. This took some time, but a breakthrough step came when she got some help from Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, then commander of UNIT-UK:
I had heard through Lieutenant Sullivan that Miss Smith was having some difficulty re-establishing herself, and I thought this was grossly unfair considering what she had been through. So I passed the word along to some Fleet Street connections that she had been engaged in service to her country of the utmost importance and should not be penalized for doing so. It seemed to help.
It did, indeed. Percy Wollstonecraft, then editor of the Metropolitan and never one to miss an opportunity, brought a proposal to Smith. Shortly thereafter, his magazine had yet another exclusive, with a three-part article on UNIT penned by her and providing the public's first-ever glimpse at this secretive organisation.
Other articles appearing under her byline during this period were an odd assortment, but included ones on nuclear power plant safety, extra-sensory perception, the state of the art in robotics, and the possibility of life on other planets.
Christmas of 1981 approached and, with her career back in good shape once again, she decided to retreat to the quiet countryside of her aunt's new residence, a farm in the Cotswolds, and begin work on expanding her article on UNIT into a book. However, yet again she found herself in the midst of some excitement and ended up exposing a coven of witches who were about to sacrifice her aunt's ward.
Things settled down a bit after that, and her history of UNIT, Fighting for Humankind, was published in late 1982. Despite the censorship the book was subjected to in Europe, it remains the most authoritative work on that organisation available to the general public and copies are frequently imported from the States, alongside other 'banned' bestsellers such as Peter Wright's Spycatcher.
Once she had completed that book, she moved back to South Croydon and returned to her journalistic career in earnest. Her first big success came in 1983, when she published a series of articles exposing the COBRA terrorist and arms dealing network in Western Europe, coincident with a six-nation crackdown by UNIT. She has continued to report on similar stories and remains one of Britain's top journalists in that field. But she is not content to devote herself to one field and has made herself one of the most eclectic of journalists, covering areas as diverse as the space program, cults and mysticism, robotics, medicine, and hypnotism.
A few years on and another interesting addition to her resumé came along, that of science fiction writer. Her first novel, World War Skaro , was a huge success, with many readers appreciating her gift for creating vivid, realistic characters, most notably the mysterious alien Doctor, in a fantastic setting. And she has continued to produce Doctor books at roughly the rate of one per year, with the most recent one, The Monster at the End of Space, finding its way onto both The Times and New York Times bestseller lists.
Today, she is one of Britain's best-known and best-respected journalists, as well as a successful science fiction writer. Does she have any further ambitions?
Oh, yes, there's always more to do. For one thing, the European Space Agency is soliciting candidates for its journalist-in-space program, and I've put in an application for that. Of course, I don't know if I'll get in, but I have covered the space program, and I think I'd be a natural for it. We'll see. Really, I'm very happy doing what I'm doing.
She maintains a home in South Croydon accompanied by a mechanical dog, rumoured to be a gift from Doctor John Smith (no relation), one of her former UNIT associates. However, she seldom finds herself there, as, both professionally and otherwise, she is often travels to exotic locales, something she greatly enjoys doing. "Roving reporter" is indeed an apt description.
Recent update: Ms. Smith has of late often been seen in the company of Victor Nevis, an American computer engineer currently doing a consulting stint at the European Centre for Computer Engineering. Word is that they became acquainted when he repaired her robot dog. When asked about the romantic implications of this, all she would say is, "We're just good friends. Can't a man and a woman just be friends these days?"
Ace
Ace (given name Dorothy)A 20th-century Earth teenager from the London suburb of Perivale, she is a companion of the Seventh Doctor.
Character history
Ace is working as a waitress on the planet Iceworld when she first encounters the Doctor. 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 future. There, she meets the Doctor and his companion Mel. When Mel leaves the Doctor at the conclusion of the serial, he offers to take Ace with him in the TARDIS, and she happily accepts.
Ace has suffered traumatic events in her childhood, including a bad relationship with her mother and the racist firebombing of her friend Manisha's flat when she was 13. Following the latter event, needing to lash out, she burnt down a local abandoned Victorian house named Gabriel Chase after sensing an evil aura there and was put on probation. Consequently, Ace covers up her own fears and insecurities with a streetwise, tough exterior. Her weapon of choice, disapproved of by the Doctor (who nonetheless finds it useful on occasion), is a powerful explosive she called "Nitro-9", which she mixes up in canisters and carries around in her backpack.
Affectionately giving the Doctor the nickname of "Professor", she is convinced that the Doctor needs her to watch his back, and protects him with a fierce loyalty. In turn, the Doctor seems 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. However, the Doctor becomes more mysterious, single-minded and calculating after taking her on, and though he acts with her best intentions at heart, his higher motives and morality, as well as his strong tendency to manipulate events and people, including Ace, result in several difficult moments in their relationship.
Under the Doctor's tutelage, Ace fights the Daleks in 1963 (Remembrance of the Daleks) and the Cybermen in 1988 (Silver Nemesis), encounters the all-powerful Gods of Ragnarok in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the sadistic torturer called the Kandy Man in The Happiness Patrol, and many other dangers. She also faces the ghosts of her own past in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, enabling parts of her own timeline, including her birth, in the process. Over time, she begins to mature into a confident young woman, and her brash exterior ceases to be a front.
What the Doctor is aware of, but Ace is not, is 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 stretches across the centuries. Ace is 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 is defeated, Ace continues 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, in which Ace is returned by the Doctor to Perivale but ultimately chooses to leave again with him. A painting seen in the extended version of the serial Silver Nemesis suggests that at some point in her personal future Ace will end up in 18th or 19th Century France. This idea is further explored in the novelisation of The Curse of Fenric and the Virgin New Adventures. The novelisation contains an epilogue not included in the televised serial, in which the Doctor visits an older Ace in 1887 Paris.
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. The story Ice Time by Marc Platt, in which this would happen, was never made. When the Seventh Doctor is next seen in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, he is travelling alone, with no reference to what had happened to him or Ace in the interim.
