Ace and the Seventh Doctor
Dec. 1st, 2014 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayFirst day of the December talking meme, and this was suggested by selenak. That's a pretty broad topic, so I'm taking my chance to express my love for these characters.
I always say that while the Fifth Doctor is my Doctor, in the sense that he's the first one I grew up with, the Seventh is my best Doctor because he's the one who makes me think difficult things. He's the Doctor, so I always knew that he'd do something right in the end, but I never knew what that right thing would be. He always had a bigger picture in mind, something that had to be done but didn't leave much room to be comfortable and predictable. I've never been able to express why I love him so, why I trusted him, when I knew that the fate of one tiny bit of humanity--my tiny bit--wasn't his priority. But I did and I always will.
Ace is, hands down, my favourite Old Who companion. Donna Noble had to work pretty damn hard to become joint all time favourite companion, let me tell you.
Ace was what I wanted to be. She takes charge, she blows shit up, she beats up Daleks with a baseball bat, but she wasn't a hard terrible character. She was flawed and vulnerable, which made her feel real to me.
Ghostlight breaks my heart every time because of Ace.
The Curse of Fenric is, I think, the episode that showcases both the best and the worst of what those two characters were together. It's brilliant and horrible, and one of the best Seventh Doctor stories they did. It's not my favourite--that would be Battlefield--but it's what I always think of when I try to imagine what season 27 would have been like if the show hadn't been cancelled. In my head, it would have been a mixture of Battlefield's glorious rompiness and Fenric's horrible, terrible grand schemes, with Ace finally reaching her destiny as a Time Lady at the end.
(Shut up, it would totally have been that. I believe.)
Ace and the Seventh Doctor, together, are amazing. There's a moment in Silver Nemesis where the Doctor asks Ace if she disobeyed his instructions and brought some Nitro-9. She confesses that she did, and he beams and tells her to blow up the Cybership. For me, that's what was always at the heart of their relationship. It wasn't just that the Doctor would (after terrifying me that he might not) do his best for Ace, try to teach her about all her amazing potential and save her from the bad things. It was that he trusted her to have his back, too. To pull him out of the fire when he needed it, and to have the explosives on hand when he needed them. Their story is one of the few times in Old Who where we got to see a long-term, growing relationship between the Doctor and his companion, and it was wonderful. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't always pretty, but it was wonderful to watch.
(In my head canon, Ace and the Doctor traveled together until she'd learned enough to travel through time and save the world on her own. And then she set out on her time-travelling motorbike and picked up the threads he couldn't juggle, and they sometimes met and worked together when a problem was too big for just one of them. Or just because they wanted to and missed each other. And, because it's my head canon, Donna didn't lose herself in Journey's End: she's out there with Ace, saving the world and travelling through time, and sometimes they work with this little chap who plays the spoons when he should be running away.)
If I could only have one Doctor-and-companion for the rest of time, it would be Seven and Ace.
selenak. That's a pretty broad topic, so I'm taking my chance to express my love for these characters.I always say that while the Fifth Doctor is my Doctor, in the sense that he's the first one I grew up with, the Seventh is my best Doctor because he's the one who makes me think difficult things. He's the Doctor, so I always knew that he'd do something right in the end, but I never knew what that right thing would be. He always had a bigger picture in mind, something that had to be done but didn't leave much room to be comfortable and predictable. I've never been able to express why I love him so, why I trusted him, when I knew that the fate of one tiny bit of humanity--my tiny bit--wasn't his priority. But I did and I always will.
Ace is, hands down, my favourite Old Who companion. Donna Noble had to work pretty damn hard to become joint all time favourite companion, let me tell you.
Ace was what I wanted to be. She takes charge, she blows shit up, she beats up Daleks with a baseball bat, but she wasn't a hard terrible character. She was flawed and vulnerable, which made her feel real to me.
Ghostlight breaks my heart every time because of Ace.
The Curse of Fenric is, I think, the episode that showcases both the best and the worst of what those two characters were together. It's brilliant and horrible, and one of the best Seventh Doctor stories they did. It's not my favourite--that would be Battlefield--but it's what I always think of when I try to imagine what season 27 would have been like if the show hadn't been cancelled. In my head, it would have been a mixture of Battlefield's glorious rompiness and Fenric's horrible, terrible grand schemes, with Ace finally reaching her destiny as a Time Lady at the end.
(Shut up, it would totally have been that. I believe.)
Ace and the Seventh Doctor, together, are amazing. There's a moment in Silver Nemesis where the Doctor asks Ace if she disobeyed his instructions and brought some Nitro-9. She confesses that she did, and he beams and tells her to blow up the Cybership. For me, that's what was always at the heart of their relationship. It wasn't just that the Doctor would (after terrifying me that he might not) do his best for Ace, try to teach her about all her amazing potential and save her from the bad things. It was that he trusted her to have his back, too. To pull him out of the fire when he needed it, and to have the explosives on hand when he needed them. Their story is one of the few times in Old Who where we got to see a long-term, growing relationship between the Doctor and his companion, and it was wonderful. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't always pretty, but it was wonderful to watch.
(In my head canon, Ace and the Doctor traveled together until she'd learned enough to travel through time and save the world on her own. And then she set out on her time-travelling motorbike and picked up the threads he couldn't juggle, and they sometimes met and worked together when a problem was too big for just one of them. Or just because they wanted to and missed each other. And, because it's my head canon, Donna didn't lose herself in Journey's End: she's out there with Ace, saving the world and travelling through time, and sometimes they work with this little chap who plays the spoons when he should be running away.)
If I could only have one Doctor-and-companion for the rest of time, it would be Seven and Ace.
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Date: 2014-12-02 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-02 02:39 pm (UTC)Seven is a Doctor with so many facets, and I think that's a big part of what I loved about him. He's not easy, not straight-forward, but he's still likable.
I love that so many Seven fans are out there :-)
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Date: 2014-12-02 05:11 am (UTC)Thank you for taking up the prompt! I love them a lot, too.
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Date: 2014-12-02 02:46 pm (UTC)The so-called Cartmel Master Plan :-D I'm forever sad we didn't get to see that, because Ace as a Time Lady would have made me so insanely happy. I fell in love with that lost canon as soon as I heard about it.
I think the argument could be made Ace is the only time we see the Doctor consciously and deliberately mentoring someone in order to achieve her potential
My First/Second Doctor watching has been limited (due to all the lost tapes *sigh*) but I'm pretty sure Ace is the only one where the mentoring was deliberate. There was always a sense, to me, that he had a larger purpose for me. A destiny, in a way, and that a lot of what he did was with that aim firmly in the front of his mind. He was refining Ace, encouraging her to grow, because he knew where she should fit into the universe. Or rather, how the universe should fit around her.
Even with characters like Donna, the mentoring was more as a by-product of what they were doing on their travels rather than a deliberate action.
Ace was special for the Doctor. That has always intrigued and fascinated me.
Fenric embodies why that's so brilliant and horrible at the same time.
Yes, definitely. Fenric is incredibly difficult to watch in places, but I always had the feeling it was one of their turning points on Ace's journey. That it was supposed to lead to something else later. I've always wished that we could have seen what the writers were planning to do with what they laid down there.
Yes, I'm always going to be bitter about the cancellation!
Thank you for taking up the prompt! I love them a lot, too.
No, thank you for the prompt! It gave me a chance to babble about them and it turned out that I really, really needed to do that :-D
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Date: 2014-12-03 08:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-07 04:11 pm (UTC)Although:
There's a moment in Silver Nemesis where the Doctor asks Ace if she disobeyed his instructions and brought some Nitro-9. She confesses that she did, and he beams and tells her to blow up the Cybership.
I might be confusing it with a different moment, but does Ace reply that she's a good girl and she didn't have any, then he tells her to use it? (I love that moment)
no subject
Date: 2014-12-08 04:36 pm (UTC)Must rewatch Silver Nemesis again soon...