Ace - otherwise known as Dorothy, a name she hates - was apparently born in 1973 and hails from Perivale, west London. A rebellious teenager with a penchant for explosives, Ace's relationship with her parents continued to deteriorate as she got in more and more trouble. Ace found such antics as accidentally blowing up an art room to be rather funny, and dreamed that someday her "real" parents would come to take her away from her stifling life. Her relationship with her mother Audrey was particularly bad, and Ace apparently didn't even know the name of her maternal grandmother, Kathleen Dudman. In a way, it came as something of a relief to Ace when, during an attempt to mix up a batch of gelignite, a time storm brewed up out of nowhere and carried her off to the trading post of Iceworld on Svartos, far into the future. About sixteen years old at the time, with no-one to rely on but herself, Ace found herself a waitressing job and a place to live, but remained unhappy with the state of things until the Doctor and Mel turned up. Her impetuousness got her in trouble yet again and, fired from her job, Ace was free to go travelling the Twelve Galaxies with the Doctor.
During the course of her travels with the Doctor, Ace matures from a gung-ho teenager into a more responsible young woman. The Doctor routinely tests her observational and deductive skills, and Ace eagerly rises to the challenges he sets before her. She also comes to some important understandings about her family, especially her mother - a woman Ace never understood and did not like. The Doctor has tried to be a good influence on Ace, curbing her more self-destructive tendencies like vandalism and inclination toward trying alcohol. She is very open about her feelings - happy, uncomfortable or bored, everyone is likely to know it.
Ace enjoys using a variety of weapons in her fight against evil - a baseball bat, anti-tank rockets, a slingshot of gold coins for Cybermen...but her favorite weapon of all is nitro-nine, a potent explosive that Ace brews up herself and bottles in deodorant cans equipped with timers. Ace is talented at chemistry, and seems to have developed the formula for nitro-nine with her home chemistry set. When Ace's boom box is destroyed by the Daleks, the Doctor builds her a brand-new ghetto blaster that has the added ability to pick up and transmit signals. Ace is a skilled motorcycle rider, and she enjoys tinkering with motorbikes and repairing them.
Ace puts up a brave, tough front, although at times she uses this bravado to cover up her fear. When Ace allows her fear to make her reluctant to do something, often the best course of action is to suggest that Ace is frightened or wants to back out; this form of reverse psychology nearly always works with her, and she practically gets furious at the suggestion that she might have a single cowardly bone in her body. Ace cannot play an instrument, dance or sing, but she enjoys bacon sandwiches, rock climbing, listening to jazz music, watching the sea, and she especially enjoys blowing things up. She hates haunted houses, racism and hate crimes. She has taken classes in art, chemistry, computers and French. Ace is quite fond of dinosaurs, and collects badges for her jacket. She has the habit of giving people nicknames, which may either be affectionate (as in "Doughnut" for Mel) or a way of getting back at someone she finds irritating (as in "face-ache" for Happiness Patrol member Daisy K). She usually calls the Doctor "Professor", except when she gets scared or worried, to the point that the Doctor sometimes idly wonders if she actually remembers his name! Ace's language in general is brimming with slang - among her favorite expressions are "wicked!", "brill!", "mega!", "Gordon Bennett!" and, of course, "ace!"
Ace has brown eyes and long, straight brown hair which she sometimes keeps tied back in a ponytail. She is rarely to be found without her satin bomber jacket - covered in badges, with "Ace" emblazoned on the back - her Doc Martens boots, and her rucksack. Rather like the Doctor's voluminous pockets, Ace uses her rucksack to store items that she would rather not be without, such as a handy rope ladder and several cans of nitro-nine.
How Ace parted company with the Doctor is unknown, unless one considers the original novelizations or comic strips to be canonical. The producers' original intention was that the Doctor's testing of Ace would culminate in her being enrolled in the Academy on Gallifrey, to give Time Lord society a bit of a shaking-up, but such plans vanished into the ether when the series was cancelled. When last seen, she and the seventh Doctor were striding back to the TARDIS in order to continue on battling the evil forces of the universe.
