From: jhildeb1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Jeff Hildebrand)
Subject: Re: Ace? More like deuce... here's a new slant
Reply-To: jhildeb1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Jeff Hildebrand)
Organization: Don's Merry Horde of Topologists
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 07:15:18 GMT

	Unfortunately the original article has expired and I'm a little
wary to clean up the headers here too much, but I'll give it a try. Apologies
if I wind up misattributing anything to anyone.

c8643631@cc.newcastle.edu.au (Mr Flibble) writes:
> In article <1992Nov13.175103.18475@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>, as010b@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (andrew david simchik) writes:
> > In <torresce.721663632@craft.camp.clarkson.edu> torresce@craft.camp.clarkson.edu (Carlos E. Torres) writes:
> > 
> >>I don't think Ace is anything like Leela.  Leela is a warrior.  She has both
> >>strength and hunter skills and is fearless.  Ace to me is a brat who somehow
> >>becomes fearless and somehow at a young age got off of Earth and had so-o-o
> >>much experience within a short period of time, that she fears no Daleks/Cybermen
> >>nor anything, except some stupid mild childhood trauma that she went thru when 

	This is far oversimplifying things and does not do justice to the
way that the character was developed. I've had the pleasure (opinion in this
sentence, no flames please) of seeing the McCoy/Aldred stories over the last
few weeks, so I've got a fairly fresh perspective. I think the
characterization winds up something like this. Like most teenagers, Ace is
extremely insecure about a lot of things and tries to make up for it by
being tough. We see this is detail in _Dragonfire_, _Remembrance of the
Daleks_, and _Silver Nemesis_. There, on the outside she's acting tough
chucking cans of Nitro-9 all over the place, trying to prove that she's not
going to let anything stop her. But there are moments when she cracks. In
_Dragonfire_ she winds up begging the Doctor to give Kane the crystal ("I'm
16, I'm too young to die.") In _Remembrance_ she reacts badly to being
betrayed by Mike who she had started to trust and to open up to. And at the
end, she shows her insecurity by asking "We did good didn't we?" She's been
playing the tough kid part, but it's an act. In _Silver Nemesis_ she's come
to trust the Doctor enough to admit that she is scared by what's going on,
but she still goes on; the Doctor is going on, so she's not going to let him
be stronger than she is.

	By the next season, she was opening up quite a bit. What happened in
_Curse of Fenric_ and _Ghost Light_ strikes a far more personnal chord
with her. It is most definitely not bad writing that she reacts more
vehemently to these things, it's actually very good writing. The fact is that
the scale of the goings-on with the Cybermen and the Daleks is so huge that
it's really impossible to all take in all at once. A lot of it, to someone
like Ace, caught in the middle, trying to act tough, must be like a great
adventure. By the later shows, she's come to trust the Doctor enough that
when she has to confront some of the things that have fueled her
insecurities for so long, she can open up to him. She's no longer trying to
cover everything up with the macho veneer, she's dealing with her problems,
not hiding from them.

> Mild childhood trauma? Having her best friend firebombed by some thugs? 
> That's mild. Gee, I'd hate to find out what you think is slightly severe.

	Heh. True enough. [Note, this is where my editing gets complicated,
this is someone else's interjected comment.]

> >>she was a child involving ghosts and haunted houses -  which she overcomes and 
> >>shows no change for it.

	Boy did you miss a lot if you thought Ace shows no change over her
time with the Doctor. Watching some of her last episodes and then going back
to _Dragonfire_ is startling to say the least. Ace grows up considerably
while she's with the Doctor. The amount of nitro-9 chucking and tough
bluster drops a huge amount. She drops a lot of the facade that she has
earlier on. And so on through other little details. Such as I would claim the
clothes that Ace is wearing at the start of _Ghost Light_ are not things she
would wear when she first joins the Doctor. They're too adult, they don't
fit the image of a street-wise tough kid.

	One of the things I really liked about the McCoy/Aldred pairing is
that they brought out as aspect of the Doctor that isn't shown enough. That
of the Doctor as mentor to his companions, showing them the wonder (and the
problems) that exist in the universe. That's why I thought it was a perfect
touch that Ace called the Doctor "Professor" on occasion. On the few
occasions when Adric was well written, he had brought out this side of the
Doctor as well. (The start of _Keeper of Traken_ comes to mind.) It's a side
of the character that I like and I wish they had done more with.

	It's really too bad that production on the series stopped when it
did. I think that one more season would have done a lot for the main
characters. Ace was about at the point where the transition from teenager to
adult was about complete and I think after a story or two more she could
have been written out very well. I think it might have been good then if the
Doctor had gone without a companion for a little bit (maybe a couple of
stories) while the development of his character continued. Most people focus
on the development of Ace and miss what they were doing with the Doctor, but
that's a whole different story that I'll have to get into in some other
article, some other day. (It's one in the morning, I've got class
tomorrow...)

	Replies, including opposing arguments, welcomed. Flames ignored.

-Jeff
-- 
Jeff Hildebrand, The Shaggy TA		       	   hildebra@math.wisc.edu
"The following statement  is an editorial viewpoint  and does not reflect 
the views of WSRN-FM, its employees, or mutant drosophila" - Off the Cuff
"You can't confuse us; we're not listening to you!"  -  topology students