Alice Carroll
- You may be looking for Alice (disambiguation) or the Seventh Doctor's companion Ace.
Alice, also known as Ace, was an individual who travelled with the mysterious fourth-dimensional being known as the Professor or the Dominie.
Temporal status
Her timeline was fractured between a number of conflicting lifetimes. According to the Cleric, she "was myriad" and was both "Alice down the rabbit hole" and "Dorothy in the cyclone", as well as "Wendy in the sky" and "Lucy in the snowy woods". (PROSE: Republica)
Notably, a very similar Ace had Dorothy for a birth name; she travelled with the Seventh Doctor but frequently referred to him as "Professor". This Ace's timeline was fractured by the Quantum Anvil. (PROSE: At Childhood's End) The Dominie mentioned to Tris'Tean that he travelled with "a woman called Alice" in one version of his timeline, while in others, he travelled with "archaeologists and androids", (PROSE: The Choice) the former descriptor matching one of this prime Seventh Doctor's companions, Bernice Summerfield. (PROSE: Love and War, etc.)
Biography
Early life
In a version of her timeline distinct from the one where she was called "Alice", Ace's mother was fond of watching The Wizard of Oz on tape. Ace herself found the protagonist's perpetually amazed attitude irritating.
A young Ace once wore "her dad's old dress jacket" to the youth club dance with someone called Misha. She got called "queer" and the memory remained painful, coming back to her when she was referred to as "a queer fish" by a guileless stranger in unrelated circumstances. (PROSE: Republica)
Travels with "the Professor"
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The Professor and Ace once visited 1990s England only to discover that history had been dramatically altered by an escaped Ithacan criminal known as LeCompte. Convincing Oliver Cromwell to appoint John Lambert as his successor instead of Richard Cromwell, LeCompte had allowed Cromwell's Protectorate to survive for centuries, meaning that this late-20th-century England remained a totalitarian republic ruled by a Lord Protector. The Professor and Ace further discovered the truth about LeCompte's origins, and that he was actually trying to steer Earth's technological development so that he could direct its military forces back at his homeworld in revenge for his exile. However, realising that (unbeknownst to LeCompte) the wormhole back to LeCompte's homeworld was also a time rift, the Professor tricked him into his own doom by allowing him to fire the war rocket Behemoth through the wormhole, laying waste to the past version of Ithaca, killing LeCompte's past self, and consequently cancelling out his alterations to the timeline. Ace was horrified at the Professor destroying this version of history, aberrant as it was. (AUDIO: Republica, PROSE: Republica)
The two later landed at a top-secret British research base in Greenland during World War II where they helped defeat voracious insectoid monsters, (AUDIO: Island of Lost Souls) and on the holiday planet Millanno, uncovering the secrets of the darker half of the Isle of Prosperity. (AUDIO: Prosperity Island)
Separated from the Professor
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At some point, Ace became separated from her travelling companion. She found herself temporarily blind and cared for in an unfamiliar place by a mysterious man named Dorsai. (AUDIO: The Left Hand of Darkness)
She found herself separated even further from the Professor when she died in a car accident. While the Professor picked up a new companion, Nadia, Ace found herself fighting to survive in a liminal space where the ghost of her nan urged her to pass on into "the other side". (AUDIO: The Other Side)
Renewed travels with the Dominie
Reunited with Ace, the Professor travelled to the Vespertine Lodge in 2036 in search of the legendary Point of Stillness. The pair discovered that the strange time bubble effect at the Point was actually caused by a time prohibitor, a "banned party trick". (AUDIO: Guests for the Night)
At the temple
In a different version of history, the Professor and Ace visited a temple built on a "weak point in the linear universe", whose clerics were instantly aware that many timelines overlapped over Ace. She was given a glimpse of her and the Professor's adventures bringing down the Protectorate, and was disturbed to realise that she did not remember anything about the event. When she rejoined the Professor, he confessed that he didn't remember either, and moreover, had not been aware that his history had been rewritten, even though he usually did. Ace asked if a mysterious "him" they'd defeated in the past "after all this timeline rubbish" was to blame, while the Professor was more evasive, stating that there were others who could "meddle with things". They had a heart-to-heart about the moral weight of people from aberrant timelines, with the Professor reaffirming that "everyone mattered" even if they were native to unstable timelines. (PROSE: Republica)
Legacy
The Dominie mentioned his travels with Alice to Tris'Tean during his solo journey in Ecto-Space. (PROSE: The Choice)
Behind the scenes
Ace is strongly implied to be the same Ace that travelled with the Doctor and in the original audio drama she was played by Sophie Aldred. Various people involved, including Aldred, felt this was too blatant a copy of Doctor Who and the BBC would send a legal warning over it. The second series of audios would rename her Alice; Nigel Fairs suggested this name due to its similarity to Ace. (REF: Downtime – The Lost Years of Doctor Who)
In the Republica novelisation, a cleric refers to Ace as a "myriad" and mentions four personas, including "Dorothy [the original Ace's real name] in the cyclone, Alice down the rabbit hole". The suggestion in Republica is actually that the framing device at the temple features the "proper" Seventh Doctor and Ace, as seen in the Virgin New Adventures, while their identities as the Dominie and Alice for much of the story were a product of time being altered by an unknown party. At the end of the framing device, Ace remembers her mother watching The Wizard of Oz on the television and loving it, suggesting her name is once again "Dorothy", but is unable to remember her adventure in the Protectorate except insofar as she saw images of it through the temple computer. She additionally assumes that the alterations in time were the fault of a mysterious "him" until the Professor admonishes her that there are others who can "meddle", suggesting the temple incident takes place after the Virgin New Adventures Doctor and Ace's battle with the Meddling Monk.
In The Choice, the Dominie appears in an epilogue, travelling alone. He mentions being aware of several different lifetimes in different timelines and universes, and, explaining that it makes the details of his own life hard to keep straight, he states: "One minute I’m traveling with archaeologists and androids, the next I’m traveling with a woman called Alice". The "archaeologists and androids" mention references the BBC Seventh Doctor's companions Bernice Summerfield and Antimony.
