The character of Ace has no exit canonicity. Her character was left in limbo along with the Seventh Doctor when the show was axed in 1989. This leaves her as a blank canvas to work on. Her character was seventeen in 1989. Sixteen years later she is a mature woman with a husband and a job. I made her a married woman for one reason. At the time I could not find on any source, what her surname was in the series. Giving her a married name circumvented that problem. Making her in charge of a boarding school for delinquent teenage girls reflects how I thought her character would develop. Ace was a mixed up teenager when The Doctor found her, who had run about with a gang in Perivale and narrowly avoided breaking the law. But she was not a bad girl. She had a strong morale sense. Her reaction to the young soldier called Mike betraying the Humans to the Daleks in Remembrance of the Daleks is a particular example of that sense, and in almost every episode she is in, she displays compassion for the innocent and for the downtrodden. From that I extrapolated the idea that she would find a way to use that compassion and sense of morality to help others. And helping girls who have the same problems she had as a teenager, understanding their problems, is something I think she would do.

Why Cumbria? Why not? It’s a pretty place. Ace never liked Perivale, and even though she is a Londoner there was nothing to hold her to London.

The point of this short piece was to reintroduce Ace and to emphasise the fact that Rose is the one who is closest to The Doctor now. When Ace hits him with the baseball bat it is she who reaches him first and who cries because he is hurt, reminiscent of the times Sarah Jane cried over him. But Sarah proves that Rose can still learn something when she shows her how to test a Time Lord pulse.