Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Dead Woman Walking by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s got worms.

Dead Woman Walking, by Roland Moore, is in many ways a thought experiment through the medium of Doctor Who. It embraces the struggle of macro-creatures like humans against micro-organisms, like viruses or worms, and asks us to examine which version of us is the ‘best self’ we could be. It encompasses responsibility, recklessness, power, manipulation and consequences, all within little more than half an hour of prime Doctor Who.

Now, if that makes it all sound a bit heavy, don’t worry – Moore’s a storyteller first and foremost, and he does due diligence by his responsibility to the listener, so what you get here is a story of Ace in a biological dilemma, being kept alive by  a biological entity which exists in symbiosis with a kind of living bomb which could blow apart the planet on which she’s standing, while a vicious civil war goes on around her. What you get here is the Doctor seemingly baffled as to how to give both her and the planet a future in which they’re not inextricably bound together, and Ace, being Ace, showing the true quality of her character. It would absolutely spoiler you to explain how that quality of character resolves itself into a solution, but in a time when fandom has been reflecting on the power and the admirable nature of the likes of Sarah-Jane Smith, this story does good service to Ace’s character, and to the way in which her journey made her better, able to affect situations merely by the content of her character.

While it has something of The Invisible Enemy about it, this story deals cleverly with the question of how far out of your comfort zone you’d go to get a good result. While Ace on-screen was very much the gung-ho teenager, reader to shout at things and blow them up to get them out of her angry way, this is an Ace that feels more mature than that, an Ace who, while by no means comfortable with it, is prepared to go the long way round a problem if it’s clear that that’s the way of least danger. An Ace prepared to suffer, to grow older, even if need-be to die to solve the problem, but in the meantime to be the best version of herself she can be, and hope it rubs off on people.

While the Doctor is forced to leave her behind on the world with the living bomb at its core, Ace’s job is to stay alive, locked into a symbiosis with that bomb, being, while still entirely Ace, a kind of still point to whom others can look, a beacon and a source of peace, and an example of the way they too could live their lives, bigger than any petty conflict to which they may be dedicated.

In many ways, the sub-structure of this story is a thank you to those who’ve written Ace over the decades, and to Sophie Aldred for giving such vivacious life to her. Hardly a farewell, it’s a story that nevertheless could stand as one of the character’s many best days, the kind of days we remember when all other days are gone – perhaps fittingly so, given both the story’s title and its central dilemma, in which Ace’s life depends on her not putting a foot wrong over an extended period. As such, there’s the fuzzy warmth of the best of funerals about it, which is somewhat thankfully undercut at the end by the relationship between Ace and the Doctor in one of its more spiky moments, one of his teachable moments putting her well and truly through the wringer.

Is Dead Woman Walking perfect then?

Not quite – in fact, the more grammatically minded among you will take a layer of enamel off your teeth early on, as the storytelling starts off in a lazy way with shifted perspectives, like ‘If Ace had been conscious, she’d have heard the tone in his voice…’

Maybe you have to be a pedant for this sort of thing to get to you. I’m led to believe there are at least one or two in the fandom, so if this sort of thing drives you screaming to your computer to write emails of complaint, take a breath. Push on through. The story itself is worth the occasional moment of grammatical seething. Especially if you’re an Ace fan, it’s a slightly more mature take on her character, where there’s more depth to her than the child who hit Daleks with baseball bats (much as we love that version). It’s an Ace who might be mad as hell at the Doctor’s hard schooling, but who knows enough to stand still and let the world, just occasionally, change around her, because of her. And because of who she is, to change for the better.

Who Reviews At Childhood's End by Tony J Fyler

Tony meets up with an old friend.

We all want to know what happens to our favourite companions once they leave the Doctor (assuming of course they’re that lucky).

Ace, the companion who was with the Seventh Doctor when the axe fell on the continuous run of Classic Who, is in a particularly odd situation as far as her ultimate destiny is concerned, in that because she was never given a proper destiny on-screen, she’s been given, ultimately, several in different alternative media.

In comic-books, she died a hero’s death at the hands of one of her own cans of Nitro-9 explosive in Ground Zero. In books, she stayed behind with a population she felt the Doctor had betrayed, ending her time with the Seventh Doctor somewhat acrimoniously. And in audio, she’s done several things – been trained at the Time Lord Academy, popped back for adventures with the Doctor now and then, and so on.

But those who believe only on-screen references count as canon – and then, only sometimes – probably did a bit of a squee when, in an episode of The Sarah-Jane Adventures, she got a destiny reference point when Sarah-Jane said ‘That woman, Dorothy McShane? You know, the one who runs A Charitable Earth…’

Boom.

There it was, on-screen. Ace’s name had been established elsewhere, but even if it hadn’t, the co-incidence of ‘A Charitable Earth’ being ‘A C E’ would have been quite enough of a giveaway, thank you. So there she was, in our imaginations, growing away quite nicely, running a charitable organization to probably, knowing Ace, save the world in a thousand ways at once, every day in every way.

Of all the destinies of Ace, this is one which has been gradually climbing towards legitimacy ever since that episode of The Sarah-Jane Adventures. Older Ace, now Dorothy, running her charitable foundation. It was used as the basis for a fandom-melting trailer to the blu-ray release of Season 26. It’s recently been added to the Big Finish canon in stories like Dark Universe, and now there’s this. A novel of Ace and the Doctor, written by Sophie Aldred, who has always been the face, the voice and the body of Ace, not only showing us some of the things she’s been getting up to in the decades since we last saw her on screen, but also bringing the relationship between Ace and the Doctor slap bang up to date.

Awesome – sounds like a must-buy. But does it work?

Well, yes, it does. There’s a certain degree of formula followed, a formula more or less laid down by the recent Doctor Who Meets Scratchman novel by Tom Baker (with help from a Big Finish author). But while there’s absolutely a story, and more or less one as convoluted as you’d expect of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, including, for all you continuity-fans, a fairly mind-blowing additional revelation about how Ace was spirited up to Iceworld through the influence of Fenric, it’s important to understand one key thing. In Doctor Who, there are stories where the plot is the key thing and the characters serve the action, and then there are stories where the plot is more or less just the thing that reveals the characters and their journeys.

At Childhood’s End is very much the second kind of story – the plot’s there, and it’s suitably bonkers, with New Whoish centaur aliens and more Classic Who relatively incorporeal aliens, and a network of transport stations to zip people across vast distances, without, as Douglas Adams would have said, all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. There’s a plot which resonates all the way back to Fenric and Iceworld and which threatens to twang forward into a new era of transgalactic kidnappings and much much worse, but it’s all more or less the stuff which needs to be worked through to show us Ace as she was, Dorothy as she is, her relationship with the Doctor then and now, and how Dorothy deals with both her 21^st century life with A Charitable Earth, and the understanding that the Professor has got some new help in.

It’s absolutely glorious, frankly.

Yes, there’ll be moments when you peer behind the character development at the plot and go ‘Wait. Hang on, what’s happening now?’ but for the most part, you’re with Ace, and Dorothy, and both of them are brilliant and will keep you as safe as they can.

It’s a tale of growing up, coming back from ‘over the rainbow’ and living your life tinged with the magic of the trip, in spite of some darker moments along the way. A tale of making the most of your abilities, putting yourself between slimebags of every sort and the people just trying to get on with their lives, and how you might have the best teacher in the universe, but what happens to you depends on your synthesis of their teaching and your application of it in your real life. Just as much though, it’s a tale of reawakening, reconnection with a side of yourself you might have put behind you. Not so much a journey to find your Inner Child as a journey to find your Inner Teenager Quite Prepared To Hit Things With Sticks, appreciate the broken bits of her, realise you’ve healed those up, but rediscover the bolshy energy of that girl when faced with a universe of sleazeballs and bilgebags.

As with the Scratchman novel, there’s an almost too liberal scattering of casual references to Who stories and villains and elements in At Childhood’s End, and they’re there both to tie the story into the continuity of the Who universe but also, let’s face facts, to give your Inner Fan a bit of a thrill when you recognise them. And it’s important to note that they’re almost scattered too liberally – but not quite. By the end of the book, your inner fanboy or fangirl has been tickled to the point of spangles and giggling, but never quite to the point of wishing it would all just stop.

There’s one biggie in terms of references, and without spoiling it for you, it’s really difficult to talk about much of the second and third act character developments. But we’re not going to break that moment for you, because when it happens, it’s absolutely glorious, and you don’t want to go into it knowing or expecting it. Suffice it for now to say that the Dorothy we meet in this story has seen the breakdown of Torchwood, and is in a very particular relationship to the development of UNIT, which has consequences for meeting up with the Doctor again after all those years.

And in a very sensitive moment, the multiple destinies of Ace and Dorothy are actively addressed, rather than swept under the carpet of storytelling, leaving us with a Dorothy McShane who’s utterly modern, properly at home in this 21^st century, and entirely believable as a potential anchor to her own spin-off series. The Inner Ace might be worth re-igniting in this novel, but Dorothy McShane has a centred worth all of her own, and it’s that that’s really hypnotic in this story.

The audiobook reading is of course by Sophie Aldred (Who else would it be? Even during her TV time as Ace, Aldred was in demand as a voice actress and reader). Her reading ties everything together, the writing and performance, and it’s fun to hear what she makes of some of the other voices in the story. More or less, she makes joy out of them. Joy is very much the sense with which this book and its audio reading will leave you – some of it pure nostalgia, some of it sparkling fresh and as current as can be.

Childhood may have its end, absolutely. But the blend here between the pleasure and the power of childhood, the not-knowing when you’re outclassed or outgunned and stepping forward anyway, and the more grown-up assessments we need to make, the power and the pleasure that comes with having things sorted out and still stepping forward anyway, turns At Childhood’s End into more than just a nostalgic catch-up with a favourite companion. It turns it into a hymn both to having the right kind of role models in your life, and having to take the responsibility to make your mark on the world, your way.

At Childhood’s End is a thing of beauty, a thing of joy, a thing of centaur aliens and backgrounded mysteries and at its beating heart the story of someone we know, someone we loved for her spirit when she was young, and someone we love now for the way in which she’s melded her experiences together to make the right kind of difference in the world.

It’s absolutely Ace, but much, much more besides.