ACE OF HEARTS

This story is a fairly typical example of the poor quality pieces that have been published recently in the BBC's Short Trips anthologies. Admittedly, More Short Trips is worse, but I can't bring myself to read those stories again to gain a critical appraisal of them. I feel that Steven Cole's decision to go for as many stories as possible, of varying lengths (but mostly minimal), has led to a drop in quality. Even the longer stories are only about 20 pages, which means there's not enough length to develop a decent storyline. What's important in Doctor Who is the storytelling, and you can't tell a story without enough words. Most of the More Short Trips stories are over before they even begin, leading to a general feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction. Some are little more than one page character vignettes, which achieve nothing. We're back in Brief Encounters territory there...

Virgin's Decalog collections were much more worthwhile, usually with stories of 30 to 40 pages. There were some duff stories certainly - those written by Howe, Stammers and Walker spring to mind - interesting to note that they didn't commission stories from themselves in their second collection - but overall the quality was good, and most of the stories felt as if something had happened in them.

Sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but it had to be said. Anyway, back to Ace of Hearts. This is only a few pages in length, and nothing much happens. It represents the other major failing of the Doctor Who short story - it picks up on something that happened in a TV episode, and would therefore make no sense to someone who wasn't already a fan. It's not a proper story for that reason, because it requires the reader to come to it with background information already acquired from another source. I personally don't think the BBC should be publishing bad fan fiction in a professional anthology. Let's hope the next editor has more of an eye for stories, and less for the fan-wanky gimmickry.

The big irony of Ace of Hearts is that, in their desire to be all clever and continuity-referencing, the authors have completely missed the point of what happens in The Curse of Fenric. If you haven't read it, Ace of Hearts is set at a time when Ace is still a baby. It features Kathleen Dudman, Ace's grandmother, organizing a reunion of Wrens, and hiring a peculiar magician as the entertainment. He seems a bit familiar, and of course he turns out to be the seventh Doctor. He has come to this time to see the baby Ace, and apologize to her for the trauma he put her through, because he can't apologize to the grown-up Ace. And that's the whole story...

Leaving aside the paucity of the plot, I am just staggered by this idea of Kathleen Dudman being Ace's grandmother. Sure, she turned out to be Ace's biological grandmother, but Ace didn't know that. She sent Kathleen off to her grandmother's house in Streatham, so that she could take baby Audrey to escape the Haemovores, unwittingly saving her own mother in the process. I'm not surprised that Ace didn't recognize her mother as a baby, but are they seriously trying to suggest that Ace wouldn't recognize her own grandmother, even as a young woman? Hasn't she seen any family snapshots? And wouldn't she know her grandmother's name was Kathleen Dudman? The point is, we don't know what happened to Kathleen Dudman. Maybe she was killed - there was a war on after all. All we can infer from The Curse of Fenric is that she got the baby to Streatham, whereupon Audrey must have been adopted by the woman whom Ace knew as her grandmother. We'll never know the precise circumstances, and of course it doesn't matter. That's another story.

What matters is that Kathleen Dudman was not the grandmother Ace knew - The Curse of Fenric just wouldn't make sense otherwise. So Perry and Tucker have built an entire story around a misconception. Quite amusing, really...

Adventures of the seventh Doctor Who

Sylvester McCoy, the seventh Doctor Who

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