Fielding played Tegan from 1981 to 1984, debuting in Fourth Doctor Tom Baker's final story Logopolis and remaining for almost the entire run of his successor, Peter Davison. She is the classic show's longest-running companion in terms of dates (though not episodes), marginally beating the run of Sarah Jane Smith (the late Elisabeth Sladen), who appeared several times during David Tennant's run and helmed her own spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures. Tegan was an Australian air stewardess who inadvertently entered the TARDIS thinking it was a real police telephone box. She travelled with the Doctor for almost three years before quitting the TARDIS crew after the story Resurrection of the Daleks, due to disquiet over the number of fatalities that seemed to accompany the Doctor's adventures. Tegan was also part of the TARDIS crew during the 1983 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, meeting the First, Second and Third Doctors.
Janet Fielding as Tegan.
Aldred played Ace from 1987 to 1989 alongside the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. She debuted in the final story of McCoy's first season, Dragonfire, and remained on the TARDIS for the duration of his run. Ace was a teenage girl from Perivale who was inadvertently transported to an alien planet by a "time storm." Rescued by the Doctor, Ace decided to keep travelling with him. Ace was a hugely popular companion because she upended stereotypes of the time. She tackled problems head-on and had a tendency to engage the Doctor's enemies with violence and explosives, to his distress. In arguably her best story, Remembrance of the Daleks, she engaged Daleks in combat with improvised explosives, antitank missiles and even an energy-charged baseball bat. Ace was also notable as being arguably the first companion to drive stories like the Doctor could, and in the show's final season it was revealed that Ace was being manipulated by both the Doctor and alien forces for unknown reasons. The producers of the time subsequently confirmed that one idea they had was that the Doctor was testing Ace to see if she could become a Time Lord in her own right. Ace's stories also explored - albeit at a remove - issues like racism for the first time, as Ace grew up on a mixed-race housing estate and many of her friends experienced prejudice (as noted in Remembrance of the Daleks and her own final story, Survival).
Sophie Aldred as Ace.
Because Ace was the incumbent companion when the show unexpectedly ended in 1989, her fate was never confirmed on-screen. When Sylvester McCoy returned as the Seventh Doctor for the 1996 TV movie (handing over to Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor), Ace was nowhere to be seen. Both spin-off novels and comics tackled her story, some suggesting she got married, others that she became a space mercenary in the distant future, others that she continued fighting evil thanks to a time-travelling bike and in some, that her character died heroically. Ace's actual, canonical fate was not alluded to until The Sarah Jane Adventures mentioned that she was the head of a successful charity called "A Charitable Earth."
Both Fielding and Aldred have reprised their roles for audio dramas over the years, and Aldred recorded her first new screen footage as Ace in over thirty years as a promo for the new range of Doctor Who Blu-Rays a couple of years ago.
Along with Sarah Jane Smith and Jo Grant (Katy Manning, who reprised her role in The Sarah Jane Adventures), Tegan and Ace are arguably the two most popular classic Doctor Who companions, so it'll be great to see them return to the franchise.
Jodie Whittaker's swansong will also see the return of Sacha Dhawan as the Master, along with both the Daleks and Cybermen. The episode is so far unnamed, but should air around the time of the BBC Centenary in October this year. Russell T. Davies will subsequently reprise his role as Doctor Who showrunner, with his first episode expected to be the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary special in November 2023.
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