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Humanity hasn’t got as far as Mars by The Seeds of Death, explaining why they don’t know about the Martians. It’s harder to explain why Zoe, who is from a time when the solar system has been explored, is unaware of them.
Some fans (as well as sources like the FASA roleplaying game) have concluded that the Ice Warrior civilisation was subterranean - a view that’s practically taken for granted in the books and audios, even though there’s no evidence for it on screen. The books and audios have made further attempts to explain why the Ice Warriors are not well-known to future humanity. In particular, Transit featured a genocidal war fought in the late twenty-first century between Earth and Mars. Its vision of most Martians leaving the planet - with a few left behind as an underclass to the human colonists - is depicted in later stories such as GodEngine and Fear Itself (EDA).
Benny Summerfield is an expert on Martian history, but most accounts have her believing that the Martian civilisation is a dead one (or at the very least, that there are no Ice Warriors on Mars itself).
The Dying Days attempted to reconcile some of the UNIT-era accounts by depicting a Martian culture influenced by the Osirians, who are disturbed by a British space mission (and there’s a fleeting reference to the aliens from The Ambassadors of Death). As it’s set in 1997, it would explain why UNIT know what Martians look like in The Christmas Invasion, and some fans have interpreted the line in the TV episode as a reference to the book.
[214] Dating The Taking of Planet 5 (EDA #28) - It is “about 12 million years ago” (p71). The Elder Things aren’t the same as the Great Old Ones seen in Lovecraft’s work, so there’s no direct clash with this story and the Great Old Ones seen elsewhere in the Doctor Who novels.
Delphon was mentioned in Spearhead from Space, Tersurus got a mention in The Deadly Assassin but didn’t appear until the Comic Relief sketch The Curse of Fatal Death. According to Alien Bodies, the Raston robots (The Five Doctors) are built on Tersurus.
[215] The Shadow of the Scourge
[216] Blue Forgotten Planet
[217] Just War
[218] So Vile a Sin
[219] 9.25 million years before Benny: Ghost Devices.
[220] Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge
[221] Frontios. Date unknown, but it’s long enough before the twentieth century that Turlough has the race memory, but doesn’t otherwise seem to know the Tractators by name.
[222] The Seeds of Doom
[223] St. Anthony’s Fire
[224] The Quantum Archangel
[225] The Janus Conjunction
[226] The Dying Days
[227] Dating Genocide (EDA #4) - It’s 1.07 million years before 2,569,868 BC.
[228] The Dark Path
[229] Millions of years before Benny: Down.
[230] Dating Genocide (EDA #4) - The precise date is given (p260).
[231] Dating Frozen Time (BF #98) - The Doctor, upon his revival, says he was frozen “millions of years” ago. There is no evidence that Arakssor’s imprisonment bears any relation to Varga’s mission (The Ice Warriors), and it could substantially pre-date it.
[232] FP: The Eleven-Day Empire
[233] “Millions of years” before The Slow Empire. The Empire lasts “two million years” once it has been set up.
[234] Nocturne
[235] Slipback
[236] Love and War
[237] A Device of Death
[238] “A million years” before “Invaders from Gantac”.
[239] Viridios claims to have slept for “a million years” before The Eternal Summer. In real life, Viridios is a Celtic deity whose name means “Green Man” in the Celtic languages and Latin. Altar stones to Viridios have been recovered from Roman Britain; in Doctor Who terms, though, there’s no evidence that Viridios-worship went any further than the Stockbridge area, with the Doctor describing it as “highly localized”.
[240] The Dying Days. They would send an expedition to Earth, as seen in The Ice Warriors. Its loss presumably convinced them to use their scarce resources another way, and put them off conquering our planet.
[241] Synthespians™
[242] City of Death. The earliest known use of fire was around 700,000 BC. Supporting this, the “second splinter” of Scaroth seen on screen is presented (somewhat confusingly) as a Neanderthal.
[243] Measured from The Daleks, in which the Doctor says that the Thal records “must go back nearly a half a million years”.
[244] Love and War
[245] The War Games
[246] “The Stockbridge Horror”
[247] “Ground Zero”
[248] “Hundreds of thousands of years” before The Year of Intelligent Tigers.
[249] The Ice Warriors. Arden states that the Ice Warrior Varga comes from ice dating from “prehistoric times, before the first Ice Age”. Arden’s team have discovered the remains of mastodons and fossils in the ice before this time. In Legacy, the Doctor states that Varga “crashed on Earth millions of years ago”. Timelink favoured that Varga’s ship fell to Earth in “10,000 BC”; About Time, acknowledging the vagueness of the evidence, said it was some undetermined point between “1,000,000 BC” and “8,000 BC”.
[250] According to Benny in The Dying Days.
[251] An Unearthly Child, Ghost Light.
The First Ice Age
According to Doctor Who, the Ice Age was a single event around one hundred thousand years ago. In reality, there were waves of ice ages that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years as the ice advanced and retreated. We may now be living in an interglacial period. An Unearthly Child seems to take place at the end of the Ice Age: the caveman Za speaks of “the great cold” - although this might simply mean a particularly harsh winter. Similarly, the butler Nimrod talks of “ice floods” and “mammoths” in Ghost Light, and he’s one of the last generation of Neanderthals. In The Daemons, the Doctor says that Azal arrived on Earth “to help homo sapiens take out Neanderthal man”, and Miss Hawthorne immediately states that this was “one hundred thousand years” ago.
[252] Last of the Titans
[253] Ghost Light
[254] The Daemons, Ghost Light. Science tells us that the Ichthyosaurs actually died out at the time of the dinosaurs. In Timewyrm: Genesys, Enkidu is one of the last Neanderthals. In reality, Neanderthals only evolved about one hundred thousand years ago and survived for about sixty thousand years, until the Cro-Magnon Period.
[255] Dating An Unearthly Child (1.1) and The Eight Doctors (EDA #1) - Ian confirms in The Sensorites that the story is set “in prehistoric times”. (An Unearthly Child itself never explicitly states that it’s set on Earth, rather than another primitive planet.) Now that we know that the production team called the first televised story 100,000 BC at the time it was made (the title appears on a press release dated 1st November, 1963), dating the story has become a lot less problematical. Anthony Coburn’s original synopsis of the story also gives the date as “100,000 BC”.
The first edition of The Making of Doctor Who placed the story in “33,000 BC” (which is more historically accurate), but the second edition corrected this to “100,000 BC”. The Programme Guide said “500,000 BC”, The Terrestrial Index settled on “c100,000 BC”. The Doctor Who File suggested “200,000 BC”. The TARDIS Special claimed a date of “50,000 BC”, The Discontinuity Guide “500,000 BC - 30,000 BC”. Timelink says 100,000 BC. About Time leaned toward a date of “not much earlier than 40,000 BC”.
[256] Dating TW: The Men Who Sold the World (TW novel #18) - The year is given.
[257] Time and Relative
[258] “A hundred thousand years” before Snowglobe 7.
[259] “The Vanity Box”. Events on the asteroid take place in The Wishing Beast.
[260] Dreamtime
[261] More than a hundred thousand years before The Sandman.
[262] “A hundred thousand years of conflict” before Heroes of Sontar.
[263] City of Death, Image of the Fendahl, The Daemons.
> [264] Autumn Mist
[265] “Seventy thousand years” before The Crystal Bucephalus (p34). The fungoids on Mechanus in The Chase were named “Gubbage Cones” in the script but not on screen.
[266] The Quantum Archangel
[267] Four to Doomsday
Monarch’s Journey
There is a great deal of confusion about the dates of Monarch’s visits to Earth, as recorded in Four to Doomsday. The story is set in 1981. The Greek named Bigon says he was abducted “one hundred generations ago [c.500 BC], and this is confirmed by Monarch’s aide Enlightenment - she goes on to say that the visit to ancient Greece was the last time the Urbankans had visited Earth. Bigon says that the ship last left Urbanka “1250 years ago”, that the initial journey to Earth took “20,000 years” and that “Monarch has doubled the speed of the ship on every subsequent visit.”
This is complicated, but the maths do work. The speed only doubles every time the ship arrives at Earth, perhaps because of some kind of slingshot effect. Monarch’s ship left Urbanka for the first time in 55,519 BC, it arrived at Earth twenty thousand years later (35,519 BC), the speed doubled so the ship arrived back at Urbanka ten thousand years later (25,519 BC), it returned to Earth (15,519 BC), the speed doubled and the ship travelled back to Urbanka (arriving 10,519 BC). Monarch returned to Earth (in 5519 BC), the speed doubled once again and the ship arrived back at Urbanka (in 3019 BC). The ship made its final visit to Earth around 519 BC, and now the trip back to Urbanka only took 1250 years. The ship left Urbanka (731 AD) and reached Earth in 1981.
However, this solution leaves a number of historical problems - see the individual entries.
[268] TW: Miracle Day. The advent of money occurred a lot later than this, though.
[269] “Fifty thousand years” before the 2008 portion of TW: “Rift War”.
[270] Fifty thousand years before Benny: The Infernal Nexus.
[271] Peri has just turned down an opportunity to visit the caves with her mother at the beginning of Planet of Fire. Although filmed on Lanzarote and named as such in the story, in real life Lanzarote was nowhere near any ancient Greek trading routes.
[272] Four to Doomsday. Bigon states that Kurkurtji was taken “thirty thousand years” ago. Examples of Australian Aboriginal art that are at least twenty-five thousand years old survive.
[273] Trading Futures
[274] Dating Only Human (NSA #5) - The Doctor and Jack calculate the precise date.
[275] According to the Doctor in Only Human, which doesn’t take into account the two survivors he met in Ghost Light and Timewyrm: Genesys.
[276] Thirty thousand years before The Song of the Megaptera.
[277] “Twenty-five thousand years” before First Frontier. Yuggoth is another reference to H.P. Lovecraft (it’s his name for the planet Pluto).
[278] “Twenty-five thousand years” before The Land of the Dead.
[279] The Seeds of Doom
[280] Return to the Web Planet. “Pwodoruk” is the name the Optera give to the Animus, evidently taking after this legend.
[281] “Thirty thousand years” before “A Fairytale Life”.
[282] “Eighteen thousand years” before The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.
[283] Four to Doomsday. Bigon claims that Villagra is a “Mayan”. Although the Doctor boasts of his historical knowledge, he then suggests that the Mayans flourished “eight thousand years ago”, but the civilisation really dated from c.300 AD - c.900 AD. The Urbankans, though, don’t visit Earth after 500 BC. It would appear that Villagra must come from an ancient, unknown pre-Mayan civilisation.
[284] “A dozen millennia” before The King of Terror.
[285] The Tomorrow Windows (p256).
[286] “Eleven thousand years” before Nyssa’s time, according to Cold Fusion.
[287] “Ten thousand years” before Invasion of the Cat-People.
[288] “Ten thousand years” before King of Terror.
[289] “Many thousands of years” before Superior Beings.
[290] The Veiled Leopard
[291] City of Death. Scaroth says that he “turned the first wheel”. Archaeologists think that mankind discovered the wheel around 8000 BC.
[292] Day of the Moon
[293] The Waters of Mars. A deleted scene said that the Martians left Mars because they could not beat the monsters from that story, the Flood. Nonetheless, because the scene was omitted, it’s unclear within the fiction if the Flood was frozen after the Martian ecology went into decline (The Judgement of Isskar), or in one of Mars’ polar regions beforehand.
[294] The Waters of Mars
[295] Wishing Well. This could have been at any time, but here it’s assumed that the Doctor and Martha visited when the castles were at their height, rather than in ruins.
[296] The Waters of Mars
[297] The Silent Stars Go By, Thin Ice, respectively.
[298] This appears to be true, if nowhere else, in an alternate dimension in Iris: Enter Wildthyme.
[299] Dating The Judgement of Isskar (BF #117) - This is the backstory to the downfall of the Martians, and (for some of them) their forced relocation from Mars. Exactly when the Martian ecology goes into decline is open to debate - on screen, the only real clue is the Doctor’s claim (The Waters of Mars) that flowers last grew on the Red Planet “ten thousand years” ago; such flora would seem unlikely once the toxic Red Dawn (Red Dawn, The Judgement of Isskar, Thin Ice) becomes a factor. Another approach would be to consider if Varga’s ship (The Ice Warriors) crashed to Earth before or after Mars was devastated, but so little is said of Mars itself in that story, it’s hard to make that determination.
[300] Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars.
[301] The Judgement of Isskar, based upon the history of Izdal given in Red Dawn.
[302] Demon Quest: A Shard of Ice. This may be a reference to Pyramids of Mars.
[303] “Ten thousand years” before Meglos.
[304] This is suspected to have occurred “twelve thousand years” before Benny: Secret Origins.
[305] At least ten thousand years before Benny: Genius Loci.
[306] TW: The Sin Eaters. Date unknown, but this is presumably early on in each race’s history. Proto-Indo Europeans settled Norway toward the end of the third millennium BC; Ireland has been inhabited for about nine thousand years. Pryovillia is the home of the Pyroviles from The Fires of Pompeii.
[307] “Ten thousand years” before Placebo Effect.
[308] “Eight thousand years” before The Face-Eater.
[309] Four to Doomsday. There is no “Futu dynasty” in recorded Chinese history. The Doctor has heard of it, however, and claims it flourished “four thousand years ago”. The date does not tie in with the details of Monarch’s journey as described in the rest of the story. Archaeologists have discovered a piece of tortoiseshell with a character from the Chinese alphabet on it that is seven thousand years old, so it seems that an early Chinese civilisation was established by that time, and the timescale does tie in with the dates established by Bigon.
[310] Ten thousand years before The Song of the Megaptera.
[311] “Six thousand years” before “Echoes of the Mogor”.
[312] “Eight thousand years” before Benny: The Tree of Life.
History
The planet Trion founded colonies on other worlds, forming an empire. Science and technology drove the ruling Clans, who developed a vacuum transport system that revolutionised on-planet travel. Non-Clansmen incorporated cold fusion into their spaceships. [1]
The Time Lord passing as “Jane Templeton” - unwilling to face her punishment on Gallifrey for meddling with human history - piloted her dying TARDIS into Earth’s sun, inadvertently causing a small shift in the Earth’s axial rotation. [2]
Ancient Egypt
Seven thousand years ago in the Nile delta, Egyptian civilisation was flourishing. A variety of extra-terrestrials visited Egypt around this time, and were seen as gods. The Egyptian god Khnum
was either one of the Daemons or a race memory of them, and Scaroth of the Jagaroth posed as an Egyptian god and Pharaoh, building the earliest Pyramids. [3]
The Osirians
By 5000 BC, the highly-advanced Osirian race had influenced the cultures of many planets, including Earth, Mars, Youkali (the scene of a devastating battle between the Osirians and Sutekh) and Exxilon. [4] A final generation of the giant insects aided by the Osirians hatched in 5000 BC. [5]
Some Osirians were as powerful as decent-sized planets. Many of them bore different animal heads to keep up appearances, and to reflect their biodiversity. Osiris founded the Osirian Court, which existed in its own timeframe - its past and future could interact in varying ways with different eras of different planets, including the Homeworld of the Great Houses. [6]
Sutekh married his sister Nephthys on the same day that Osiris cut the court off from history. [7] The Osirians had a slave force of more than two billion - nearly one billion of those in the inner court alone - and had influence on six hundred and sixty worlds. [8]
The Osirians constructed the Ship of a Billion Years - a formidable vessel that would pass through the noospheres of different planets, and facilitated a “thousand year cruise” of the gods. The Ship was powered by Ra: a miniature sun that the Osirians, even mighty as they were, revered. Four Osirians (Osiris, Sutekh, Upuat and Kepri) were designated “the divine shields of Ra” - they could tap Ra’s energies to defend the Ship. Ra’s voice spoke through the Lady Nut, and it was said that no man could reach the throne of Osiris without earning passage on the Ship. Whichever Osirian sat on the throne could receive the loyalty of the Ship, but had no jurisdiction over it. [9] The Ship was forged inside a star, and had a hull of solid gold. [10]