[21] The Algebra of Ice
[22] Return of the Living Dad
[23] Silver Nemesis. The book Who Killed Kennedy offers another perspective on the assassination. The frequent references to the Kennedy Assassination are in-jokes, as Doctor Who’s first episode was shown the day after Kennedy’s assassination, the day most people in the UK learned the news.
[24] Dating Who Killed Kennedy (MA, unnumbered) - The date is given, and ties in with historical fact.
[25] Zagreus
[26] Rose
[27] TW: The Men Who Sold the World. It’s possible that this is just hyperbole.
[28] Let’s Kill Hitler. This doesn’t necessarily denote JFK’s assassination.
[29] Father Time
[30] Wonderland
[31] Dating K9: The Cambridge Spy (K9 1.16) - The date is given, and is the date of the first broadcast of the first episode of Doctor Who.
[32] The Resurrection of Mars. This episode was broadcast before An Unearthly Child episode three, which is why it gained a million viewers over episode two.
[33] Dating Winter for the Adept (BF #10) - The date is given by the Doctor.
[34] SJA: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith
[35] “Almost twenty years” before Rat Trap.
[36] Two years before The Veiled Leopard.
[37] Shada
[38] It was cancelled in 1989 after twenty-five years, according to Escape Velocity.
[39] Dating Planet of Giants (2.1) - The year is not specified on screen, although the setting is contemporary. Forester lives in a rural area, and a switchboard operator still mans the local telephone exchange.
[40] Dating The Land of the Dead (BF #4) - It is “thirty years” before 1994.
[41] Dating SJA: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (SJA 1.5) - The precise date is given. There’s no mention of Sarah remembering Maria’s visit to 1964 in the restored history. The Trickster’s background is given in SJA: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.
[42] In the Writers’ Guide for the Season 23, written in July 1985, Mel is described as “21”. In the Terror of the Vervoids novelisation she is “22”, in The Ultimate Foe she has lived for “twenty-three years”. In Just War, Mel was born “twenty eight” years after “1936”. Later books have stated that Mel joined the Doctor in 1989, which would seem to make her year of birth later than this.
[43] Spiral Scratch
[44] Demon Quest: The Relics of Time
[45] Benny: Present Danger: “The Empire Variations”
[46] Dating FP: Warlords of Utopia (FP novel #3) - Scriptor gives the date.
[47] TW: Miracle Day
[48] Paradise 5, and possibly an erroneous reference to the first Doctor’s trip to the Empire State Building (in The Chase, actually set in 1966).
[49] “Two years” before Thin Ice.
[50] “The Stockbridge Child”, based upon an extremely rough estimate of Max’s age as he appears in “The Stockbridge Horror”.
[51] The Space Age
[52] Dating The Chase (2.8) - On their return home, Ian sees a tax disc dated “Dec 65”, and Barbara notes that they are “two years out”. (Ironically, after two years of trying to land in England in the nineteen-sixties, the TARDIS visits Ian and Barbara’s native time five times in the next ten television stories.) The script suggested that the Visualiser tuned in on the Beatles’ Fiftieth Anniversary reunion tour. The costume listing for 1st April, 1965, included a request for an announcer dressed in futuristic clothing from “2014”, and it seems that the Beatles were contacted. However, the television version eventually used stock footage from 1965.
The tenth Doctor says in “The Forgotten” that he doesn’t know what happened to Ian and Barbara after they left, but that story entails him having selective amnesia.
[53] Who Killed Kennedy
[54] Goth Opera
[55] Dating The Massacre (3.5) and Salvation (PDA #18) - It is never made explicit which year Dodo boards the TARDIS. She is surprised that the Post Office Tower has been completed on her return to Earth in The War Machines in 1966. In Salvation (p19), an edition of the New York Ranger marks the date that Dodo enters the TARDIS as 25th March, 1965. The same publication dates the gods’ departure as 1st April (p251).
[56] Dating “The Vanity Box” (BF #97b) - The back cover says “circa 1965”, but the Doctor more specifically says, “It’s 1965, I believe that’s groovy enough for anyone”. For the Doctor and Mel, this story follows directly on from The Wishing Beast.
[57] Dating “Klein’s Story” (BF #131a) - Colditz specifies that this occurs in 1965.
[58] Dating TW: Children of Earth (TW 3.01-3.05) - The year is given.
[59] Dating Blackout (BBC DW audiobook #14) - It’s said to be “1965”, “the middle of November”. The blurb specifies the exact date.
[60] Dating The Daleks’ Master Plan (3.4) - A calendar in the police station reads “25th December”. It was originally intended that the 1965 Christmas episode, “The Feast of Steven”, would include a crossover with the popular BBC police serial Z-Cars. Publicity material to this effect was sent out on 1st October, 1965, and it appears that a version of the script was written with the Z-Cars characters in mind. John Peel’s novelisation of this story and Lofficier’s The Universal Databank both retain the names of actors (not the characters) from the police series.
[61] Spiral Scratch
[62] Invasion of the Cat-People (p115), no date is given.
[63] Dating Dead Air (BBC DW audiobook #7) - The Doctor says it’s the “late 1960s”, but the blurb specifies that it’s 1966. For what it’s worth, it’s specified that the story doesn’t take place on a Tuesday. It’s implied that the Time Lords designed the Hush for use against the Daleks in the Last Great Time War.
[64] Dating The Veiled Leopard (BF promo, DWM #367) - The year is given.
[65] Dating The Chase (2.8) - Morton Dill says it is “1966”, in Alabama at least.
[66] Dating The Perpetual Bond (BF CC #5.8) - It’s generally said to be “the 1960s” in this story, but The Cold Equations and The First Wave specify Oliver as being “from 1966”. As The Perpetual Bond is set between The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre, a dating of 1966 would thematically be in keeping with the other contemporary Hartnell TV episodes (An Unearthly Child episode one, The Chase episode six, etc.) that seem to occur at time of broadcast.
[67] The Cold Equations. Homosexuality was legalised in England and Wales in 1967.
[68] In The War Machines, it is twice stated that Ben has a shore posting (he is depressed by this and wants to get back to sea). At the end of the story, it is stated that he has to get “back to barracks”. However in The Smugglers and The Faceless Ones, he wants to return to his “ship”.
[69] Dating The War Machines (3.10) - C-Day is set for 16th July, but this didn’t fall on a Monday in 1966... it was actually the Saturday that The War Machines episode four was to be broadcast. The year “1966” is confirmed in The Faceless Ones and also in the Radio Times. WOTAN is connected up to Telstar and Cape Kennedy, both of which were operating in 1966. At the end of The Faceless Ones, Ben and Polly realise that it’s the same day they joined the TARDIS, and give the date as the 20th of July.
[70] Dating The Faceless Ones (4.8) - Setting this story in 1966 seems to have been a last minute decision to smooth Ben and Polly’s departure, one that also affects the dating for The Evil of the Daleks. The Radio Times stated that it is “Earth - Today”.
[71] Dating The Evil of the Daleks (4.9) - The story follows straight on from The Faceless Ones.
[72] Dating “They Think It’s All Over” (IDW DW Vol. 2, #5) - The 1966 World Cup final took place, as every true Englishman knows, two weeks to the day after the last episode of The War Machines.
[73] Dating “The Love Invasion” (DWM #355-357) - The year is given.
[74] Planet of Fire. According to a Character Outline prepared for Season 21, before Nicola Bryant was cast in the role, Peri is “an 18 yea
r old” when she starts travelling with the Doctor. Her mother’s name is “Janine” (the same document also says Peri is “blonde”). This would seem to make Peri three years younger than the actress playing her. In both Bad Therapy and The Reaping, Peri confirms she was 18 when she met the Doctor.
[75] Blue Box
[76] “Forty years” before TW: They Keep Killing Suzie.
[77] A Good Man Goes to War, Day of the Moon. The timeframe is a little murky here, as Graystark was shut down in 1967, suggesting that Melody lived there afterwards - and yet Melody is kidnapped by the Silence as an infant, but is a young girl when we see her in 1969 (The Impossible Astronaut). It’s possible that the Silence kept her in another locale/time zone on Earth before relocating her to the 1960s.
[78] Day of the Moon. The whole point of taking Melody to Earth was to raise her in an Earth environment, so she wouldn’t necessarily need a life-support device. As much as anything, the suit is probably needed to fulfilll the story (related in Closing Time) of the Doctor being killed by “an impossible astronaut”.
[79] Wonderland (p46, p50).
[80] The Gallifrey Chronicles. The Beatles went to Bangor in 1967.
[81] TW: In the Shadows
[82] TW: Miracle Day
[83] TW: The Men Who Sold the World
[84] Brendan is “14” according to K9 and Company.
[85] Amorality Tale
[86] The Year of Intelligent Tigers
[87] “Ten years” before Image of the Fendahl.
[88] Dating Wonderland (TEL #7) - The date is given (p11).
[89] Dating TW: Trace Memory (TW novel #5) - The year is given (p143). Page 169 says that it’s “fourteen years” after 1953. It’s “late summer” (p143).
[90] Dating Renaissance of the Daleks (BF #93) - It’s during the Vietnam Conflict (which lasted 1959-1975, although US participation was greatly accelerated under President Johnson in 1965). Agent Orange is here deployed; it was used 1961-1971. The US military didn’t use female pilots in Vietnam, so the likelihood of Alice Hunniford seeing combat duty is remote.
[91] Dating Revolution Man (EDA #21) - The general date is given on p1; the dates of the defacings on p98-100.
[92] Dating Thin Ice (BF LS #2.3) - The Doctor tells Ace, “This is the USSR, 1967. Everyone is watching [you].” More specifically, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution; the parade that the Doctor and Ace watch might commemorate the start of the downfall of the Tsars on 7th November. (Part of the terminology confusion here is the difference between Russia’s Julian calendar and the West’s Gregorian calendar - 7th November on the latter equates to 25th October on the former.) Raine, therefore, might be born on 7th November itself. In Crime of the Century (set in October 1989), Raine as a grown woman says that Thin Ice was (roughly) “twenty years ago”.
[93] Crime of the Century
[94] Animal
[95] We don’t know how old Donna is when she travelled with the Doctor, but Catherine Tate was born in 1968. Planet of the Ood cites Chiswick as Donna’s birthplace.
[96] TW: Children of Earth
[97] Gridlock. As the tenth Doctor’s coat is already in the TARDIS wardrobe in The Christmas Invasion, it was given to an earlier incarnation - which means it really shouldn’t fit him. It’s possible that Joplin was on so many drugs, she wasn’t concerned about whether the coat fit or not. Joplin lived 1943-1970.
[98] The Time Meddler
[99] The Underwater Menace
[100] Frontier Worlds. The Tufty Club was a group that taught British children the fundamentals of road safety. The group’s mascot, Tufty the squirrel, avoided roadside accidents and was featured on club badges.
[101] The Sound of Drums. Some have viewed this as a reference to events in The Invasion, which broadcast in November and December 1968. John Frobisher seems to reference the same protocols in TW: Children of Earth.
[102] The Banquo Legacy (p274).
[103] Iris: The Land of Wonder, presumably reflective (in Iris Wildthyme terms) of the second Doctor working alongside UNIT in The Invasion. Crossroads initially ran 1964-1988. Mention of the “robot guru” is probably meant to parallel the Beatles’ association with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which started in 1967.
[104] Iris: The Claws of Santa. Animal Magic ran 1962-1983.
[105] Iris: Enter Wildthyme. Chi Chi arrived at the London Zoo in September 1958, died in 1972.
[106] Dating Nightshade (NA #8) - Ace finds a calendar saying it is “Christmas 1968”.
[107] Dating The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories: “The Entropy Composition” (BF #142b) - The year is given.
[108] Revolution Man (p180).
[109] Instruments of Darkness. This might be the same car the eighth Doctor drives in the early EDAs.
[110] SJA: The Ghost House
[111] SJA: Wraith World
[112] “Black Death, White Life”
[113] “Six weeks” before The Impossible Astronaut.
[114] Dating Iris: The Sound of Fear (Iris audio #2.1) - Mohanalee makes Iris take him back to an unspecified part of the 1960s, but it’s probably later in the decade than earlier, given this story’s fixation on the golden oldies.
[115] Dating Blink (X3.10) - The year is given, first of all in the graffiti that the Doctor leaves for Sally to find in 2007. The Doctor and Martha mention that the moon landing hasn’t happened yet - this occurred on 20th July, 1969.
[116] Dating The Impossible Astronaut (X6.1) - The date is given. The story continues in Day of the Moon; some details from that story and A Good Man Goes to War have been included in this summary for clarity.
[117] Day of the Moon
[118] The Wedding of River Song
[119] Dating Revolution Man (EDA #21) - The date is given (p223).
[120] Dating Day of the Moon (X6.2) - A caption tells us that the action (which follows on from The Impossible Astronaut) has resumed “3 Months Later. July 1969”. Events culminate with the Apollo 11 moon landing (on 20th July).
[121] “Wormwood”. The TV Comic story “Moon Landing” predicted the first moon landing would occur in 1970. Richard Lazarus namechecks Armstrong in The Lazarus Experiment.
[122] Blink. These were separate occasions from their being stranded in 1969.
[123] Beautiful Chaos (p76). This presumably references Bernard Quatermass and his daughter Paula.
[124] Heart of Stone (p146). This happened on “the last Apollo mission”, presumably Apollo 11.
[125] The Blue Angel. The novel was published in 1969.
[126] The Left-Handed Hummingbird. No specific actions on Manson’s part are mentioned, but the infamous “Helter Skelter” murders took place in August 1969, and the most prominent victim, actress Sharon Tate, was killed 8th August. Page 243 establishes that Huitzilin merely fed off Manson’s actions, but didn’t “possess” or influence him as is sometimes claimed.
[127] “Five years” before The Invasion according to Vaughn.
[128] Dating The Web of Fear (5.5) - It is the near future. Professor Travers declares that the events of The Abominable Snowmen were “over forty years ago”, Victoria says that they were in “1935” and no-one contradicts her, so it’s at least 1975.
Some fans have suggested that Travers is senile or confused, but in the story he’s clearly the opposite. All things considered, he’s sharp-witted and in command of the facts. The maps of the London Underground that we see render the network as it was in 1968, and don’t show the Victoria or Jubilee lines, which opened on 7th March, 1969, and 1st May, 1979, respectively.
Downtime states that this story took place “some twenty-five years before”, in “1968”.
[129] Downtime
[130] The Web of Fear
[131] The Paradise of Death. This happened “just before he joined UNIT”.
[132] The Invasion. UNIT is not set up specifically to fight aliens, but to “investigate the unexplained”. The independent film Wartime says that UNIT was formed “
during the late 1960s”.
[133] Who Killed Kennedy
[134] Emotional Chemistry
[135] The Dying Days
[136] Island of Death
[137] Bullet Time
[138] The Time Monster - the Seventh Enabling Act allows the Brigadier to take command of government forces - and The Green Death.
[139] Between The Web of Fear and The Invasion, although there’s no indication in the TV series as to precisely when. In Spearhead from Space, the Brigadier tells Liz Shaw that “since UNIT was formed” there have been two alien invasions. The Web of Fear took place before UNIT was formed, and so we only saw UNIT fight one set of aliens, in The Invasion. It’s here presumed that the Brigadier was simplifying events and referring to the two televised Troughton stories that he appeared in. If not, the Doctor does not seem to have been involved in fending off the other invasion, as he never refers to it. In Spearhead from Space and Terror of the Zygons, the Brigadier implies that UNIT existed before he was placed in charge of it.
[140] “Years” before Old Soldiers.
[141] The Mind of Evil
[142] “Years” before The Ambassadors of Death.
[143] The Ambassadors of Death
[144] “Over twenty years” before The Dying Days (so before 1977). This was a Mars Probe mission as seen in The Ambassadors of Death.
[145] Carrington set off for Mars no later than thirty months before The Ambassadors of Death.
Britain’s Missions to Mars
The timeline for the backstory of The Ambassadors of Death, and therefore the British space programme, is unclear.
It is a long-term project. Carrington was on Mars Probe 6, and the “missing” ship is Mars Probe 7. Mars Probe 7 takes between seven and eight months to get to Mars (various characters say it takes “seven months”, “seven and half months” and “nearly eight months”), the astronauts spend two weeks on the surface and logically need seven or so months to return to Earth. That’s a round trip of about fifteen months.
Assuming all missions followed that timescale and that only one mission was underway at any one time, then even if each mission was launched the day the previous one returned, this would stretch the Mars programme back eight or nine years. However, not all the Apollo missions were designed to land a man on the moon, so we could reasonably infer that some of the early Mars Probes were shorter test flights. Nowhere, though, is it stated that Carrington was the first man on Mars, and The Dying Days makes clear that he wasn’t.
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