B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  [940] Josh’s allegiances are revealled in SJS: Fatal Consequences.

  [941] It’s not expressly said that the villains hoping to disrupt the peace conference are Hilda Winters’ group, but it seems likely.

  [942] In SJS: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, Hilda Winters acquires the deactivated K9 - who admittedly isn’t cited by name - from Sarah’s flat. Although the audios say nothing more about this, it seems reasonable to assume that Sarah re-acquires K9 after Winters’ death in SJS Series 2. The different Doctor Who media (this story, Decalog 3: “Moving On” - also written by Peter Anghelides - and School Reunion) are remarkably consistent on the point that Sarah, for a time, is unable to keep K9 operational because she lacks the futuristic technology needed to service him. The situation doesn’t change until the tenth Doctor revives the rusty K9 in School Reunion.

  [943] Dating The Fearmonger (BF #5) - This is “just over fifteen years” after Ace’s time.

  [944] Dating Rutans: In 2 Minds (BBV audio #34) - The audio came out in 2002 and seems contemporary. Notably, the potential crisis is resolved because the UK’s air defences are on full alert owing to 9-11. One of the characters jokes about a “winter migration”, suggesting that it’s later in the year.

  [945] Dating Drift (PDA #50) - The year isn’t given, but it’s clearly the modern day.

  [946] Dating Time Zero (EDA #60) - Anji returns home three weeks after she met the Doctor, and stays there eighteen months, so this story is set around the end of August 2002. Control also appears in The Devil Goblins of Neptune, The King of Terror, Escape Velocity, Trading Futures and Time Zero. The fire elemental that Curtis attracts is the creature the Doctor defeats in The Burning.

  [947] Dating Unnatural History (EDA #23) - Excerpts from a publication, Interesting Times, are dated to 7th and 14th November, 2002, and it’s said to be “November 2002” when the story opens (p1).

  [948] Head Games

  [949] The King of Terror

  [950] Time Zero, The Infinity Race, The Domino Effect, Reckless Engineering, The Last Resort, Timeless.

  [951] Dating The Domino Effect (EDA #62) - The book starts on “Thursday April 17 2003” (p1).

  [952] Dating Reckless Engineering (EDA #63) - The Doctor is sure it’s “2003” (p24).

  [953] Dating The Last Resort (EDA #64) - Time is a rather fluid concept in this novel, but Fitz and Anji are based in “2003” (p7, p11).

  [954] Dating Timeless (EDA #65) - No year is given, but the story takes place after The Last Resort, and Anji has been going out with Greg for a year by the time of The Gallifrey Chronicles.

  [955] Dating The Forge: Project: Valhalla (BF New Worlds novel #3) - The present day segments conclude with Nimrod commencing with Project: Lazarus (from the audio of the same name), and Cassie being promoted to the rank of field agent. So, even though Project: Valhalla was released in November 2005, the “present day” in this case must mean 2004 if not 2003.

  [956] Project: Lazarus

  [957] “About five years” before SJA: Eye of the Gorgon.

  [958] TW: Miracle Day

  [959] “Seven years” before Iris: Enter Wildthyme.

  [960] Dating Touched by an Angel (NSA #47) - The exact days are given (pgs 7, 197, 227).

  [961] Dating Eternity Weeps (NA #58) - The date is given (p1).

  Did Liz Shaw Die in 2003?

  Until recent years, and for anyone who considers the New Adventures canon, the answer was almost unequivocally, “Yes.” In Eternity Weeps (set in 2003), Liz, as Operations Chief for Tranquillity Base on the moon, is infected with a flesh-eating terraforming virus, endures an unspeakable amount of pain, and dies after passing along the formula for an anti-virus to her lover Imorkal - who himself perishes after telepathically planting the information in Chris Cwej’s mind. Cwej’s failure to euthanise Liz despite her pleas is examined in The Room with No Doors, and the matter is then considered closed.

  Of late, both The Sarah Jane Adventures and the Big Finish Companion Chronicles starring Caroline John (reprising her role as Liz) have called Liz’s death into question. In SJA: Death of the Doctor, Colonel Karim mentions, with regards associates of the Doctor invited to his funeral, “Miss Shaw can’t make it back from moonbase until Sunday” (not an indicator that there’s a crisis there, and probably just reflecting the infrequency with which shuttles transport personnel back to Earth). The acknowledgement of Liz working on a moonbase, strangely enough, confirms some of Eternity Weeps while rejecting another part of it.

  With the Companion Chronicles being on audio, it was possible to imagine that Liz was narrating her stories prior to her death in 2003... until she says in The Sentinels of the New Dawn that if events in 2014 had not been wiped from history, “That horror would be starting around now...”, i.e. a few years beforehand, concurrent with the audio’s release in 2011.

  Balancing these accounts is no easy task. The only leeway lies in the fact that in Eternity Weeps, we don’t actually see Liz’s dead body. The virus gives Liz horrific injuries at a United Nations Hazmat base in Turkey, but her actual passing is only confirmed by Imorkal, who tells Chris and Jason Kane, “She is dead”. It becomes the stuff of fan-fiction to imagine events by which Liz recovered enough to be alive and well in 2011 (for instance, Imorkal placed Liz in a prototype Silurian healing chamber after plucking the formula for the anti-viral from her mind), but keeping these stories in a single continuity requires some off-screen explanation, however spurious.

  [962] Dating Rip Tide (TEL #6) - It is “late May” (p13), in “the twenty-first century” (p78). There’s no reason to say the story isn’t set in the year the novella was published.

  [963] The Highest Science. The year is given on p2, and reiterated in Happy Endings (p5).

  [964] TW: Into the Silence

  [965] Dating The Quantum Archangel (PDA #38) - It’s 2003 according to the blurb and p48, “thirty years” since The Time Monster (p39).

  [966] The Quantum Archangel

  [967] Dating Minuet in Hell (BF #19) - It’s “the twenty-first century” and humanity has just developed quantum technology, suggesting it’s the near future. Neverland gives the firm date of 2003 for this story.

  [968] The Taking of Planet 5 (p15).

  [969] The Power of the Daleks

  Vulcan

  The planet Vulcan is only seen in The Power of the Daleks, a story that is almost certainly set in 2020. There is no indication that mankind has developed interstellar travel or faster-than-light drives in this or any other story set at this time. This would seem to suggest that Vulcan is within our own solar system.

  There is some evidence to support this conjecture: since the nineteenth century, some astronomers (including Le Verrier, who discovered Neptune), speculated that a planet might orbit the sun closer than Mercury. There was new interest in this theory in the mid-nineteen-sixties, which might explain why the home planet of Mr Spock was also called Vulcan around the same time in Star Trek. The draft script talked of a “Plutovian Sun”, suggesting Vulcan is far from the Sun, not close.

  In 1964, The Dalek Book, which, like The Power of the Daleks was co-written by David Whitaker, named Vulcan as the innermost planet in our solar system (and Omega as the outermost). This, though, contradicts the story that immediately precedes The Power of the Daleks, in which Mondas is referred to as “the Tenth Planet”; Image of the Fendahl, where the Fendahleen homeworld is “the Fifth Planet”; and The Sun Makers, where Pluto is established as the ninth planet of the solar system. So it seems that Vulcan wasn’t in our solar system in the late nineteen-eighties or the far future.

  Taking all this literally and at face value, Doctor Who fan Donald Gillikin has suggested that Vulcan arrives in the solar system but later leaves. This might be scientifically implausible - at least in the timescale suggested - but we know of at least three other “rogue planets” that enter our solar system according to the series: Earth’s moon, Mondas and Voga. The Taking of Planet 5 (p15) confirms Gillikin’s theory by s
tating that Vulcan was discovered in 2003 and had vanished by 2130.

  [970] Dating The Hollow Men (PDA #10) - No year is given, but the drought of ‘02 is mentioned, and five-pound coins are legal tender.

  [971] Dating “Evening’s Empire” (Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Special 1993) - There’s a calendar giving the month as June in the first panel in which we see the real Alex. The year is harder to establish, however. The complete story was published in 1993, and in the last part, there’s a newspaper dated “Nov 23 1993”. It’s “fifty” years since the World War II plane crashed, again supporting a date in the early nineties. However, the story falls after “The Mark of Mandragora”, set after 1997, and enough time has passed for Frost to be promoted from Major to Colonel.

  [972] Muriel Frost

  According to John Freeman in his afterword to the collected “Evening’s Empire”, DWM originally planned to introduce “a more solid supporting cast” for the seventh Doctor. Muriel Frost of UNIT, a fiery redhead with a complicated personal life, was clearly a big part of those plans. However, publication of “Evening’s Empire” was delayed, and the comic series ended up tying in more closely with the New Adventure novels - meaning the planned storylines were dropped.

  Muriel Frost appeared in “The Mark of Mandragora”, “Evening’s Empire” and “Final Genesis” in DWM. A Captain Muriel Frost also appeared in the 1980 sequence of The Fires of Vulcan. This is clearly meant to be the same character, but it really doesn’t fit with what we know. In the British regular army, it’s possible to spend twenty years as a Captain, but an able candidate could expect to be promoted to Major within four or five years (not to mention the fact that Frost doesn’t look old enough in “The Mark of Mandragora”). Between “The Mark of Mandragora” and “Evening’s Empire”, she’s gone from Major to Colonel - a process that would normally take over ten years.

  Even though the intention was that they are the same character, it might be simpler to imagine (and nothing particularly contradicts this idea) that the Frost in The Fires of Vulcan is Colonel Frost’s mother. In which case, the young US major who appears and is killed in Aliens of London (set in 2006) - the same character who the Doctor called “Muriel Frost” in the draft script, and who has a “Muriel Frost” name badge - must presumably be her American cousin.

  [973] Dating “Final Genesis” (DWM #203-206) - Ace recognises Muriel Frost, so in her terms the story takes place after “Evening’s Empire”.

  [974] Dating Zygon: When Being You Isn’t Enough (BBV independent film) - The story was released in 2008 but filmed years beforehand, hence why a credit card flashed by a minor character, Ray, bears the active/expiration dates of “09/02” to “09/04”. It seems reasonable to assume that the card is still valid, because Anderson goes on a shopping spree upon finding it. A Euronics Centre advertisement establishes that it’s summer.

  Somewhat infamously, this film is a canonical Doctor Who-related erotic thriller, with full-frontal nudity and two softcore sex scenes - although the back cover, featuring three pictures of naked people on a couch, overstates the amount of film time given to sex acts. That said, in what will doubtless be disappointing news to some, there are no sex scenes involving Zygons in their natural state.

  [975] Dating The Shadow of the Scourge (BF #13) - It is “the fifteenth of August 2003” according to the Doctor.

  [976] Dating Jubilee (BF #40) - The date is given (and it’s the hundredth anniversary of the events of 1903).

  [977] Dating Daemons: Daemos Rising (Reeltime Pictures film #6) - A calendar in Cavendish’s house cites the exact day that Mastho is summoned as 31st October, 2003, and the story begins the night before. This is the first time that Mastho had been summoned from his point of view; from Sodality’s, it’s the second (the first being in 1586, in TimeH: Child of Time).

  [978] Dating Falls the Shadow (NA #32) - It is “a crisp November morning”, “five years” after “UN adventurism in the Persian Gulf”. Winterdawn is alive and well in The Quantum Archangel, so this book is set after that. Thascales was an alias of the Master in The Time Monster. Author Daniel O’Mahony intended it to be set in “the near future”.

  [979] Dating Catch-1782 (BF #68) - The date is given.

  [980] TW: Miracle Day, in a cheeky little reference to the ITV show Mine All Mine (2004) by Russell T Davies.

  [981] “Four years” before “The Widow’s Curse”.

  [982] “Five years” prior to TW: Consequences: “The Wrong Hands”.

  [983] Unregenerate! Rausch says he hasn’t seen Louis in “fifty years”, but this could be a rounded sum. A radio broadcast says US and UK forces are “hours” away from Fallujah in Iraq. The main offensive there occurred on 8th November, 2004. Unregenerate! was recorded just more than a week later on 16-17 November.

  [984] “Five years” before SJA: The Mark of the Berserker.

  [985] Night Thoughts

  [986] Dating Sometime Never (EDA #67) - An invitation states that an exhibition at the Institute of Anthropology opens on 31st January, 2004. Sometime Never was published in the same month.

  [987] “A year” before The Gallifrey Chronicles. Greg was introduced in Timeless.

  [988] Transit of Venus. The most recent transit happened in June 2012 - another won’t occur until 2117.

  [989] The Five Companions. This happens at an unspecified point after Ben and Polly become a couple on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Ian, although constantly said to be “older”, is still spry enough to run down corridors and dodge Dalek laser beams with the best of them.

  [990] Dating Project: Lazarus (BF #45) - The dating clues are very conflicting. According to Professor Harket’s journal, the story opens on 18th July, 2004 , and the first track is explicitly titled as such. However, the Doctor says it’s “late November”. He lets the TARDIS choose the destination, though, so perhaps he’s confused. Nobody can quite agree on how much time has passed since Project: Twilight - the Doctor thinks it’s been “a couple years”, Cassie suggests it’s been “a few years”, and Nimrod specifies that it’s “five years”. Project: Destiny seems to establish that Project: Twilight was set in 2001, and its back cover reiterates that Cassie died in 2004.

  [991] Dating The Tomorrow Windows (EDA #69) - Trix’s clothes are “very 2004” (p13). The Earth year 2004 is equivalent to the Galactic Year 2457. All the events on alien planets in The Tomorrow Windows seem contemporaneous, and the Doctor even says on p278, “we only travelled in space, not in time”.

  [992] Dating TW: Trace Memory (TW novel #5) - Owen is now a doctor (TW: Greeks Bearing Gifts says that he was six months into his residency in September 2001) and has a girlfriend (who isn’t necessarily his future finance, seen in TW: Fragments), but the year is still a bit unclear.

  [993] Dating TW: Fragments (TW 2.12) - It’s “five years” prior to the story’s 2009 component. This synchs with TW: Greeks Bearing Gifts (set in 2007, where it’s said that Tosh has been with Torchwood for three years) and TW: To the Last Man (set in 2008, in which Toshiko has known Tommy - who revives from stasis annually - for “four years”). The Torchwood Archives is the odd man out on this one, saying that Tosh was arrested “late 2004/early 2005”, but held for eight months before Jack approached her. TW: SkyPoint alternatively says that she was imprisoned for “six months” (p87).

  [994] Dating The Sleep of Reason (EDA #70) - It’s the “near future” according to the blurb, but references to things like Limp Biskit and Casualty suggest it’s at most only a few years after publication. It is “a hundred years or so” since 1903 (p273).

  [995] Dating The Algebra of Ice (PDA #68) - It’s apparently set “several years” after the Brigadier first met the seventh Doctor (in Battlefield). From his perspective, the Brigadier previously met the seventh Doctor in No Future, but the Doctor mind-wiped the Brigadier’s recollection of those events, and doesn’t restore these memories until Happy Endings, set in 2010. The Algebra of Ice falls in the period where the Brigadier would recall Battlefield as
their first meeting. Lloyd Rose wrote this story with “the modern day” in mind.

  [996] Dating The City of the Dead (EDA #49) - No year is given, but it’s “a few years” after Anji’s time.

  [997] Dating The Deadstone Memorial (EDA #71) - There’s no specific date beyond “early twenty-first century” (p51). It’s set in the modern day.

  [998] “Two years” prior to the 2007 component of TW: Fragments.

  [999] Dating The End of Time (X4.17-4.18) - Rose gives the date.

  [1000] Dating The Eleventh Hour (X5.1) - In the precredits sequence (a late addition to the story), as the TARDIS is seen swooping over London, both the Millennium Dome (started in 1996) and the London Eye (built in 1999) are visible. The opening action, then, presumably entails the new Doctor flailing about in the same time zone in which he regenerated, not when he meets Amy.

  [1001] Dating Iris: Wildthyme at Large (Iris audio #1.1) - The story seems contemporary with the audio’s release in November 2005. A case could be made for dating it slightly later, though, as Iris: The Devil and Ms. Wildthyme - which takes right after this story - is said to occur “thirty years” after December 1978.

  [1002] Iris: Enter Wildthyme

  [1003] Dating Iris: The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme (Iris audio #1.2) - The story directly follows Iris: Wildthyme at Large.

  [1004] Dating SJA: Lost in Time (SJA 4.5) - Date unknown, but the setting seems a bit contemporary in that the babysitter has a compact mobile. Even so, this portion of the story is unlikely to occur simultaneous to Sarah’s starting point in 2010, as the Shopkeeper meant to send her “through time” to this location.

  [1005] Dating Erimem: The Coming of the Queen (BF New Worlds novel #2) - Wilton is said to discover the tomb “today”, and the novel was published in 2005.

  [1006] Dating Rose (X1.1) - The year isn’t specified, but there’s a contemporary setting. The story is clearly set after 2003, as the Doctor reads a paperback copy of the novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Aliens of London shows a missing persons poster that definitively cites Rose as last seen on 6th March, 2005. The casualty figures come from the www.whoisdoctorwho.co.uk website, which also has pictures with time-stamps that offer an alternative date 26th March, the day of broadcast.