[142] The episode is a clip show, with very little new material.
[143] Iris: The Claws of Santa outright states that the ice cap melted. Hothouse shows that global warming has become a major political issue, and K9: Sirens of Ceres says that many top scientists have been assigned to find a solution. It’s very tempting to see the Gravitron from The Moonbase, a global weather control system set up in 2050, as a potential solution to the environmental collapse the planet is suffering from in other stories set around that time.
[144] Dating The Time of the Daleks (BF #32) - It is “the mid twenty-first century”.
[145] “Twenty years” before The Moonbase.
[146] Deceit (p27, p153). It was possibly based on Silurian technology, as the Silurians establish a Gravitron on the moon (in an alternate history) in Blood Heat (p196).
[147] The Last Dodo
[148] The Wheel in Space. The Doctor’s familiarity with the Gravitron in The Moonbase, ion rockets in The Seeds of Death and Galactic Salvage and Insurance in Nightmare of Eden suggests he visited the solar system during this period at least once.
[149] The Room with No Doors (p48).
[150] Transit
[151] The Waters of Mars
[152] Dating The King of Terror (PDA #37) - The day that Daniel Clompus visits the Brigadier is given.
[153] Dating The Wedding of River Song (X6.13) - It’s a “few months” after the Brigadier has passed away, the date of which was established in The King of Terror.
[154] “Almost a century” before The Final Sanction (p175), although it must be a little longer than that, as the Selachians were active in the twenty-first century according to both The Murder Game and Alien Bodies.
[155] The Memory Cheats. Mention of the Company’s self-defence techniques presumably explains how Zoe can flip the Karkus about the place in The Mind Robber. This placement here is roughly in accord with Zoe being “19 or so” in The Invasion; Wendy Padbury was 20 when she started playing the part (The Wheel in Space).
[156] TW: Asylum
[157] Alien Bodies (p12).
[158] Vampire Science
[159] Mad Dogs and Englishmen
[160] St Anthony’s Fire
[161] Interference (p217). The Indestructible Man specifies that the UN is the force behind the ban (p13).
[162] The Waters of Mars. We’re told that the crew have been “gone over two years” before November 2059, and also that it was a “two year journey” to get to Mars, so they left in late 2056/early 2057. It would only take “nine months” to get back, but the outbound trip involved taking all the supplies necessary to build the colony, time refuelling on the moon and possibly time in Martian orbit while drones built the base.
[163] Dating The Waters of Mars (X4.16) - The historical significance of the date of the destruction of Bowie Base One means the precise day is repeated a number of times. Once again, human beings who you’d think would have been briefed by someone in the know are totally unaware of the Ice Warriors. There’s no evidence that the computer or robots on Bowie Base One have artificial intelligence.
[164] Dating SJA: The Mad Woman in the Attic (SJA 3.2) - The date is given in a caption and reiterated by Adam. While no link is made in any of the stories, we might infer some and come to interesting conclusions. Luke may have inherited the house on Sarah Jane’s death (in 2040, according to a possible future seen in Interference). This is set after the K9 series, so we can infer the teenagers from The Sarah Jane Adventures were in their fifties and in London during those events. We don’t know the fate of K9 Mk IV, but it’s entirely possible there are at least two versions of K9 around in Britain in 2059 - the Mk I or II model from the K9 series, and the Mk IV from The Sarah Jane Adventures.
[165] “Nearly forty years” before Snowglobe 7.
[166] “Final Sacrifice”. The “weird little planet” could be a reference to Vulcan from The Power of the Daleks. The Doctor finds the lost colony circa 21906.
[167] Interference (p217).
[168] Human Resources. No date is given, but it has to be at a point in the twenty-first century with both political instability and a human space programme. Karen is apparently the same age as Lucie (late teens) in 2006.
[169] Benny: Another Girl, Another Planet
[170] Nekromanteia
[171] “Fifty years in the future” of the present-day component of The Way Through the Woods. Although the temporal anomalies that occur in Swallow Woods are undone, the area presumably does still become a lake after Reyn’s spaceship is sent away from Earth.
[172] Dating The Last Dodo (NSA #13) - The Chinese Three-Striped Box Turtle is a new addition to the collection, and has recently gone extinct, so it’s around 2062.
[173] The Waters of Mars. They were planning “five years on Mars”, which started in 2058.
[174] Alien Bodies. See “Are There Two Dalek Histories?”
[175] “About twenty years” before Loups-Garoux.
[176] The Beast Below
[177] “At least five hundred”, maybe five hundred and fifty years” before Benny: the Tub Full of Cats.
[178] The Indestructible Man. This story seems to contradict a lot of the other stories set around this time, both in broad terms and points of detail.
[179] Dating Alien Bodies (EDA #6) - The date is given, p68.
[180] TW: Asylum. Freda seems to hail from 2069, despite Gwen’s suspect math; somehow, she’s able to add Freda’s birthday (30th May, 2053) to her age (17) to determine that she stems from 2069.
[181] Seeing I (p29). No date given.
[182] Nightmare of Eden. A monitor readout states that Galactic Salvage and Insurance were formed in “2068”. The Doctor has heard of the company and briefly pretends to be working for them.
[183] The Murder Game (p9).
[184] Dating The Wheel in Space/The War Games (5.7, 6.7) - This, along with The Seeds of Death, is one of two stories set in the twenty-first century that are trickiest to date. There’s no date given in the story itself.
In The Moonbase, base leader Hobson states that “every child knows” about the destruction of Mondas (in The Tenth Planet). Yet none of the crew of the Wheel have heard of the Cybermen, and they’re generally sceptical about the existence of alien life. This is a contradiction whether Zoe comes from before, around the same time or after The Moonbase. Invoking Zoe’s narrow education doesn’t work if “every child” knows about Mondas’ demise, and surely the only way she wouldn’t know is if it had been deliberately kept from her, which would be a bit bizarre. (Unless it’s felt that telling future astronauts about all the monsters up there would be counter-productive.)
Amongst its other duties, the Wheel gathers information on Earth’s weather, but this needn’t mean that weather control isn’t in use - to control the weather, you surely need the ability to monitor it.
As it’s Zoe’s native time, we get more clues in subsequent stories she’s in: Zoe is “born in the twenty-first” century (The War Games), and she is “19 or so” according to the Brigadier in The Invasion, so the story must be set somewhere between 2019 and 2119. In The Mind Robber, she recognises the Karkus - a comic strip character from the year 2000 - which might suggest she comes from that year. For that reason (presumably), the narration in The Prison in Space identifies Zoe as “a pretty astrophysicist from the year 2000”. However, when discussing the Karkus, Zoe asks the Doctor if he’s been to the year 2000 - if it’s not a rhetorical question, then The Wheel in Space isn’t set in that year. In The Mind Robber, we see an image of Zoe’s home city - a highly futuristic metropolis.
It’s never explicitly stated that The Seeds of Death takes place before Zoe’s time (see the dating notes on The Seeds of Death). In The Seeds of Death, Zoe understands the principles behind T-Mat, meaning she possesses knowledge that’s otherwise limited to a few specialists (she may have picked this up on her travels - although she doesn’t in any story we see). Why Zoe doesn’t remember T-Mat or recognise the Mart
ians is a mystery, but it does indicate she was born after T-Mat was abandoned, or she’d recognise it. Then again, Zoe has a narrow education and doesn’t recognise kilts or candles, either, so perhaps T-Mat is seen as a quaint and irrelevant historical detail by her time.
If Zoe’s inability to recognise T-Mat is relevant, it suggests that the earliest date for The Wheel in Space is at least “nineteen years or so” (the Brigadier’s estimate of Zoe’s age in The Invasion) after The Seeds of Death (dated to circa 2040 in this chronology), so it can’t take place before 2059. This doesn’t help narrow the upper limit on when the story can occur, however.
Many subsequent stories establish that the governments of Earth knew about the existence of aliens in the twentieth century, and the new television series (as well as stories in the books and comics) establish that the general public accepts the existence of aliens by the early twenty-first.
The Indestructible Man places this story after 2096, as it’s set before Zoe was born. The Harvest (set in 2021) refers to the Wheel space stations.
The first two editions of The Programme Guide placed The Wheel in Space between “1990-2000”, but The Terrestrial Index suggested a date “c2020” (or “2030” in The Universal Databank). “2074” was suggested by “A History of the Cybermen” in DWM. Cybermen, after some discussion (p61-62), said “2028 AD”. The first edition of Timelink said “2020”; the Telos version favoured “2080”. About Time says “it looks like the 2030s to us”.
The story is here placed a century after it was broadcast, around the same time as the other Cyberman incursion seen in The Moonbase. In the last episode of The War Games, Zoe is returned to her native time.
[185] “The Forgotten”
[186] Fear of the Daleks. Wendy Padbury was 58 when this was recorded, a possible indicator of Zoe’s age.
[187] Dating The Moonbase (4.6) - Hobson tells the Doctor they are in “2070”, and Polly later repeats this. On screen, the small crew of the moonbase includes Englishmen, Frenchmen and Danes. The production file for the story listed the other nationalities represented at the moonbase: Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Germans and Nigerians.
[188] Original Sin (p289).
[189] The Tomb of the Cybermen, Attack of the Cybermen.
[190] Sword of Orion
Telos
After the destruction of their vast advance force (The Invasion), their homeworld of Mondas (The Tenth Planet) and most of the surviving Cyber warships (Silver Nemesis), the Cybermen must have been severely weakened. They gradually regrouped and attempted to attack Earth at least twice in the twenty-first century (The Wheel in Space, The Moonbase). These attempts failed, and the Cybermen faced extinction (according to the Controller in The Tomb of the Cybermen). So they left the solar system and conquered Telos. (The Doctor says in Attack of the Cybermen that “if Mondas hadn’t been destroyed, the Cybermen would never have come here [to Telos]”, which contradicts an unbroadcast line from The Moonbase where a Cyberman states, “We were the first space travellers from Mondas. We left before it was destroyed. We came from the planet Telos.”) The Cybermen subjugated the native Cryons, used Cryon technology to build their “tombs” (Attack of the Cybermen) and experimented with new weapons before entering suspended animation. In the late twenty-fifth century, the Cybermen revive (The Tomb of the Cybermen), but are refrozen. Telos is destroyed soon after in an asteroid strike (the Cyberman audio series), but a new breed of Cybermen is forged to menace the galaxy (Cyberman 2, evidently leading into The Cyber War).
[191] St Anthony’s Fire
[192] Lords of the Storm (p104).
[193] Dating “The Forgotten” (IDW DW mini-series #2) - No date is given. The level of technology seems reminiscent of Zoe’s time.
[194] “Sixty years” after Autonomy.
[195] Dating Mad Dogs and Englishmen (EDA #52) - It is “one hundred years” (p9) after “1974” (p3).
[196] Deceit (p188), with similar technology in Transit.
[197] “Twenty years” before Snowglobe 7.
[198] Dating Loups-Garoux (BF #20) - The date is given.
[199] A Death in the Family
[200] “Four hundred years” before The Game.
[201] Dating Warriors of the Deep (21.1) - The Doctor tells Tegan that the year is “about 2084”. The televised story doesn’t specify which bloc the Seabase belongs to, and only the novelisation specifies the blocs as “East and West”. Even that leaves the geopolitics far from clear. The most obvious division in 1984 would have been between a capitalist West and communist East, but nowadays that seems unlikely. Lt. Preston doesn’t seem surprised that the TARDIS is “not from this planet”, and no-one seems shocked that the Silurians are intelligent nonhumans. This might suggest that contact has been made with a number of alien races by this time.
The Return of the Earth Reptiles
In Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Ambassadors of Death and The Sea Devils, the Doctor thinks that the Brigadier has killed all the Silurians at Wenley Moor. However, they may simply be entombed, and one Silurian - Ichtar - seems to survive the first story into Warriors of the Deep.
Based on discrepancies between the events of Doctor Who and the Silurians, the descriptions of the Doctor’s last encounter with the species in Warriors of the Deep, and the fact that the Doctor recognises Icthar, the Myrka and the Silurian submersible, The Discontinuity Guide postulated that there is an unrecorded adventure featuring the Doctor and the Silurians set between the two stories. The novel The Scales of Injustice, set in the UNIT era and published the year after The Discontinuity Guide, addresses most of these issues in an attempt to fill the gap.
Cold Blood entails a Silurian colony that’s slated to revive and try to negotiate an accord with humanity around 3020, but we aren’t shown the outcome of that effort. Silurians are referred to in a number of New and Missing Adventures set in the future (Love and War, Transit and The Crystal Bucephalus to name three). They seem particularly peaceful towards humans in Benny’s native time.
[202] The Dying Days (p115). This is mankind’s first diplomatic contact with alien races, as opposed to being invaded by them. See also “When Does the General Public Accept the Existence of Aliens?”
[203] No Future (p257).
[204] It arrived “thirty years” after The Waters of Mars. Travelling at lightspeed, it would take a little over four years to reach Proxima Centauri, so it must have been launched in 2085.
[205] Dating “Black Destiny” (DWM #235-237) - The date is given. The United Nations World Health Organisation is still operating, as are nuclear power stations. Peace must have broken out since Warriors of the Deep.
[206] “A hundred years or so” after The Nightmare Fair. This isn’t the Doctor’s best suggestion, as “a hundred years” after that story would be around 2086, at the start of the Thousand-Day War.
[207] Transit, with additional details of Paris’ obliteration provided in Benny: Beige Planet Mars. The Mona Lisa that perishes is presumably the one with “This is a Fake” scrawled on it in felt-tip, per City of Death.
[208] Transit
[209] Fear Itself (PDA, p176-177).
[210] Transit
[211] GodEngine
[212] Legacy (p86), GodEngine (p79). In The Curse of Peladon, we learn that the Martians and Arcturans are “old enemies”.
[213] GodEngine (p168).
[214] Legacy (p86).
[215] Dating The Story of Martha: “Breathing Space” (NSA #28b) - The year is given.
[216] Fear Itself (PDA)
[217] Transit
[218] “Thirty years” after The Waters of Mars.
[219] Dating Paper Cuts (BF #125) - The Doctor twice says that it’s been “sixty years” since he visited Draconia and aided with the space plague, but the Queen Mother - who vividly remembers meeting the Doctor when she was only 12, and would presumably be in a better position to know - claims it’s actually been “fifty years”. The story leaves open-ended how Draco
nia resolves the struggle between the fifteen emperors, but however it happens, the Draconians have a new empire and just one emperor by Frontier in Space.
[220] Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Possum Kingdom”.
[221] Roughly five hundred years before Benny: The Gods of the Underworld.
[222] This happens long enough before Benny: The Kingdom of the Blind that the Halvans’ descendents don’t remember their own history.
[223] “Seventeen years” before The Memory Cheats.
[224] Dating “Ground Zero” (DWM #238-242) - The date is given in a caption. The destruction of the TARDIS console would seem to lead to its new design in Doctor Who - The Movie, although oddly it’s the old TV console introduced in The Five Doctors that’s destroyed, not the version seen in the later seventh Doctor strips.
Ace’s Fate
The seventh Doctor and Ace walk off together in Survival, but the next time we see the seventh Doctor - in The Movie - he’s travelling alone. Thus, there have been a number of accounts of Ace’s fate.
The New Adventures saw her grow to become a young woman, then in Set Piece she acquires her own time machine and left the Doctor, and the last time we see her is in Lungbarrow, where she’s still an independent time traveller. In “Ground Zero”, a teenaged Ace sacrifices her life to save the Doctor’s - and the Doctor is wearing the costume he did in The Movie, suggesting it’s shortly before he regenerates. In (the possibly apocryphal) Death Comes to Time, an older Ace is training to become a Time Lord, and witnesses the seventh Doctor’s death. In Prime Time, we see the Doctor exhume Ace’s teenage body - although in Loving the Alien, we learn the dead Ace (the one we saw with the Doctor on TV) was replaced by one from an alternate timeline. The four Big Finish audios adapted from suggested stories for the unmade Season 27 (Thin Ice, Crime of the Century, Animal and Earth Aid) don’t have Ace leave the TARDIS as the production team at the time initially planned; instead, she continues travelling with the Doctor and Raine Creevy. In due course, Big Finish may also tell “Ace’s last story”.
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