Riots are held on the first Thursday of every month, and one occurs here. A piece of conflicting information, however, is that it’s repeatedly said that electrical engineer Jevvan Petrovna Adrea is having a birthday, and she was born “3-2-23”. This would seem to indicate that Valhalla takes place on 3rd February, not December as the catalogue suggests. If push comes to shove, the catalogue is probably more important to the plot (as it’s what motivates the Doctor to visit Valhalla in the first place) and should arguably take precedence.
[560] Dating Terminal of Despair (BBC children’s 2-in-1 #5, released in Sightseeing in Space) - It’s “five months” after “October 2345” (p21).
[561] Original Sin (p287).
[562] “Three hundred years” after K9: The Korven.
[563] Dating “The Seventh Segment” (DWM Summer Special 1995) - K9 says the planet was settled “Relative Terran date 2350 AD”, but gives no indication how long ago that was, and a later dating is certainly feasible.
[564] Dating Exotron (BF #95) - Writer Eddie Robson has stated that the planet was intended as being Earth, but the back cover states that the story takes place on “a distant outpost of Earth”. Within the story, a colony ship arrives direct from Earth. (Track 36, for example, has Sergeant Shreeni say, “Bleedin’ hell… what a time for the Earth shuttle to arrive.”) Security officers are dispatched from an organisation named Earth Authority, which is presumably headquartered on Earth itself.
The atypical and dead-end development of the Exotrons themselves aside, the technology level suggests Earth’s early colonial era. Otherwise, this date is arbitrary.
[565] Dating Recorded Time and Other Stories: “A Most Excellent Match” (BF #150c) - The year of the fair is given.
[566] “Profits of Doom”. The Mayflower was twenty years from its original destination in 2321, its new destination is another “twenty or so” years away.
[567] Dating The Macra Terror (4.7) - The planet was colonised “many centuries” ago. This date is somewhat arbitrary, but it allows the story to fit into a period in which Earth’s colonies are relatively remote and unregulated. The level of technology is reasonably low. The second edition of The Making of Doctor Who described the setting as “the distant future”. The Programme Guide set the story “c.2600”, The Terrestrial Index preferred “between 2100 and 2150”, Timelink “2670”.
[568] Gridlock. The Doctor says the Macra were the scourge of “this galaxy”, and New Earth establishes that the planet New Earth isn’t in our galaxy. Nonetheless, we can probably infer that he means our galaxy.
[569] Zagreus, but this is part of a suspect simulation.
[570] Tairngaire was colonised “three hundred years” before Shadowmind (p32).
[571] Dating Lords of the Storm (MA #17) - The Doctor states that it is “Earthdate 2371” (p23).
[572] The Stone Rose
[573] “Five or six years” before The Romance of Crime (p62-63).
[574] The Eight Doctors. Not date given, but Sarg appears in Shakedown, so it is before that time.
[575] “Ten winters” and “many years” before Infinite Requiem.
[576] Divided Loyalties (p31).
[577] Dating The Androids of Tara (16.4) - The Doctor implies that Tara is “four hundred years and twelve parsecs” away from Earth at the time of The Stones of Blood. It’s here assumed that the TARDIS travelled into the future, not the past, and that Tara is an isolated Earth colony (as the Tarans know of life on other planets). The Terrestrial Index set the story in the “fiftieth century”, Timelink in “2378”, The Discontinuity Guide in the “2370s”, About Time thought that “somewhere around 2400” was reasonable.
[578] Dating Mindwarp (23.2) - The Valeyard announces that the story starts in the “twenty-fourth century, last quarter, fourth year, seventh month, third day”. There is a case to be made for 2379, but not “2479” as suggested by the third edition of The Programme Guide. Peri is apparently killed in Mindwarp, but is revealed as having survived in The Ultimate Foe, and returns in the novel Bad Therapy, the comic “The Age of Chaos” and the audio Peri and the Piscon Paradox (which establishes there are multiples of her). Yrcanos’ people are rendered as the “Krontep” in the Mindwarp novelisation, as “Kr’on Tep” in Bad Therapy.
[579] Peri and the Piscon Paradox
[580] “The Age of Chaos”
[581] Mindwarp
[582] Dating The Price of Paradise (NSA #12) - It’s “the late twenty-fourth century”.
[583] Dating The Romance of Crime (MA #6) - Uva Beta Uva was “colonised in Earth year 2230” according to Romana (p47); the story is set “a hundred and fifty years later” (p8). The month and day are given on p46.
[584] Dating The Infinity Race (EDA #61) - There’s a conspiracy of assassins who have been waiting “six hundred years” (p191) for the chance to eliminate Sabbath - this would appear to be an offshoot of the Secret Service, which initiated him into its ranks in 1762. (There are reports - in the standard timeline, at least - of the Service trying to kill Sabbath in 1780, although it’s entirely possible that they moved to kill him sooner.)
Mention is also made of an Earth Empire that’s ruled by an Emperor, but as the story takes place in a parallel universe, there’s no guarantee that its history is comparable to our own. Dating this story off Sabbath’s history seems a surer bet, as it’s established in Sometime Never that the Council of Eight - deeming the Doctor the most unpredictable element in the whole of history - recruited Sabbath as the most constant variable in the whole of time. This is the reason, in fact, that no temporal duplicates of Sabbath show up in The Last Resort, whereas the Doctor, Fitz and Anji are duplicated thousands of times over. In every alternate history that we’re shown in this period of the EDAs, then, Sabbath’s history is reliably consistent.
[585] “Dogs of Doom”. The date is given.
[586] The real Jaeger comes to power “twenty years” before LIVE 34.
[587] The Happiness Patrol
[588] Dating The Dimension Riders (NA #20) - It is “the late twenty-fourth century” (p2). The Doctor repeats this, adding it is “Just before Benny’s time, and after the Cyberwars” (p25); this analysis comes from The Terrestrial Index rather than the TV series. The date is not precisely fixed until the sequel, Infinite Requiem, which is set in 2387, “six years” after the events of the first book. “March 22nd” was “one week ago” (p76).
[589] Infinite Requiem
[590] Dating Fear of the Dark (PDA #58) - The date is given on the back cover. The personnel file of a mineral pirate, Jyl Stoker, says she departed Earth Central some years back in 2363 (p109), and Tegan notes it has been “four hundred years” since 1982 (p118). It is after the time when Mechanoids were used. The Vegans first appeared in The Monster of Peladon.
[591] Dating Slipback (Radio 4 drama, unnumbered Target novelisation) - An arbitrary date. The Vipod Mor is undertaking a census, perhaps placing it in the same time period as The Happiness Patrol. The illegal time travel experiments in this story also fit neatly with the time travel research mentioned in a variety of other adventures set in the twenty-fourth century.
[592] The Leisure Hive
[593] The Well-Mannered War (p273).
[594] She’s from “the twenty-fourth century” according to Return of the Living Dad (p41).
[595] The Highest Science (p203, p235).
[596] “Centuries” after Night Thoughts.
[597] “Many hundreds of years” after The English Way of Death, with reference to the group Third Eye (p37).
[598] Dating Infinite Requiem (NA #36) - The year is quickly established as “2387” (p5). The precise date is given (p273). It is “six years” since The Dimension Riders (p15).
[599] Dating The Happiness Patrol (25.2) - Terra Alpha is an isolated colony, apparently in the same system as Terra Omega. While Trevor Sigma’s casual dismissal of Earth may suggest the story is set far in the future, the Doctor states only that the planet was “settled some
centuries” in Ace’s future. Interstellar travel is via “rocket pods”. Timelink suggests “2788”.
[600] Two hundred years before Benny: Dry Pilgrimage.
[601] Benny: Dragons’ Wrath
[602] Benny: Down
[603] Two centuries before Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript.
[604] The Highest Science
[605] The Taking of Planet 5
[606] “Twelve years” before Divided Loyalties.
[607] Dating “Planet Bollywood” (DWM #424) - No year given. The tone of this story suggests that Bollywood culture has now crept into space, suggesting it’s the future (unless Bollywood culture was, in fact, extra-terrestrial to start with).
[608] “The Child of Time” (DWM)
[609] The Happiness Patrol
[610] Synthespians™
[611] Year of the Pig
[612] “Five hundred” years after Year of the Pig, although it’s impossible to know if the conference is real - and of interest to Chardalot’s time-travelling father - or just part of Chardalot’s half-baked imaginings.
[613] Dating The Pit (NA #12) - Benny states that the Seven Planets were destroyed “Fifty years before my time... 2400” (p9).
[614] Dating LIVE 34 (BF #74) - The isolated, heavily censored colonists believe that Earth was abandoned “centuries ago”, and most facets of this society - the style of LIVE 34’s broadcasts in particular - bring to mind an Earth colony rather than an alien one. Additionally, a LIVE 34 broadcaster doesn’t question the dating system when Ace mentions a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle. The dating of this story is somewhat arbitrary, although Colony 34 very much fits the mould of an isolated, oppressed Earth colony akin to Terra Alpha in The Happiness Patrol.
[615] She was married to Yrcanos for twenty-five years according to Bad Therapy (p288).
[616] Peri Leaves and Causes Continuity Problems, Two and Three
Peri’s departure was a little confused on television. The Trial of a Time Lord first tells us that she died, then that she lived happily ever after with King Yrcanos - a last-minute addition to the script, and a big stretch given what we saw of their on-screen relationship.
However, there’s a bigger problem: taking what we’re told about subsequent events in the comics and novels, and - as Ahistory does - assuming that it’s the same continuity, a couple of knotty problems emerge.
The first is exactly what happens to Peri, the problem being that the novel Bad Therapy and the comic “The Age of Chaos” contradict each other. In Bad Therapy, Peri resents her new life and returns to Earth after twenty-five years. In “The Age of Chaos”, she remains on Krontep and raises a dynasty of children and grandchildren. This conundrum, at least, is easily explained thanks to Peri and the Piscon Paradox establishing that owing to the Time Lords’ tinkering, there are at least five Peris active in the universe. Clearly, the Peri from Bad Therapy and the one in “The Age of Chaos” number among these variants.
Thankfully, the novelisations don’t “count” for the purposes of this book, because in the Mindwarp novelisation, Philip Martin stated that Peri and Yrcanos immediately went to the twentieth century and Yrcanos became a professional wrestler.
There’s another continuity issue connected with Peri’s departure - Frobisher is the companion of the seventh Doctor for one adventure (“A Cold Day in Hell”), and they make reference there to Peri leaving for Krontep with Yrcanos (on television in Mindwarp), implying it was very recent. For people reading the DWM strip at the time, it was - the story follows straight on from “The World Shapers”, featuring the sixth Doctor, Frobisher and Peri, but this is difficult to fit around the TV series.
Furthermore, in “The Age of Chaos”, the sixth Doctor and Frobisher are twice seen visiting Krontep, so it’s odd that Frobisher hasn’t come to terms with Peri leaving. The story also implies that the sixth Doctor has dropped Frobisher off in the Antarctic at some point and is travelling solo. (Strange how Frobisher seems to take sabbaticals from the Doctor’s company, as he also leaves the TARDIS for a time in The Maltese Penguin, then returns.)
Any solution also has to explain how Mel - who’s present when the Doctor regenerates (in Time and the Rani), but not in “A Cold Day in Hell” or the following story “Redemption” - fits in. Ultimately, unless Frobisher’s hiding in the TARDIS, unmentioned, during the television stories (or Mel is doing the same during “A Cold Day in Hell” and “Redemption”), it’s not easy to come up with a neat solution that fits all the evidence.
[617] “About a hundred years” before Sword of Orion.
[618] Dating Vanishing Point (EDA #44) - An arbitrary date. The colony has been around for “centuries”.
[619] Dating Divided Loyalties (PDA #26) - It is “thirty years” after Dymok became isolated in 2378 (p16). The Toymaker next appears in The Nightmare Fair.
[620] The Game. Carlisle’s birth date and details of his early life are given, Disc 1, Track 7.
[621] “More than a century” before Parasite (p49).
[622] The Menagerie
[623] “Pureblood”
[624] In the “ten years” leading up to “The Age of Chaos”.
[625] Dating “The Age of Chaos” (DWM Special, unnumbered) - The story is set after Mindwarp, long enough afterwards that Peri’s youngest grandchild is 16 (and her grandsons were young men ten years ago), but no exact date is specified. So, it has to be at least fifty years since Peri left the Doctor. The tenth Doctor claims in “The Forgotten” that he never visited Peri when she was living with Yrcanos, but he’s not exactly in his right mind at the time.
[626] Dating “Dogs of Doom” (DWW #27-34) - Babe tells Sharon the system has been “settled here for fifty years - since 2380 Old Earth time”. It’s never explained why the Daleks need Werelox to invade the settlements if they’re going to sterilise the planets from orbit.
[627] The colonists crashed on Axista Four about a hundred years before The Colony of Lies. Kirann mentions meeting the seventh Doctor on p164.
[628] Spiral Scratch
[629] Dating Survival of the Fittest (BF #130b) - The cliffhanger is resolved in The Architects of History. The Doctor finds himself in 2044 in that story, owing to Klein’s historical alterations, but it’s impossible to believe that Survival of the Fittest occurs in the same year - it’s much too early for humanity to have spread out this far into the Milky Way. Also, human technology is now at a stage where a team of fortune-seeking humans can venture off into space armed with a fearsome amount of hardware - enough to kill thousands of adult Vrill and take out their hive system. Even so, this date is arbitrary.
[630] The Architects of History
[631] Benny: Tears of the Oracle. KS-159 is the future home of the Braxiatel Collection.
[632] “Decades” before Judgement of the Judoon.
[633] Benny: Down
[634] Dating Scaredy Cat (BF #75) - According to the Doctor, the Earth Empire bans Saravin “a few hundred years” after this point.
[635] Dating The Underwater War (BBC children’s 2-in-1 #7, released in Alien Adventures) - Earth’s space technology seems relatively advanced, as two trips between Earth and Hydron are made in the span of two years, minus all the time Fleming spends on Earth in the interim. That said, Earth culture is not so advanced from the present day that Jules Verne has been forgotten, as two submersibles are here named after him. “The Company” is not IMC, the seemingly ubiquitous mining corporation in operation during Earth’s Empire phase (not that it’s ever established that IMC is the only mining company of its day), and it seems a stretch, without it being said, to think that it’s the same corporation that runs Terminus (Terminus). Ultimately, the story could occur just about anywhere.
[636] 2454, according to Judgement of the Judoon.
[637] “Twenty years” before Mrs Ransandrianasolo is born, according to Return of the Living Dad (p164).
[638] The Crystal Bucephalus - referred to as “shortly before the Second Dalek War” (q.v. The
Dalek Wars).
[639] The Colony of Lies
[640] Benny: Old Friends. When this occurs is unclear, but by 2562, the lemurs’ offspring are holding down jobs on the spacelanes.
[641] The Also People (p170).
[642] Theatre of War. The date of publication is given as both “2566” (p36), and “2466” (p135). While the first date is actually in Benny’s home era, the intro pages to Big Finish’s Benny short story anthologies take such continual delight in pointing out that Down Among the Dead Men was “published originally in 2466, which is odd given that it is now 26—”, the latter date has become a lot harder to discount. Appendix II of Sky Pirates! is “A Benny Bibliography”, and contains further details.
[643] Dating Colony in Space (8.4) - We see a calendar being changed from “Monday 2nd March 2472” to the next day. Ashe tells Jo that they left Earth in “seventy-one”. Hulke’s novelisation sets this story in “2971”.
[644] “Some five hundred years” before The Mutants, according to the Administrator.
[645] “Five hundred years” after Return of the Living Dad (p61).
[646] “Seventy-two” years before Return of the Living Dad.
[647] “Almost thirty-five years” before The Taking of Chelsea 426 (p74). It’s notable that Mars is not thought to support plant life in this era - we know from Benny: Beige Planet Mars that by 2545, a settlement equipped with photon missiles is in operation there.
[648] Burning Heart (p174).
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