B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  [1244] The Daleks’ Master Plan, with the date of 3932 given in Neverland. The entity is referred to as “the Embodiment Gris” in The Daleks’ Master Plan, as “the Embodiment of Gris” in The Dying Days and Neverland.

  [1245] Dating The Monster of Peladon (11.4) - Sarah guesses that it is “fifty years” after the Doctor’s first visit, and this is later confirmed by other people, including the Doctor, Thalira and Alpha Centauri.

  [1246] Dating The Blue Angel (EDA #27) - No date is given, but the ship serves the Federation and is en route to Peladon.

  [1247] Dating “A Cold Day in Hell” (DWM #130-133) - According to the Doctor, “you Martians allied yourself to the Federation years ago”, and this is after The Monster of Peladon, because Axaxyr and the events of that story are mentioned. These Martians were “born and bred on the frigid wastes of Mars”, and they style A-Lux “New Mars”, so it would seem to be their original planet that’s uninhabitable.

  [1248] Dating “Redemption” (DWM #134) - This is Olla’s native time, so the story is set shortly after “A Cold Day in Hell”.

  [1249] Dating Bang-Bang-A-Boom! (BF #39) - No date is given, but the story is set in the Federation period.

  [1250] War of the Daleks

  [1251] Legacy. We learn that the Vogans were “ultimately self-destructive” and that the Cybermen eventually settled on a “New Mondas”, as they wished to do in Silver Nemesis. However, this second homeworld has also been destroyed by the time of Legacy. The Cybermen survive to appear in The Crystal Bucephalus.

  [1252] In The Daleks’ Master Plan, Mavic Chen seems to have been Guardian for a very long time. He says, when accused of stealing the taranium, “Why should I arrange that fifty years be spent secretly mining to acquire this mineral...” - which implies, but does not actually state, that he has been actively involved with the plot for half a century. Against this, The Guardian of the Solar System establishes that Chen started mining taranium for reasons entirely unrelated to the Daleks, and only joined the conspiracy after the destruction of the giant clock in 3999 threatens Earth’s security - a time-table that’s in keeping with his being named as the newest member of the conspiracy, its “most recent ally”, in the TV story. Neverland cites 3950 as the year that Chen became Guardian of the Solar System.

  The non-aggression pact is referred to in The Daleks’ Master Plan. This perhaps suggests that planets in the solar system were in conflict before this time, and Chen’s hope that peace will spread throughout the universe implies that much of known space is at war. A short scene in Legacy suggests that Chen did not become Guardian until much later.

  [1253] Dating Iris: The Sound of Fear (Iris audio #2.1) - Iris and Gold meet at an Intergalactic Song Contest won by Nicky Newman, who appears in Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, so the two stories must occur relatively close to one another. Tom is no longer travelling with Iris and Panda, as he suddenly fell in love with someone he met while they battled giant alien cockroaches.

  [1254] Iris: The Two Irises

  [1255] Placebo Effect

  [1256] The Book of the Still

  [1257] Probably some decades before The Only Good Dalek.

  [1258] Carmodi was born as one of the Unnoticed’s sensitives thirty years before The Book of the Still. At the end of that novel, she paradoxically averts the creation of the Unnoticed, making it debatable whether these events occurred in the proper history or not.

  [1259] “Twenty years” before Max Warp.

  [1260] Dating “Deathworld” (DWW #15-16) - The Doctor explains in the framing sequence that the Ice Warriors “came from Mars thousands of years ago, then spread their conquests through the galaxy”. Trisilicate is a mineral that’s only been found on Mars and Peladon by The Monster of Peladon, so this story is set after that. The two races don’t recognise each other, and the Cybermen refer to the Cyberman Empire.

  Do the Cybermen Ever Have an Empire?

  As they are the second best-known monsters to fight the Doctor, it’s easy to assume that the Cybermen are second only to the Daleks when it comes to the power they wield and territory they control. Yet there’s precious little evidence for this in the televised stories.

  We see or hear that at various points in history, humanity, Daleks, Sontarans, Rutans, Draconians, Mutts, Osirians, Tharils, Jagaroth, Skonnos, Movellans, Autons and even the Chelonians (according to Zamper) all control vast areas of our galaxy. Elsewhere in the universe, races have achieved domination of an entire galaxy - in The Daleks’ Master Plan alone, we meet eight delegates who each have total control of one of the Outer Galaxies. The Wirrn (The Ark in Space) dominated Andromeda until humanity drove them out. The winners, though, are... the Dominators, the masters of “ten galaxies” according to The Dominators. (They also state they control “the whole galaxy” that Dulkis is part of, but while it’s not as impressive a boast, neither is it the contradiction some reference sources seem to think.) Linx’s boast (in The Time Warrior) that the Sontarans have subjugated every galaxy in the universe must surely only be rhetoric.

  Away from the televised stories, there’s a parallel universe where the Roman Empire has conquered the entire galaxy (“The Iron Legion”), and the Gubbage Cones (The Crystal Bucephalus), Cat-People (Invasion of the Cat-People) and Foamasi (Placebo Effect) are all stated to be or have been major galactic powers.

  So what of the Cybermen? For the most part, their effectiveness as would-be galactic conquerors is tepid to say the least. In Doomsday, tellingly, an army of parallel-universe Cybermen that’s millions strong is no match for four Daleks, and when Dalek reinforcements arrive, the Cybermen are routed in minutes.

  Perhaps surprisingly, in the four decades since the Cybermen debuted, the most territory we ever actually see them control in a television story... is one planet, and it’s their homeworld. In The Tenth Planet, they control Mondas, which is destroyed at the end of the adventure. After that, the best they manage is one complex on one planet - in The Tomb of the Cybermen and Attack of the Cybermen, they control their city on Telos. In every other story, we see only a small force launching a stealthy attack - usually with a larger army being held in reserve - and every story ends with the defeat or destruction of every single member of that army (with the possible exception of Attack of the Cybermen, where a base on the moon is mentioned and its fate isn’t accounted for). In a number of stories (The Tomb of the Cybermen, Revenge of the Cybermen, Earthshock, Attack of the Cybermen and possibly Silver Nemesis) it’s explicitly stated that the Cybermen are on the verge of extinction.

  The audios The Harvest and Sword of Orion follow the same pattern. “A handful” survive in Real Time. The Cybermen fare no better in the books - in Legacy, the Federation thinks they’re extinct. Iceberg and Illegal Alien feature a small group of isolated survivors. They’re routed in Killing Ground, which ends - to compound their problems - with a group of converted humans setting out to pick off any Cybermen they can find.

  In none of these stories does anyone claim that the Cybermen have “an empire” or anything like it.

  Despite all of this, there’s some evidence in the DWM comic strips that the Cybermen do have an empire. “Deathworld” directly makes this claim (a Cyberman tells an Ice Warrior, “Why are you intruding on a planet of the Cybermen Empire?”), and “Throwback”, while not making actual mention of an empire, shows the Cybermen at their most powerful. They’re feared, with a futuristic city on Telos, vast space fleets and the military power to conquer whole worlds with ease. “Black Legacy” shows Cybermen of the same vein as those seen in “Throwback”, but is difficult to date.

  “Kane’s Story” makes reference of a “Cyber-Emperor” and is set at a time when Davros is the Emperor of the Daleks - so it’s between Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks (or after “Emperor of the Daleks” and before Remembrance of the Daleks, if we take the other media into account).

  The Cybermen are also powerful at the time of Earthshock (in 2526), and this chronology links that to their re
-emergence from their tomb on Telos (the Cybermen audio series appears to do the same). So there may well be a Cyber Empire blossoming in the late twenty-fifth, early twenty-sixth century - although it seems to have fallen by the time of Frontier in Space (2540), presumably after their crushing defeat in the Cyber War. The seemingly formidable Twelfth Cyber Legion is seen in A Good Man Goes to War (set in the fifty-second century)... but the Doctor deals it an indeterminate amount of damage while learning Amy’s location. Nonetheless, logic suggests that at least eleven other Cyber Legions must exist in this time zone, whatever their effectiveness.

  [1261] “Fifteen years” before Placebo Effect.

  [1262] Dating Legacy (NA #25) - The dating of this book is problematic. It has to be set after “3948”, when a couple of the fictional reference texts cited were written (p37). The Doctor says that it is “the thirty-ninth century” (p55) and later narrows this down to the “mid-thirty-ninth century give or take a decade” (p84) [c.3850]. The novel is set “one hundred years” after The Curse of Peladon (p106), at a time when “young” Mavic Chen is still a minor official and Amazonia, who first appeared at the end of The Curse of Peladon, is the Guardian of the Solar System (p237) [so before 3950]. It is “thirty years” before a Dalek War that might well be The Daleks’ Master Plan (p299) [therefore 3970] and “six hundred years” after The Ice Warriors (p89) [therefore 3600, favouring the dating of that story as 3000]. The book takes place a couple of months before Theatre of War, and as that book is definitely set in 3985, this last date has been adopted.

  [1263] Dating Theatre of War (NA #26) - The book is set soon after Legacy in “3985” (p1), a fact confirmed by Benny’s diary (“Date: 3985, or something close”, p21), and the TARDIS’ Time Path indicator (p81).

  Benny: The Wake confirms that Bernice (from her perspective) first visits the Braxiatel Collection and meets Irving Braxiatel “a thousand years” in the future of her native era. This is slightly hard to reconcile against the Benny audios, where events progress in rough symmetry with the Gallifrey series - meaning that Braxiatel in 2610 is aware of the oncoming Last Great Time War, and it’s a bit hard to think that he toils away for another thousand years before finally shutting the Collection down and returning home (in Gallifrey: Mindbomb). That said, there’s no evidence that the Collection isn’t active at the time of Theatre of War, even if nothing else is presently known about its status after 2610. In Tales from the Vault, the fourth Doctor identifies a painting that was stolen from the Braxiatel Collection “over two centuries ago” - he can’t mean that amount of time before the story (which is set in 2002), and so must mean that long ago in his lifetime, suggesting the Collection is in operation at least that long.

  [1264] The Drowned World. The commendation is presumably unrelated to Vyon’s tenure with the Space Security Service, and he didn’t join until 3990 according to The Daleks’ Master Plan. Using Nicholas Courtney’s age as standard based upon when he played the role, Vyon would have been born in 3967, age 18 in 3985.

  [1265] “One thousand two hundred and seventy years” before The Genocide Machine.

  [1266] The Daleks’ Master Plan

  [1267] The Only Good Dalek

  [1268] “Two thousand years” after Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark (p247).

  [1269] Dating The Daleks: “The Destroyers” (BF LS #2.2b) - According to Sara in The Guardian of the Solar System (set in 3999), this happens “Back when I’d first met the Daleks, so many years ago.” In The Daleks’ Master Plan, Sara doesn’t indicate one way or another as to whether she’s met the Daleks before.

  “The Destroyers” was intended to serve as the pilot episode of a (ultimately unmade) Dalek TV show, the outline for which was first published in The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book (1988). The summation here reflects the Big Finish audio adaptation released in 2010. In both Nation’s outline and the Big Finish version, matters are left very open ended - the SSS team fails to rescue the Daleks’ captive (David in the audio story, Sara in the original outline), and while the Daleks threaten to destroy Earth, nothing is said about how they intend to accomplish this - or if it has any relation whatsoever to the Time Destructor plot central to The Daleks’ Master Plan.

  [1270] The Guardian of the Solar System

  [1271] The Daleks’ Master Plan

  [1272] Dating Placebo Effect (EDA #13) - The date is given. Placebo Effect states that Christianity is still practised on Earth in 3999, but Sara Kingdom - hailing from the year 4000 - hasn’t heard of Christmas in The Daleks’ Master Plan. Historically, not every version of Christianity has placed an emphasis on Christmas, though.

  [1273] Dating Max Warp (BF BBC7 #2.2) - No specific year was intended by writer Jonathan Morris, who feared that a concrete dating might conflict with other stories. However, mention of the Magellan Danube 4000 - touted as “a man’s spaceship”, and not a historical piece - suggests a dating in or around 3999, provided spaceships follow the tradition that car models are designated a year ahead of manufacture. The story occurs in the Sirius system, and the overall prosperity and warmth of the society seen here matches much better with the time of the Federation - and the holding of events such as the Intergalactic Olympics in Placebo Effect (also set in 3999) - than the corporate-minded gloom that seems to pervade Sirius in The Caves of Androzani.

  The only other dating clue is a derogatory mention of the Moroks from The Space Museum. According to The Death of Art, the Morok Empire collapsed in the thirtieth century, so it’s entirely possible that they’d be the subject of ridicule afterwards.

  It’s not entirely clear if the Varlons are related to humanity, although the presence of a “gin and tonic” might suggest some human influence, and it’s generally assumed that the inhabitants seen in The Caves of Androzani (if they do indeed reside in Sirius) are human. Mention of “Pluvikerr-Hinton” is a little tribute to the late Craig Hinton and his obsession with the Gubbage Cones (the unnamed fungus creatures seen in The Chase) from the planet Pluvikerr.

  [1274] The Taking of Planet 5 (p13).

  [1275] Dating The Guardian of the Solar System (BF CC 5.1) - The year is given.

  [1276] The backstory to The Daleks’ Master Plan, as catalysed by events in The Guardian of the Solar System. Writer Simon Guerrier has confirmed that the clock’s destruction triggers a slow-acting erosion of Earth’s shipping and security, not something as cataclysmic as, say, every road in the United States vanishing overnight. The matter-transportation experiment that teleports the Doctor, Steven and Sara (and a few mice) to Desperus in The Daleks’ Master Plan is part and parcel of Chen’s attempts to free Earth from its reliance on the giant clock.

  [1277] Dating Mission to the Unknown (3.2) - The story is set shortly before The Daleks’ Master Plan.

  [1278] Dating The Daleks’ Master Plan (3.3) - The date “4000” is established by Chen. The draft script for Twelve Part Dalek Story set it in “1,000,000 AD”.

  [1279] I am a Dalek

  [1280] “Two centuries” before “Body Snatched”.

  [1281] War of the Daleks. Not long after the death of an SSS agent called Marc, presumably Marc Cory from Mission to the Unknown. This throws the dating scheme of the book out, as Antalin is the planet the Daleks will disguise as Skaro to be destroyed. But that, according to writer John Peel, will happen before this.

  [1282] Storm Harvest

  [1283] “Agent Provocateur”

  [1284] Dating The Book of the Still (EDA #56) - It’s “4009” (p57).

  [1285] “Thirty years after” Legacy (p299), and possibly intended as a reference to events of or following The Daleks’ Master Plan.

  [1286] Dating The Only Good Dalek (BBC original graphic novel #1) - Although it’s never confirmed that the human officers seen here are part of the Space Security Service, they wear SSS uniforms as seen in The Daleks’ Master Plan. Tellingly, when the Doctor says he knew Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom, Tranter replies, “you must have started fighting Daleks when you were very young”. As the eleve
nth Doctor outwardly looks about thirty, “very young” would have to mean when he was a teenager, so The One Good Dalek is most likely to be set around fifteen to twenty years after The Daleks’ Master Plan. Helpfully, Legacy had established that a “massive Dalek war” was fought at about this time. One glitch is that the war is meant to have “raged for a hundred years”, which is explicitly not the case in The Daleks’ Master Plan - although a case can be made that this war against the Daleks is more covert than not. (The Only Good Dalek only talks about frontier worlds being ravaged by the Daleks, so perhaps this is a war fought on the edge of Earth space rather than at its heart.) Alternatively, the Daleks in this story are the “new paradigm” Daleks first seen in Victory of the Daleks, so it’s possible they have inserted themselves into history at this point. Mention of the high-ranking security officer “Silestru” is possibly meant to denote Georgi Selestru from Dalek Empire III, but has to be taken as a different character with a similar name.

  [1287] Prime Time. Reg Gurney has been in space corps for “thirty years”.

  [1288] Emotional Chemistry

  [1289] He’s “nearly 12” in A Good Man Goes to War.

  [1290] “A few hundred years” before the forty-fifth century segment of “Body Snatched”.

  [1291] Dating The Bride of Peladon (BF #104) - It’s “nearly a century” after The Monster of Peladon.

  Peladon stops being a member of the Federation in Legacy - something that the seventh Doctor greets as good news, because it means Peladon will be left out of a Dalek conflict set to occur thirty years afterwards. It’s entirely possible that by The Bride of Peladon - set roughly fifteen years after said conflict - Peladon has already re-entered the Federation or is at least considering it. Only one statement in The Bride of Peladon is made about Peladon’s Federation status, when Alpha Centauri says that “Galactic peace is certain and Peladon’s place in the Federation is assured” once the king marries Pandora. This can either be interpreted as suggesting that Peladon is about to return to the Federation fold, or just hopes to solidify its spot in the group’s hierarchy.