B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  [1671] Dating Head Games (NA #43) - For Mel, it’s been about two years since Dragonfire. It’s here confirmed that Glitz is from the period when Earth was moved to become Ravolox.

  The story is vague as to whether the Detrios sequences take place simultaneous to the modern day (2001), when Dr. Who and Jason pick up Mel from Avalone in the future, or in some other time zone entirely. While a contemporary dating feels more likely, a future dating is indicated when someone living on Detrios cites the people there as “we humans”, and suggests that the planet’s first settlers were “astronauts” (p91). Previous editions of Ahistory dated these sequences to the year 4000.

  [1672] Goth Opera

  [1673] Dating Iris: Enter Wildthyme (Iris novel #1) - It’s “millions of years” (p317) beyond the twenty-first century. Much of the book is spent trying to stop Marville from going to Hyspero to plunder its dark magic, but what happens after he reaches the planet is left unstated, beyond a homage to The Face of Evil.

  [1674] Euphemia says she’s the first Scarlet Empress, but Cassandra made the same claim in The Scarlet Empress. The two of them don’t appear to be the same character, although it’s a bit hard to tell. Perhaps more than one empress has tried to augment her authority by claiming the mantle of being the “first”, or perhaps each empress - for whatever reason - genuinely believes that they are the first. Or, perhaps owing to Hyspero existing in “a permanent state of magical anarchy and evolution” (Iris: Enter Wildthyme), the lineage resets itself every so often.

  [1675] Dating Prison in Space (BF LS #2.2) - No year given, nor is there any explanation as to how this story relates to the rest of Earth’s history. The audio was made from an unmade (for good reason, the authors of this guidebook would argue) script for Season 6.

  While there’s little doubt that Prison in Space takes place in the future, the TARDIS crew suspect early on that they’ve arrived in Earth’s distant past, as part of a conversation that makes one wonder if the Doctor is entirely well. When Zoe very spuriously asks if they’ve arrived, “About what? Forty million years BC?”, the Doctor replies, “Give or take the odd million, yes. Somewhere between the Oligocene and the Miocene periods.” The Oligocene and Miocene epochs (subsets of periods of Earth prehistory) respectively ran from thirty-four to twenty-three million years ago, and from twenty-three to five million years ago - so the Doctor presumably means they’re at twenty-three million BC, give or take. (Which would mean that when he says “give or take the odd million [years]”, he actually means about “seventeen million [years]”, but let’s move on.)

  Then the Doctor confirms, on the grounds that he’s spotted some maple and oak trees, that they’re in the Miocene [period], and that “It’ll be another fourteen million years before man sets foot in this part of the world... in any part of the world.” Calling upon the scientific consensus that man walked the Earth some four to six million years ago, it would further suggest the Doctor thinks they’re somewhere between eighteen to twenty million BC.

  Once the travellers meet Chairman Babs and her people, however, all discussion that they might be in Earth’s past vanishes. At no point are Babs’ people treated as aliens who have colonised Earth in defiance of established history - or, alternatively, breed in such a way as to become humanity’s ancestors. They’re decisively identified as human, have technology that has eliminated general need, and possess a drug that extends human longevity by two centuries (much more effectively, then, than even the life-extending Spectrox from The Caves of Androzani). By any measure, then, Babs’ regime must exist in the future - the far future, even.

  Earth and its environs (Paris, New York, Tokyo, Mars, Jupiter) are named so often, we probably have to accept (however reluctantly) that Chairman Babs’ regime did rule Earth for more than a century. Certainly, the Doctor seems certain when he tells his companions that they’ve arrived at, “Terra, with a capital T. What you call the British Isles, Jamie.” (Then again, this is the same man who misidentifies the era by at least twenty million years.) Funnily enough, the presence of oak trees - while a fairly terrible means of determining the year - supports the notion that this is humanity’s birthplace, per The Android Invasion establishing that oak trees being exclusive to Earth. At one point it’s commented that Zoe, “comes from a different world, a different culture” - but while it’s tempting to wish otherwise, this should, in the face of all the other evidence, be interpreted that she’s from “a different time period”.

  Attempts were made to place Prison in Space in the pre-solar flare era, but it’s too difficult to find a century where Babs’ regime could have taken place without massively contradicting other stories, or at least being unavoidably referenced in them. The best option, then, is probably to set Prison in Space in the very far future, when mankind’s technology is greatly advanced, and the continued abandonment and restoration of Earth might provide an opening for a comparatively weak regime to rule the planet for a time. At a guess, Prison in Space might come before the collapse of Earth society in The Sun Makers - if nothing else, it’s a bit in keeping with the parody nature of the latter story.

  [1676] Dating The Sun Makers (15.4) - Set unspecified “millions of years in the future” according to contemporary publicity material, but this is never stated explicitly on screen. Earth has had time to regenerate its mineral wealth, which would suggest the story is set a very long way into the future. The Programme Guide failed to reconcile The Sun Makers with other stories, claiming that the Company dominated humanity only from “c.2100” to “c.2200” (first edition), or “c.2200” to “c.2300” (second edition). The Terrestrial Index suggested that the Earth was abandoned some centuries after the “fifty-second century”, and recolonised “five thousand years” later. The TARDIS Logs suggested that the story was set “c.40,000”, Timelink “25,000”, About Time found it credible to think it was “millions of years in the future”.

  [1677] Dating Benny: Escaping the Future (Benny audio #11.2) - Bev Tarrant says that the Deindum are based “four million years” in the future; as Benny and Peter have actually been there, one presumes Bev is in a pretty good position to know. Benny: Secret Origins says that the Deindum are from “billions” of years in the future, but this can probably be written off as misinformation spread by Robyn to hide her creators’ native time. Writer Eddie Robson concurs that, “Although it says billions of years [in Secret Origins], for practical reasons we might say that’s wrong and it’s actually millions.”

  [1678] Benny: Escaping the Future. The exact timeframe isn’t given, but it’s after the Deindum’s empire - before Benny and Braxiatel erase it, that is - has run its course.

  [1679] “Several million years” after Benny: Present Danger: “Excalibur of Mars”.

  [1680] Dating Scaredy Cat (BF #75) - It is four million years after the previous part of the story, which roughly takes place during the time of the Earth Empire.

  [1681] Dating The Criminal Code (BF CC #4.6) - Benny says that the story takes place “far, far into my future, and a long way from human space”; the Doctor is a little more specific in saying that the terraforming technology seen here is “a good few million years at least” in advance of her time. The terraforming tech is clearly of human manufacture, but there’s nothing to say that it was developed on Earth itself. The technology seen here appears unrelated to that of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, although both involve nanobots/nanites that obey spoken command and create “magical” effects through transference of matter and energy.

  [1682] Dating “4-Dimensional Vistas” (DWM #78-83) - The time it takes to grow the crystal is specified.

  [1683] “Five million years” after “The World Shapers”.

  [1684] “Five million years” after Iris: The Panda Invasion.

  [1685] Time and Relative. No date is specified, but it’s safe to presume it wasn’t when the Company occupied Pluto.

  [1686] “Many millions of years” after The English Way of Death (p189).

  [1687] The Ark
. Earth, and a number of races known to Earth - most notably the Daleks - achieved limited success with time travel experiments (one human scientist built a time machine in the nineteenth century, according to The Evil of the Daleks), but these have presumably been forgotten by now.

  [1688] “Several million years” after Parasite (p304).

  [1689] Frontios

  [1690] Dating The Ark (3.6) - The Commander states that this is “the Fifty-Seventh Segment” of time, which the Doctor instantly calculates to be “ten million years” after Steven and Dodo’s time.

  [1691] The Silent Stars Go By. This is roughly in keeping with The Ark, save that such multi-generation vessels are cited as being more numerous than the TV story suggests. Also, there’s no sign of the colonists in The Ark having terraforming technology - they target Refusis II because “only it” has conditions akin to Earth. The colonists in Frontios might have possessed such terraforming tech, but lost it when they crashed.

  [1692] Dating Frontios (21.3) - According to the Doctor, the story happens “on the outer limits. The TARDIS has drifted too far into the future”. The inhabitants of Frontios are among the very last humans, and they have evacuated the Earth in circumstances that sound very similar to those of The Ark. While this would seem to dictate that Frontios is contemporary with The Ark, there is room for debate: no date is given in Frontios, there’s no explicit link made to the earlier story, the colony ship is of a very different design, there is no sign of the Monoids and neither story refers to other arks. It is difficult to judge the level of technology, as virtually everything is lost in the crash, but it does not seem as advanced as that of The Ark.

  [1693] Excelis Dawns

  [1694] The Hollows of Time

  [1695] Dating “The Child of Time” (DWM #438-441) - It’s a long while after Earth was obliterated in the human-Galatean war timeline. The present-day Galateans are said to be “the result of ten million years of robot evolution”.

  [1696] Dating The Silent Stars Go By (NSA #50) - The Hereafter colonists left Earth owing to the same cataclysm as witnessed in The Ark. While it’s unclear how long it took them to travel to Hereafter, “twenty-seven generations” (i.e. six hundred seventy-five years) have passed since they arrived. It’s “winter” (p11).

  [1697] Dating The Ark (3.6) - The last two episodes of the story take place at the end of the Ark’s journey, which occurs “seven hundred years” after the first two episodes.

  [1698] The Silent Stars Go By

  [1699] In Frontios, a message flashes up on a TARDIS console screen: “Boundary Error - Time Parameters Exceeded”. Likewise, in The Sun Makers, the Doctor is worried that the TARDIS might have “gone right through the time spiral”. This limitation doesn’t seem to affect the TARDIS in The Ark or The Savages, or the New Adventures story Timewyrm: Apocalypse, which is also set in the distant future. The words quoted are those of the Doctor in Frontios. The novelisation of that story makes it clear that “ours” refers to the Time Lords, and that the story is set at the “edge of the Gallifreyan noosphere”. It may - or may not - be significant that the Time Lords are unable to travel beyond the time of Earth’s destruction.

  It is perhaps also significant that in stories set after the destruction of Gallifrey, such as Father Time, Hope, Sometime Never, The End of the World and Utopia, the Doctor is capable of travelling much further into the future (although he also seems quite capable of doing so in other stories set before Gallifrey’s destruction, such as Timewyrm: Apocalypse and The One Doctor).

  [1700] The back cover copy from FP: Movers, building on FP: The Book of the War. The “supernova” in question would seem to be the one from The Ark, rather than the one from The End of the World.

  [1701] FP: Movers. Date unknown, but the blurb (in accordance with FP: The Book of the War) establishes that the posthumanity era follows Earth’s final demise.

  [1702] FP: Newtons Sleep

  [1703] FP: Of the City of the Saved

  [1704] Dating Infinite Requiem (NA #36) - Events at the Pridka Dream Centre occur “Beyond Common Era of Earth Calendar” (p83), millennia after the destruction of Earth, and the presence of Morestrans and Monoids emphasises that this is the far future. This date is arbitrary.

  [1705] Dating TimeH: Peculiar Lives (TimeH #7) - The era isn’t named, but this strain of humanity is so advanced that one of their number, Sanfiel, has lived for “tens of millennia” purely on the basis of his genetics.

  [1706] Evolution (p40).

  [1707] Dating The Well-Mannered War (MA #33) - This is “right at the end of the Humanian era, after the destruction of Earth” (p25) and “the fifty-eighth segment of time”.

  [1708] The Well-Mannered War

  Eras

  The Humanian Era was first mentioned in Doctor Who - The Movie, which also referred to the Rassilon Era. The TARDIS console prop for that story also included references to the Peon, Manussan, Sumaron, Kraaiian and Sensorian eras. Zagreus adds the Morestran Era to the list.

  The Humanian Era includes Earth in 1999, and is presumably a reference to the human race. The Well-Mannered War implies that it’s simply the Era when humans exist. The Rassilon Era applies to Gallifrey (the “present” for the Doctor would seem to be 5725.2 in the Rassilon Era, according to the TV movie). Neverland specifies that the period around the Federation and Mavic Chen was the Sensorian. The Manussan and Morestran eras are presumably references to the planets from Snakedance and Planet of Evil respectively. Taking all this at face value, it would seem that eras can overlap each other - the Sensorian and Morestran eras, at least, fall comfortably within the Humanian Era.

  [1709] Return of the Living Dad, tying in with the date for Delta and the Bannermen.

  [1710] Dating Delta and the Bannermen (24.3) - An entirely arbitrary date. However, Nostalgia Trips is notorious throughout the “five galaxies”, suggesting that the story is set in a far future period of intergalactic travel. In Dragonfire, Svartos serves “the twelve galaxies”, so perhaps it is set later than this story. While only the Daleks had broken the time barrier by 4000 AD (The Daleks’ Master Plan), the human ship in Planet of the Spiders and the Movellan ship in Destiny of the Daleks have “time warp capability”, and we see a couple of races developing rudimentary time travel around now (Magnus Greel in 5000 AD, the Metebelis Spiders a little later). Such secrets are limited, and are lost by the time of The Ark. Murray, the bus driver, says “the 1950s nights back on Navaro were never like this”, which implies nostalgia parties rather than that he lived through the 1950s himself. The Terrestrial Index set this story “c.15,000”, Timelink went for “????’ (sic), About Time broadly dated it to “the future, possibly the far future”.

  [1711] “Twenty years” before Nevermore.

  [1712] Dating Nevermore (BF BBC7 #4.3) - The works of Poe have readily survived, to such an extent that Uglosi and company can correctly recite them. It’s possible this story occurs in the far future, as the Doctor upon leaving sets the coordinates for “The Humanian Era” - then again, that doesn’t automatically rule out Nevermore taking place there as well. It should also be noted that authorities in Cassiopeia have contact with the Time Lords, which also suggests a later placement. Even so, this dating represents a guess.

  [1713] The Quantum Archangel

  [1714] Dating The One Doctor (BF #27) - The Doctor expounds on the subject of the Vulgar End of Time at the beginning of the story.

  [1715] Dating Omega (BF #47) - The dating is arbitrary, but much about this story resembles the Vulgar End of Time: time travel is now deemed unfashionable rather than unattainable; the exploits of the Doctor, Omega and - generally speaking - the Time Lords are widely renowned, if somewhat erroneously; and the period is one of prosperity, leisure and dullness. The Doctor is said to have accidentally wiped out the thought-based Scintillans while combating space pirates who used telepathically-controlled weapons and ships, but a proper dating for this isn’t given.

  [1716] Dating 100: “My Own Private Wolfgang” (
BF #100b) - This is vaguely said to happen “thousands upon thousands” of years in the future, but it surely must be many magnitudes further along than that - partly because cloning is being used as a consumer gimmick, but mostly because time-travel is now so cheap that even a Mozart-clone fired from his job as a butler can save up enough for a trip. It’s something of a guess, but the overall crassness, decadence and hedonism of this society - plus the fact that the Time Lords haven’t curtailed the commonplace availability of time travel - very much suggests the Vulgar End of Time.

  [1717] I am a Dalek

  [1718] “One hundred million years” before Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space.

  [1719] Dating Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space (World Distributors illustrated novella) - No date is given, but humans are legendary to the people of Andromeda, and seem to be the ancestors of the Andromedans (“the humans of the worlds of Andromeda were the patterns”). That galaxy faces (in the long term, at least) extinction.

  Using information from other stories, we know from The Ark in Space that humanity first arrived in Andromeda after the Solar Flares, and that the events of The Mysterious Planet, set two million years in the future, involved Andromedans. The story is set, then, at some point in the distant future. As Glitz comes from Andromeda, the galaxy is clearly not dominated by The One at that time. Yet it’s an interesting coincidence that the enclosed society set up by the Andromedans on “Ravolox” - with an obedient population controlled by an artificial intelligence - is very similar (albeit on an infinitely smaller and less advanced scale) to the Andromedan civilisation seen in Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space. It’s also notable that they steal a copy of the Matrix in that story, and the Matrix contains the memories of all the Time Lords in the same way The One contains all the memories of the Andromedans.