B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (178 page)

[
864
] Dating
Millennium Shock
(PDA #22) - It is “Christmas Eve” (p64).

[
865
] Dating “The Forgotten” (IDW
DW
mini-series #2) - The Doctor and Romana are here to see the Millennium celebrations. While it isn’t specifically cited as being New Year’s Day, a sign on a structure that’s presumably meant to be the Eiffel Tower says “2000”, and the Doctor wishes his opponent, “Happy New Year”.

[
866
]
Happy Endings

[
867
] Captain Jack,
Torchwood
Series 1 and 2.

[
868
]
Seeing I
(p86).

[
869
]
Cat’s Cradle: Warhead
,
System Shock.

[
870
] The ecu is in use by
Iceberg
, at the exchange rate of one ecu to two dollars. In
Warlock
, the drug enforcement agent Creed McIlveen has a suitcase full of “EC paper money”, although Sterling is still used on a day-to-day basis.

[
871
]
The Shadow of the Scourge

[
872
]
Psi-ence Fiction

[
873
]
So Vile a Sin

[
874
]
Blink.
Allowing for wherever Sally’s taste in DVD entertainment might take her, Billy must have inserted the Easter Eggs over the course of a few years at least, and prior to 2007.

[
875
]
Tooth and Claw
(TV)

[
876
]
The Taking of Chelsea 426

[
877
] “The Immortal Emperor”

[
878
]
The Mind Robber
. Zoe was a fan, which would seem to imply that she is from the year 2000, but see the dating notes on
The Wheel in Space
.
Alien Bodies
says the adventures of the Karkus are still running in the 2050s.

[
879
]
Christmas on a Rational Planet
, via
The Mind Robber
and
The Wheel in Space. The Harvest
has the Wheels operating in 2021.

[
880
]
Escape Velocity
, referenced as occurring “last year”.

[
881
] “Five years” before
SJS: Fatal Consequences
. The “alien visit” the Chapters were expecting (i.e. the return of the Mandragora Helix) actually happened on schedule in “The Mark of Mandragora”, but, following the Helix’s defeat by the seventh Doctor and Ace, the Chapters had no way of knowing this.

[
882
] “The last three years” before
Eternity Weeps.

[
883
]
Benny: The Sword of Forever

[
884
]
A Death in the Family

[
885
] The blurb for
Project: Destiny
says that Cassie left for London in 1999, but Nimrod says that this happened “two years” after Hex was born in October 1998.

[
886
] “Two decades” before
House of Blue Fire
.

[
887
]
TW: The Undertaker’s Gift

[
888
] Dating “The Glorious Dead” (
DWM
#287-296) - The year isn’t specified, but it is the “present day”.

[
889
] Dating
Sontarans: Old Soldiers
(BBV audio #22) - The audio was released in February 2000 and seems contemporary. Brak repeatedly says that it’s been “eighty years” since World War I.

[
890
] Dating
Time and the Rani
(24.1) and
The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind
(BBV audio #28) - There isn’t much doubt that
The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind
- BBV’s sequel to
Time and the Rani
, one of the famously undatable
Doctor Who
TV adventures - takes place in (or, worst case, very near to) 2000. The Tetraps kidnap two humans, Sam and Lucy, from Earth via conventional spacecraft, and the Rani later returns the two of them home via the same means. Sam, a neurochemist, has scientific knowledge on par with 2000 (when the audio was released), and - very tellingly - he refers to the Millennium Dome (completed in 1999, and opened to the public on 1st January, 2000) as a “twenty-first century folly” in London.

Whether or not
Time and the Rani
occurs in the same year is entirely contingent on if any temporal displacement is involved when the Tetraps tie the Rani up and return home in her TARDIS at the end of that story. It’s unlikely that the Rani would have given the Tetraps the know-how to pilot her Ship in through space-time in an unfettered fashion - then again, they might know enough to operate the TARDIS on preprogrammed coordinates that do, in fact, involve time travel. The choice remains fairly clean-cut, however: either no time travel happens and
Time and the Rani
occurs in 2000, or time travel
does
occur and the story should once more be designated undatable.

[
891
] Dating
Grave Matter
(PDA #31) - Peri thinks it’s the “twentieth century” (p201); there’s nothing to suggest it’s not set the year the book was published, in 2000.

[
892
] Dating
Imperial Moon
(PDA #34) - “Some time in the early twenty-first century” (p7). The book was published in 2000.

[
893
] Dating
The Marian Conspiracy
- No year is given. Evelyn is from the present day, and has a mobile phone.

[
894
]
100:
“My Own Private Wolfgang”

[
895
]
Doctor Who and the Pirates

[
896
] Dating
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
(BF #9) - Lethbridge-Stewart has been retired “a few years now”. Evelyn phones one of her friends, so this is her native time. The first meeting of the sixth Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart is portrayed both here and in
Business Unusual
. Given that the Doctor first meets Mel in
Business Unusual
, and that he clearly travelled with Evelyn before her, it’s fair to assume that from the sixth Doctor’s perspective, he first encounters the Brigadier in
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.
But the Brigadier first meets the sixth Doctor in
Business Unusual
, which takes place about eleven years previous in 1989.

[
897
] Dating
Excelis Rising
(BF
Excelis
series #2) - The story is set a thousand years after
Excelis Dawns
and three hundred before
Excelis Decays
.

[
898
]
TW: Adrift
; Torchwood.org.uk gives the date.

[
899
] Dating
Touched by an Angel
(NSA #47) - The exact day is given (p137).

[
900
]
Verdigris
(p2).
Iris: Wildthyme on Top
suggests that Tom returns to Earth in the mid-90s... about five years, then, before he joined Iris on her travels.

[
901
]
Made of Steel

[
902
]
Unnatural
History
(p33), picking up on a line from
Doctor
Who - The Movie.

[
903
] “Six months” before
SJS: Comeback
, which opens with Sarah Jane at Lavinia’s gravesite, very shortly after her funeral. Brendan appeared in
K9 and Company
. Lavinia’s death is sometimes implied in
The Sarah Jane Adventures
;
Comeback
and
Ghost Town
are explicit about it.
SJA: The White Wolf
, set in 2010, both confirms Lavinia’s death and loosely agrees with the dating given here, mentioning an article Sarah wrote “about five years ago” after her aunt’s passing.

The framing sequence of
Millennium Shock
, set in 1998, entails Sarah telling Harry, “I have to get back to Morton Harwood, sort out Aunt Lavinia’s things” (p2) - possibly an indicator that Lavinia has died, possibly an indicator that she’s still alive but is moving house, or possibly just meaning that Lavinia is leaving for/returning from a lecture tour, and wants Sarah to help her pack/unpack.

[
904
]
Let’s Kill Hitler
. No date is given, but Amy, Rory and Mels are all pupils at Leadworth Comprehensive (named in a sign above the anti-bullying poster).

[
905
]
SJA: The Mad Woman in the Attic

[
906
]
Borrowed Time

[
907
]
SJS: Fatal Consequences, SJS: Dreamland.

[
908
]
The Quantum Archangel

[
909
] Dating
Escape Velocity
(EDA #42) - The exact date is given (p26).

[
910
]
Time Zero

[
911
] Dating
The Shadow in the Glass
(PDA #41) - According to the blurb, it’s “2001”.

[
912
] Dating
FP: This Town Will Never Let Us Go
(
FP
novel #1) - The Red Uranium detonation seems to be linked, although this isn’t directly established, to the start of humanity’s “ghost point” (an era in which humanity’s scientific and cultural progress greatly stagnates, and becomes vastly less relevant to the War in Heaven) as detailed in
FP: The Book of the War
. The same text says that the “ghost point” begins in 2001, and while
This Town Will Never Let Us Go
was published in 2003, the story fits either year reasonably well, with the participants displaying a cultural awareness relevant to that time. (For instance, Inangela and Valentine’s bafflement as to how Orwell could appear on
The Muppet Show
.) Inangela is presented as very young woman, and she was “15” (p34) when Princess Diana died (in 1997).

The bigger question is to what degree events in
This Town Will Never Let Us Go
are to be taken as actually occurring within the timeline of
Doctor Who
- or within that of
Faction Paradox
, for that matter. To what degree is this book a treatise on culture, not to be taken overly literally? To what degree is the narrator unreliable? Are the timeship’s tendrils so interwoven into the town that the town exists in its own little cul-de-sac of history, hence why the national government has no evident response to the town being sometimes pelted by rockets? All of that said, there’s nothing to resolutely rule against
This Town Will Never Let Us Go
being part of the greater
Doctor Who
canon either.