B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (199 page)

The passage of time within
The Curse of Clyde Langer
, however, is a bit trickier to pin down. At first blush, it would appear that a total of two nights and three days (the first and last of which are school days) elapse, but Ellie’s comment to Clyde at the start of episode two - that she first saw him “the other day” (back when he first visited the museum, after the rain of fish) - might suggest that more time than that passes. If so, and presuming for the moment that Sarah is seen reading (for whatever reason) an older edition of
The Ealing Echo
, a framework for this story can be derived... the rain of fish happens on 1st April, and Sarah and her friends visit the Museum (leading to Clyde getting the splinter) on the same day; the 2nd April edition of
The Ealing Echo
leads with the story “Fish Flingers” and also contains a
preview
(not an after-the-fact account) of “Cricket’s First Day”; the curse on Clyde’s name fully activates the night of 3rd April, when he signs his name to some artwork (this means that a day passes between the scenes of Clyde and his mother settling down to dinner and him going to bed, which isn’t intuitive but works); Clyde is ostracised after visiting Sarah the morning of 4th April, when she’s going through some articles from the 2nd April
Ealing Echo
(possibly just because she failed to read it over the weekend); night passes between episodes one and two, and events conclude no earlier than 5th April. (Possibly even later than that, depending on how long Clyde is forced to live on the streets.)

[
1442
] Dating
SJA: The Man Who Never Was
(
SJA
5.3) - There’s no indication of how much time has passed since
SJA: The Curse of Clyde Langer
. The SerfBoard launch date is given as “the 15th”; as it’s not a school day and 15th April was a Friday in 2011, the best fit (if the real-world calendar holds any sway here) is Sunday, 15th May. It’s also a bit symmetrical to think that
The Man Who Never Was
takes place at the end of the school year - this could in fact be the reason why Luke is home from Oxford, although it isn’t said.

[
1443
] Dating
SJA: Children of Steel
and
SJA: Judgement Day
(
SJA
audios #9-10) - The final (to date)
Sarah Jane Adventures
audios occur at some unspecified point after Sky’s introduction (
SJA: Sky
). The audios were released after Series 5 had finished broadcasting, so it’s entirely possible that they follow on from the final TV story,
SJA: The Man Who Never Was
. Both of the audios occur on a Saturday, and so must take place at least a week apart.
Judgement Day
provides further evidence that Series 5 occurs earlier in the year than when it aired (in October 2011) - Sarah is said to “step out of the house, and into the spring sunshine”, and it’s established that
SJA: Judgement of the Judoon
was “many months ago”,
SJA: Vault of Secrets
(set circa October 2010) was “a few months ago”. One oddity - because there hasn’t been quite enough done to confuse the issue of when the humanity learns about the existence of extra-terrestrials, oh no - is that Sarah Jane wins over the Veritas partly by convincing them that humanity is “not ready for the truth” that aliens are real, in defiance of the public
surely
having figured it out by now.

[
1444
] Dating
The Impossible Astronaut
(X6.1) - River Song gives the year as “2011”. Amy and Rory’s invite instructs them to meet the Doctor on “22/4/2011”; it’s possible they receive the invite before that exact day, allowing time for them to travel by conventional means from Leadworth to Utah. The specific date of the Doctor’s death is also given as 22/4/2011 in
Let’s Kill Hitler
,
Night Terrors
,
Closing Time
and
The Wedding of River Song
, and is doubtless meant to roughly parallel the broadcast of
The Impossible Astronaut
on 23rd April of that year.

[
1445
]
Closing Time

[
1446
] Dating
The Wedding of River Song
(X6.13) - The bulk of the action of this story takes place in one instant: 5.02.57pm on 22nd April, 2011.

[
1447
] Between
A Good Man Goes to War
and
Let’s Kill Hitler
. Amy and Rory have not yet experienced events in
The Wedding of River Song
.

[
1448
]
Serpent Crest: The Hexford Invasion.
Easter was on 24th April in 2011.

[
1449
] “Almost a year” and, later, “over a year” earlier than
The Shadows of Avalon.

[
1450
] Dating
Serpent Crest: The Hexford Invasion
(BBC fourth Doctor audio #3.4) - Mrs Wibbsey’s narration says that the story begins on “a Thursday in August”, “nearly nine months” after the Doctor returned her to Hexford in
Serpent Crest: Aladdin Time
. The faux second Doctor putters about Hexford for “just over a fortnight” before the fourth Doctor returns “on Friday afternoon”. The Hexford residents spend three months in their personal timeline in the far future, but Hexford presumably returns to Earth the moment after it left - Captain Yates swears the townsfolk to secrecy about everything they’ve witnessed, and that would be a great deal harder, given the inevitable media attention, had Hexford vanished overnight only to return three months later.

[
1451
]
Serpent Crest: Survivors in Space

[
1452
] Dating
Let’s Kill Hitler
(X6.8) - The Doctor has had “all summer” to look for baby Melody.

[
1453
] Dating
Night Terrors
(X6.9) - Alex, while admittedly not knowing his son’s true origins, believes that George was born “a couple of weeks” after “24/12/2002” (the time-stamp on a photograph), and that George “just turned eight” in January. So, it’s now 2011. Alex’s landlord says that
Bergerac
(1981-1991) is “thirty years old”. There’s a day planner on the wall of George’s bedroom, but nothing helpful can be discerned from it.

[
1454
] Dating
Touched by an Angel
(NSA #47) - The exact days are given (pgs 13, 235). The Doctor and Amy make an initial visit to 1994, thinking they’ll return the moment they left, but instead come back a week later (p43). In the interim, Rory stays in Mark’s flat, and pops up to Leadworth to collect the post (p44).

[
1455
] Dating
The Way Through the Woods
(NSA #45) - The book was released in 2011, and keeps making reference to “England, now” - which appears to be simultaneous to “late October” (p10).

[
1456
] Dating
TW: Miracle Day
(
TW
4.1-4.10) - No year, day, month or time of year is expressly stated.

The incidental evidence suggests that the year is 2011, the same as the story’s broadcast. Events in 1928 are variously generalised as having occurred “eighty years” and “nine decades” ago; evidence pertaining to a murder in 1927 has been archived for “almost ninety years”. The back of the Overflow Camp Heath Care Provider Framework: Standards and Guidelines folder that Gwen is given (in episode five) says “Copyright 2011”. Oswald Danes says (episode two) he spent “six years” in solitary confinement - he was convicted in 2006, but it’s very likely, for a crime of his magnitude, that he was held without bond for some time beforehand. An investigative report on Jack that Esther pulls from sealed CIA archive boxes (episode one) is dated 21st December, 2010. The CIA’s intelligence (episode one) says that there’s been “no sightings” of Gwen “for the last twelve months” - which isn’t to say that Gwen didn’t go underground some time before that (after
TW: Children of Earth
). Each episode begins with a rising population counter that starts at 6,928,198,000(ish) - in the real world, the Population Division of the United Nations declared the “Day of 7 Billion” (the day designated as Earth’s population achieving that amount) as 31st October, 2011, although the Miracle might have made the population crest over the seven billion mark somewhat sooner. In
The End of Time
(TV), set prior to the Miracle at Christmas 2010, the population of Earth was given as 6,727,949,388.

Gwen’s daughter Anwen, born in or near early May 2010, looks much more like a one year old than a two year old. Both Rex’s mobile (episode two) and the phone logs on Charlotte Wills (episode ten) - although not entirely reliable for reasons discussed below - display the year as “2011”. Overall, and barring some new finding coming to light, 2011 seems like a safe bet.

The biggest challenge with
Miracle Day
, then, is finding a portion of 2011 in which it can occur without coming into conflict with
Doctor Who
Series 6 and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
Series 5 - neither of which make any mention, or display any sign, of either the Miracle or its massive impact upon global society. Three pieces of evidence - all of which must be discounted for continuity reasons - go directly to this question: a) in a scene set a few days after the Miracle begins, Rex’s secondary mobile gives the date as “22-MAR-11” (episode two), b) also a few days following the Miracle’s start, Oprah Winfrey wants Oswald Danes as a guest on her show, which in the real world took a bow on 25th May, 2011 (episode two), and c) a CIA trace on the phone records of Charlotte Wills (in episode ten, so after the two month gap between eps eight and nine) says the last use of her mobile occurred on “2011.09.09”.

The first two pieces of evidence are fairly easy to set aside... Rex is talking to Esther on what’s presumably his CIA-issue mobile, so perhaps his secondary mobile is a disposable unit he hurriedly picked up for personal use, and the date isn’t set right. Also, if anything could coax Oprah into bringing her show back (presuming that she ever ended it in the
Doctor Who
universe), the Miracle would be it. Charlotte’s phone records, admittedly, are much more difficult to overlook, as they’re produced by advanced CIA spyware.

It’s entirely possible that the production team meant for Rex and Charlotte’s mobile dates to denote that six months pass during
Miracle Day
from start to finish - or it could equally be the case that they weren’t paying attention to such things. (This is the same production team, after all, that allowed an email to Esther in episode two to read as if it were written by a Dadaist poet: “Ballistics wants report on top of the shade. The flower commands ballistics. The curtain outweighs ballistics. How will the welcome quiz ascend below report? Inside ballistics weds deterrent. Should ballistics stem report? The incidental river pops after report. Report rubs ballistics.”) Whatever the intent, however, the phone records cannot be treated with absolute sanctity because...

While the time that elapses within the ten
Miracle Day
episodes is reasonably indeterminate, a non-negotiable gap of two months occurs between episodes eight and nine, and the first eight episodes appear to span a few weeks if not more. (The Torchwood team seems to conduct its investigations at a relatively quick pace, and some developments - such as the construction of the concentration camps - were undoubtedly hastened by the Three Families planning so far in advance of the Miracle; “weeks” passing seems to fit the bill better than “months”.) There’s wiggle room, but it must take a bare minimum of three months, roughly speaking, for
Miracle Day
to play itself out. (One side note: The prediction in episode one that Earth will exhaust its resources in four months probably doesn’t need to be taken literally, as it’s never mentioned again, and - as appalling as it is to point out - the mathematical models would change once the incineration units start reducing the number of Category 1 cases.)

When
, then, do these three months (if not longer) occur in 2011? Some commentators determined from Rex’s mobile date that the Miracle began in March 2011, and made some heroic efforts to explain how and why Amy and Rory might already be experiencing it when the Doctor summons them to Utah on 22nd April (in
The Impossible Astronaut
). It is simply beyond the pale, however, to think that Amy and Rory would be reunited with their best friend - an adventurer in time and space with a penchant for solving cosmic problems - and not once ask him to address the issue that people can no longer die, that concentration camps are sprouting up all over the place, and that the world governments are feeding civil liberties into a paper shredder. It is doubly beyond the pale, in fact, to think that they would not once express bewilderment as to how the Doctor can be shot dead on the beach in a world without death, or at the very least scream at the grave injustice of it all. Thinking that such statements were made off screen seems like wishful thinking, and once it’s factored in that
The Sarah Jane Adventures
Series 5 runs throughout spring 2011 without a single hint of the Miracle happening, any scenario in which the Miracle coincides with these episodes becomes nigh-impossible.