B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (298 page)

[
870
] Dating
Benny: Beige Planet Mars
(Benny NA #16) - The day is given (p7). Benny here celebrates her thirty-fifth birthday, but she must be counting in absolute terms, allowing for her travelling through time with the Doctor. The book was published in October 1998, just before the thirty-fifth anniversary of
Doctor Who
.

[
871
]
Benny: Venus Mantrap

[
872
]
The Infinity Doctors

[
873
] Dating
Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion
(Benny NA #18) - Four months have passed since
Benny: Where Angels Fear
.

[
874
] Dating
Benny: Dead Romance
(Benny NA #19) - Events in the outside universe are set between
The Mary-Sue Extrusion
and
Tears of the Oracle
. Within the bottle universe, events unfold from 27th September to 12th October, 1970. The universe-in-a-bottle also appears in
Interference
and
The Ancestor Cell
.
FP: The Shadow Play
, strongly implies that Christine ends up joining Faction Paradox as “Cousin Eliza”, a main character in the Faction audios.

[
875
] Dating
Benny: Tears of the Oracle
(Benny NA #20) - Allowing that
Benny: Twilight of the Gods
takes place “a year” after
Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion
, the calendar-flip from 2595 to 2596 likely occurs somewhere in this vicinity. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Sam visit Vega Station in
Demontage
.

[
876
]
Interference,
“two years” after Fitz is initiated into Faction Paradox.

[
877
] Dating
Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet
(Benny NA #21) -
Benny: Tears of the Oracle
ended with Benny having only “a month to live” owing to a brain illness, and she’s here cured.

[
878
] Dating
Benny: Twilight of the Gods
(Benny NA #23) - Benny and company here reunite after spending a bit on their own pursuits, so some time has passed since
Benny: The Joy Device
. Moreover, it’s said on p48 that “it had almost been a year since [Benny] had seen [Dellah]” (in
Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion
), which roughly coincides with the real-life duration of ten months that passed between the two books. The Ferutu first appeared in
Cold Fusion
.

The Benny New Adventures end in 2596, but Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield range don’t rejoin her life until the very end of 2599, starting with the Benny anthology
The Dead Men Diaries
. As much as anything else, the relaunch dating was presumably meant to accommodate the release of Big Finish’s first full-length Benny novel,
Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript
, in 2000 - nonetheless, this does create a three-year gap in Benny’s timeline. In
The Dead Men Diaries
, Benny mentions arriving at the Braxiatel Collection after having endured “fraught adventures” that include “Time travel, other universes, the destruction of everything I’d previously relied upon to define me” and Jason being lost... all of which seems to refer to her New Adventures tenure. It’s possible that Benny whittled away a year or three at Vremnya until construction of the Braxiatel Collection was complete - but it’s somewhat astonishing that she goes such a prolonged period with nothing particularly exciting happening to her.

[
879
]
Benny: Resurrecting the Past
. It’s possible that Braxiatel learned of the energy field near KS-159 after all the business concerning the Oracle of the Lost (
Benny: Tears of the Oracle
), and only then decided to make it the home of the Collection.

[
880
] “Ten years” before
Benny: Beyond the Sea
.

[
881
]
Benny: The Judas Gift

[
882
]
Benny: Secret Origins
,
Benny: Resurrecting the Past
and
Benny: Escaping the Future
. Braxiatel says Buenos Aires is destroyed “in the late twenty-sixth century”, and Robyn says that it was “2598, or was it 2599?”

[
883
]
Original Sin
(p204).

[
884
] Two hundred years before
Nocturne.

[
885
]
The Stealers of Dreams

[
886
] From
Benny: The Dead Men Diaries
. The framing sequence says “it’s now 2600”, but the stories within predate
Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript
- which opens on New Year’s Eve - and so must occur in 2599.

[
887
]
Benny: Glory Days
.
Death to the Daleks
mentions the “Wonders of the Universe”, so this is a different convention.

[
888
]
Benny: The Dead Men Diaries
(p73).

[
889
]
Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript
. The new Joseph is presumably built using what remains of the omnitronic processor that the seventh Doctor recovered from Victor Farrison’s Joseph drone in
The Dark Flame
.

[
890
]
Benny: The Dead Men Diaries:
“The Door Into Bedlam”

[
891
]
Benny: The Infernal Nexus
, playing off a theory established in
Benny: Walking to Babylon.

[
892
]
Benny: Resurrecting the Past
,
Benny: Escaping the Future
. Exactly when Braxiatel learns of Benny’s significance to the Deindum’s creation is unclear, but it motivates his actions and manipulations throughout much of the Big Finish Benny range.

Irving Braxiatel vs. Cardinal Braxiatel

Irving Braxiatel is one of Bernice Summerfield’s best friends and most invaluable allies throughout the New Adventures, but the Big Finish Benny range recasts him as someone far more ruthless and amoral - a manipulator who (even under the caveat of acting for a greater good) aggressively rewrites the personal histories of Benny and her associates, brings the Mim to the point of extinction, and goads Benny’s son Peter into savagely murdering Jason Kane.

In large measure, the difference in character owes to historical revision.
Gallifrey
Series 1 establishes that in Braxiatel’s original history, he became so horrified by the destruction of Minyos (
Underworld
) that he left Gallifrey and founded the Braxiatel Collection to preserve the universe’s great cultural treasures. Braxiatel’s history changes, however, when a renegade Time Lord goes into Gallifrey’s past and steals the timonic fusion device that obliterated Minyos, preventing the planet’s annihilation and (inadvertently) robbing Braxiatel of his motive to leave Gallifrey. Alterations to Gallifrey’s history are exceedingly rare - most of the tie-in ranges presume that safeguards created by Rassilon or his associates stop anyone from tampering with Gallifrey’s past, although this isn’t ever established on TV. Here, though, Gallifrey’s timeline undeniably changes.

The second version of Braxiatel - the one who stays on Gallifrey long enough to become a Cardinal (as first seen in
Zagreus
) - presumably pops into existence and overwrites his previous self the exact moment the fusion device is stolen. Crucially, it’s Cardinal Braxiatel and Romana (in
Gallifrey: The Inquiry
) who restore Gallifrey’s history by facilitating the device’s detonation - but as their existence is vital to the restoration of the timeline, they’re presumably insulated when Gallifrey’s history returns to normal.

Romana’s history remains largely the same, save that Cardinal Braxiatel (
Gallifrey: Lies
) served as her tutor. For Cardinal Braxiatel, the result is that he stays on Gallifrey long enough for events to force him to trap a small part of Pandora’s mind within his own. After he’s subsequently exiled from Gallifrey (in
Gallifrey: Pandora
), events seen in the New Adventures run much the same - he still founds the Collection, etc.
Benny: The Wake
dramatizes scenes from
Theatre of War
,
Happy Endings
and
Benny: Tears of the Oracle
, helping to confirm that the NAs still occur, word for word (or near enough), in Braxiatel’s revised history.

Whether the Pandora component directly warps Braxiatel’s personality - or whether it just enhances his innate greed and arrogance - is a subject of some debate. Either way, it’s surely not coincidence that the first instance of Braxiatel’s machinations being exposed,
Benny: The Crystal of Cantus
, has one of Braxiatel’s victims telling him, “The thing in your head... it’s still there,” presumably denoting the Pandora segment.

Odd as it might sound, the whole of Braxiatel’s involvement in non-Gallifreyan time - all of the New Adventures with him, and the entire history of the Collection - seem to occur, from Gallifrey’s perspective, between
Gallifrey
Series 2 and 3. While this seems to violate the unspoken idea that Time Lords meet in sequence, it’s not unprecedented (see
The Apocalypse Element
).

Finally, in
Gallifrey: Mindbomb
, Braxiatel returns to Gallifrey after the Collection is defunct and attempts to salvage something of Time Lord society before the oncoming Last Great Time War. Largely failing, he once again allies with Romana, is lost to the Time Vortex (
Gallifrey: Disassembled
), emerges into history just prior to
Benny: Dragons’ Wrath
, and has to spend years eluding his younger self before leaving a message for Benny in 2616 (
Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day
) that she should contact him.

[
893
]
Benny: The End of the World
and the framing sequence to
Benny: A Life of Surprises
(which takes place in Benny’s future, and presumably doesn’t occur after Braxiatel rewrites her history). Potential versions of Keith Summerfield-Kane appeared in
Return of the Living Dad
and
Benny: A Life of Surprises:
“Might”; he was 18 months in the former, and killed as an adult in the latter. In
Benny: The Summer of Love
, Benny claims to know that she and Jason are fated to birth Keith and Rebecca, but that things aren’t turning out as they should. Fan-commentators sometimes suggest that Braxiatel changed Benny’s history to facilitate Peter’s birth as a sort of oddity - the product of a human-Killoran mating - but there’s little evidence to support this. An enigmatic man named “Kane” appears in
Burning Heart
, and is alluded to as being one of Benny and Jason’s descendants (or possibly not, after Braxiatel’s revisions to Benny and Jason’s histories).

[
894
]
Benny: The End of the World
. The change to Keri’s background explains why she participates in the Benny audios, having first appeared in
Legacy
.

[
895
]
Benny: Escaping the Future
. Van Statten was said to have cured the common cold in
Dalek
, and a vaccine exists at the time of
Fear Itself
(PDA). The secret was lost in the Tenth Segment of Time, according to
The Ark
.