B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (301 page)

The Wake
heavily cements ties between the
Doctor Who
New Adventures and the Big Finish Benny range, enacting scenes from
Theatre of War
and
Happy Endings
(
Benny: The End of the World
similarly enacts a scene from
Death and Diplomacy
), and mentioning Heaven, and the defeat of the Hoothi (
Love and War
).

[
946
] Dating Bernice Summerfield Series 9 (
Benny: Beyond the Sea
, audio #9.1;
Benny: The Adolescence of Time
, audio #9.2;
Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel
, audio #9.3;
Benny: The Diet of Worms
, audio #9.4) - Following Benny’s departure from the Collection, the Benny range defaults back to being a number of stand-alone stories, and there is little reason to suppose that Series 9 doesn’t occur over the course of a year (mirroring the passage of real time). Also, starting with Series 9, Big Finish decided that the Benny stories, for simplicity’s sake, would occur exactly six hundred years in the future - a helpful yardstick (even if the policy later ended with the
Benny: Epoch
boxset).

The novella collection
Benny: The Vampire Curse
was released between Benny Series 9 and 10 in November 2008, and the main contemporary story within (“Predating the Predators”) dates itself to June 2609. Reconciling this against Bev’s comments in (Benny: Glory Days), however, suggests that “Predating the Predators” takes place within Series 10, not beforehand.

[
947
]
Benny: The Adolescence of Time
,
Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel
. The unpublished Holmes stories are mentioned in
Benny: The Diet of Worms
, although it’s unclear when Watson had time to write the
Diogenes Damsel
manuscript, unless it pertains to Benny’s work with Mycroft prior to their confrontation with Straxus. Alternatively, it’s possible that Benny acquired these documents during her later meeting with Watson in 1914 in
Benny: Secret Histories:
“A Gallery of Pigeons”.

[
948
] Dating
Benny: The Diet of Worms
(Benny audio #9.4) - The ending leads into
Benny: Glory Days
- but given the transit time over interstellar distances, the calendar might well change in the interim.

[
949
] Dating
The Company of Friends
: “Benny’s Story” (BF #123a) - The story takes place while Benny is freelance, and Peter is with his father.
The Company of Friends
was released in July 2009, and is presumably concurrent with Benny Series 10, in which Benny and Adrian are reunited after her time away from the Braxiatel Collection. The only oddity would then be why Benny doesn’t enlist the Doctor’s help against the rogue Irving Braxiatel.

[
950
] Dating Bernice Summerfield Series 10 (
Benny: Glory Days
, audio #10.1;
Benny: The Vampire Curse
: “Predating the Predators”, collection #12c;
Benny: Absence
, audio #10.2;
Benny: Venus Mantrap
, audio #10.3;
Benny: Secret Origins
, #10.4;
Benny: Secret Histories
, collection #13) - As with Series 9, there’s little reason to suppose that Series 10 doesn’t pace itself over the course of a year, mirroring the passage of real time. Per Big Finish’s new policy that the Benny stories happen six hundred years in the future, it must now be 2609.

In
Glory Days
, Bev comments that she spent “the best part of a year running the Collection”, and also that she’s now spent a year working as a thief. Presuming that she’s rounding down a bit from her departure from the Collection in October 2607,
Glory Days
probably takes place in early 2609.

[
951
] Dating
Benny: The Vampire Curse
: “Predating the Predators” (Benny collection #12c) - The dates are given in journal entries, with the final one (p215) specifying the year as 2609. The “Alukahites” seem to be the Benny equivalent of the Great Vampires (
State of Decay
).

[
952
] Dating
Benny: Absence
(Benny audio #10.2) - Peter is now a “young man”, old enough to be hired to haul things. According to Benny’s diary, the story takes place over fifty-nine days. The Technocult and the detail about the ball bearing were previously mentioned in
Benny: Timeless Passages
.

[
953
] Dating
Benny: Venus Mantrap
(Benny audio #10.3) - The story is a sequel to
Beige Planet Mars
, a story in which Benny and Jason similarly lose a fortune in royalty payments. The Lunar penal colony is almost certainly the one seen in
Frontier in Space
.

[
954
]
Benny: Secret Origins

[
955
] Benny and Robyn’s retroactive undoing of Buenos Aires’ ruination isn’t without its temporal hiccups - the entire story might be paradoxical, in fact. Writer Eddie Robson says that despite Benny and Robyn’s historical intervention, it’s safe to presume that events in this time zone unfolded in a relatively similar fashion, and that Frost is still dead.

[
956
] The framing sequence to
Benny: Secret Histories
.

[
957
] Dating Bernice Summerfield Series 11 (
Benny: Dead and Buried
, Benny animated short #1;
Benny: Resurrecting the Past
, audio #11.1;
Benny: Present Danger
, collection #14;
Benny: Escaping the Future
, audio #11.2;
Benny: Year Zero
, audio #11.3;
Benny: Dead Man’s Switch
, audio #11.4) - Benny ends Series 10 intending to return to the Braxiatel Collection, but has some side adventures (including the framing sequence for
Benny: Secret Histories
) before doing so. The animated short
Benny: Dead and Buried
- which leads into
Resurrecting the Past
- saw release in August 2010, and so seems as good a place to “start” Series 11 (and to roll the calendar forward to 2610) as any. The short story
Present Danger:
“Six Impossible Things” says that it’s been three years minimum since Benny left the Braxiatel Collection, so the Deindum invasion initiated in
Resurrecting the Past
almost certainly occurs in 2610. The booklets to
Resurrecting the Past
and
Escaping the Future
claim that “It’s the year 2607” - this has to be regarded as a mistake, given the preponderance of evidence saying otherwise.

[
958
] Dating
Benny: Resurrecting the Past
(Benny audio #11.1) - Benny is in stasis for “five days”, and at least a few days pass in the course of the story.

[
959
] According to
Benny: Escaping the Future
, the Deindum invasion unfolds over some “months”.

[
960
]
Benny: Year Zero
and
Benny: Dead Man’s Switch
. Series 11 ends on the cliffhanger of Benny arriving at “Atlantis”.

[
961
] Dating
Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day
(Benny box set #1.4) - A robot attendant supplies the year. Benny comments, “Right... a little bit later than I was expecting, but same basic ballpark”. The
Benny: Road Trip
and
Benny: Legion
box sets - released in 2012, too late to be included in this chronology - cover Benny’s efforts to reach Legion as instructed.

[
962
]
K9: The Korven

[
963
]
Singularity

[
964
] The “Little Mind’s Eye” crystal that the Doctor gets in
Snakedance
is dated to “eight hundred years ago”.

[
965
]
Benny: A Life in Pieces
. Traillor is killed “two years” after the fortieth anniversary of Morton’s death, cited as “23 September 2645” (p150). Mention that no records exist of Benny and company could simply mean that Verum is remote enough that Taillor lacks access to them. Alternatively, it could mean that all records of them have been expunged, somehow, in the wider universe.

[
966
] Forty-five years after the Braxiatel Collection component of
Benny: The Grel Escape
.

[
967
] “More than a century” before “Time Bomb”.

[
968
] Dating
Midnight
(X4.10) - No date given, but
The Time Travellers’ Almanac
sets it in the twenty-seventh century.

[
969
] Poosh is mentioned in
Midnight
, and what became of it is revealed in
The Stolen Earth.

[
970
]
The Well-Mannered War.
The Thargons and Sorsons were originally seen in
The Tomorrow People.

[
971
] Dating
Shadowmind
(NA #16) - The Doctor tells Ace that “by your calendar the year is 2673” (p29). The events of
Frontier in Space
in “2540” (p74) were “one hundred and thirty years ago” (p61).

[
972
] Dating
The Sandman
(BF #37) - No date is given, but
Benny: The Bone of Contention
, also written by Simon Forward, features the Clutch and is set in 2603. In that story, it’s said that the Galyari Research Directorate hopes to build weapons against the Sandman. As the Clutch’s weaponry isn’t significantly advanced in
The Sandman
audio, it probably takes place soon after the Benny adventure.

[
973
]
White Darkness

Star Trek

In the Pocket Books’ range of
Star Trek
novels (particularly those by Diane Duane), the Romulans call themselves “Rihanssu”, and the race is referred to in
White Darkness
(p129). A few of the other New and Missing Adventures have included such
Star Trek
in-jokes. There are many, for example, in
Sanctuary
, another of David McIntee’s books, and Turlough refers to the Klingon homeworld in
The Crystal Bucephalus
(p104).

Star Trek
and
Doctor Who
have radically differing versions of the future, and by this point, a wide variety of tie-in stories (
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
,
The Gallifrey Chronicles
,
Peri and the Piscon Paradox
, at least four stories involving the Doctor’s companion Izzy, who is a huge fan of the series, etc.) establish that
Star Trek
is merely fiction in the
Doctor Who
universe. On screen, this is confirmed in
The Empty Child
,
Fear Her
,
The Impossible Astronaut
,
The God Complex
,
Closing Time
,
SJA: Warriors of Kudlak
,
SJA: The Lost Boy
and
SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge
. Maybe, just as Trekkies in the seventies managed to get NASA to name a prototype space shuttle after the USS
Enterprise
, the
Star Trek
fans of the future managed to name a lot of planets after ones from their favourite series - Vulcan, as seen in
The Power of the Daleks
, being one of the first.