B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (307 page)

[
1145
]
Burning Heart
. This happened when Mora Valdez, who is 21 (p15), was “five years old”.

[
1146
] Dating
The Beautiful People
(BF CC #1.4) - The back cover specifies that the story takes place in the “thirty-second century”. Morestrans appeared in
Planet of Evil
. A Tythonian was the titular
Creature from the Pit
.

[
1147
] Dating
Burning Heart
(MA #30) - The year is given (p20).

[
1148
]
Lucifer Rising
. An excommunicated Knight of Oberon, Orcini, appears in
Revelation of the Daleks
. The suggestion that the order was based on the moon of Uranus was first postulated in the Virgin edition of this book, and confirmed in
GodEngine.

[
1149
] “Thirty generations” before
Bang-Bang-A-Boom!.

[
1150
] Dating
Death Riders
(BBC children’s 2-in-1 #1) - The Doctor says that according to the TARDIS instruments, it’s “the thirty-third century” (p16).

[
1151
]
Spiral Scratch

[
1152
] Dating
Managra
(MA #14) - The Doctor sets the co-ordinates for “Shalonar - AD 3278”, and the TARDIS lands in the same timezone, but the wrong location (p26). Later, Byron states that he was created “in the middle of the thirty-third century” (p113).

[
1153
] Dating
Real Time
(BF BBCi #1) - It is “millennia” since the creation of the Cybermen, who are thought to be extinct. The story is set after
Sword of Orion
. The online notes name the planet as Chronos.

[
1154
] Dating
The Beast Below
(X5.2) - At time of writing,
The Beast Below
is, without a doubt, the New
Who
episode that’s trickiest to place on a timeline.

We can calculate the date. Amy is said in dialogue to be “1306” - as she’s seven in 1996 (
Flesh and Stone
), that means it’s now 3295. However, the screen Amy looks at actually
says
“1308”, which seems like a production error, possibly caused by confusion over the extra two years the Doctor keeps Amy waiting right at the end of
The Eleventh Hour
. If the screen’s right, it’s now 3297.
The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011
similarly derived a dating of 3297 by favouring the screen and number-crunching Amy’s birth year of 1989 with 1308.

Consistent with this, the Doctor dates the solar flares to “the twenty-ninth century”, and Liz X says her mask is “nearer three hundred” years old than the Doctor’s estimate of two hundred. As the mask was custom made so Liz could explore the mysteries of Starship UK incognito, the ship has been in flight at least three hundred years, probably four hundred (it would mean the mask was made around 2995, which is nearly a hundred years after the end of the twenty-ninth century). Those are the dates given in the story, and they’re clear and consistent.

Where this dating scheme runs aground is that while Earth is completely abandoned a number of times (see The Abandonment of Earth sidebar), it seems implicit that
these
solar flares are meant to be the same ones that cause Nerva Beacon to be converted into an Ark (as seen in
The Ark in Space/The Sontaran Experiment
). “The Keep” dates this to the fifty-first century, a time period that was already busy enough before the new series made it the native time of both Jack Harkness and River Song (neither of whom, though, have said much about Earth itself in their era). See the dating notes on
Revenge of the Cybermen
for where the “twenty-ninth century” date for the solar flares comes from, and The Solar Flares sidebar for why this chronology places them around 6000AD. The issue is that there are a number of classic
Doctor Who
stories (
The Mutants
,
Terror of the Vervoids
, etc.) definitely set in a thirtieth century where Earth isn’t just populated, it’s overpopulated, and there are even more set afterwards (say,
The Daleks’ Master Plan
, set in 4000) where Earth has a highly functional/non-solar-flare-roasted society. There’s no real wriggle room for any of this in
The Beast Below
itself - according to the Doctor, the solar flares have already happened, and so “the entire human race”, not just some Britons, “packed its bags”.

While some might be tempted to invoke the credo of “history can be rewritten, timey-wimey, wibbley-wobbley, it’s after the Last Great Time War, the Cracks in Time affected things”, etc., and say that
The Beast Below
represents a new history that has superseded the classic
Doctor Who
one... unfortunately,
The Beast Below
doesn’t match the continuity of the new series either. Only seven episodes later,
Cold Blood
has the Doctor setting the Silurians’ alarm clocks to wake them in a thousand years time (so, around 3020), and expressing his hope that humanity of that time period will be more receptive to co-existing with the Silurians. But if the Doctor’s comments in
The Beast Below
are kept sacrosanct, in actuality the Silurians would be waking up to an uninhabitable burnt cinder of a planet.

We see Liz X again in
The Pandorica Opens
, guarding the Royal Collection in a sequence after
The Beast Below
(she says that she “met the Doctor once”) and dated to 5145 (although it’s not established if the Royal Collection is on Starship UK or the planet the British settled on). While we know that Liz X’s body clock had been slowed, that was specifically to keep the Star Whale’s plight secret - by 5145, she’d be at least 2550 years old. It’s possible that the slowing of her body clock was irreversible, but there’s no indication in other stories that mankind discovers the secret of virtual immortality (not even the life-extending Spectrox, as seen in
The Caves of Androzani
, was this effective). While some sources claim Liz X “looks older” in
The Pandorica Opens
, neither of the authors of this chronology see it.

Setting the story a decade or two before 5145 is tempting, because it would consistent with “The Keep”, and roughly supported if one presumes that the Doctor meant to say that the solar flares were twenty nine
centuries
after Amy’s time. However... if the solar flares were in, say, 5010, and Liz X’s mask is three hundred years old,
The Beast Below
would be well after 5145, i.e. when Liz X claims to have already met the Doctor (
The Pandorica Opens
). And it doesn’t explain why the computer thinks Amy is 1306 (unless her connection to the Cracks in Time confused it).

Ultimately, the most pragmatic solution is to disavow not the Doctor’s statement that Starship UK left Earth in the twenty-ninth century, but his claim that it happened as a result of the solar flares. Nobody and nothing else in
The Beast Below
makes this connection, and once that component is removed, everything else neatly slots into place. Earth as seen in
The Mutants
(circa 2990) is so overcrowded, it might well resort to all sorts of drastic solutions to shed its excess population (especially as the Earth Empire goes into decline). If Starship UK can be construed to house the excess millions of the United Kingdom, just not the
whole
of the United Kingdom as part of some global disaster, it would actually be in keeping with the “twenty-ninth century” period that the Doctor names. This is an imperfect solution, but it at least keeps intact the on-screen date and the calculation of Amy’s age, plus creates the least amount of contradictions.

[
1155
]
The Beast Below
. The banner doesn’t necessarily indicate that Magpie Electricals is still active in this era; it could just be a piece of decor from a previous era.

[
1156
]
The Pyralis Effect

[
1157
] “Thousands of years” (p243) before
The Web in Space
.

[
1158
] “One or two thousand years” before
The Web in Space
.

[
1159
]
Dust Breeding
, “in the thirty-third century”.

[
1160
]
War of the Daleks,
“two hundred and seventy-five years” (p213) before the Daleks arrive on Hesperus.

[
1161
] Dating “Interstellar Overdrive” (
DWM
#375-376) - It’s “3000 ADish” according to the Doctor.
Flip-Flop
(also by Jonathan Morris) establishes that Pakafroon Wabster had its first hit single in 3012, and the group has now been around for “three hundred years”.
The Tomorrow Windows
, however, seems to imply that the band dates to earlier than that.

[
1162
] “Nearly a hundred years” before
Snakedance
.

[
1163
] Dating
The Dalek Factor
(TEL #15) - In
Planet of the Daleks
, the Thal space missions against their arch-enemies seem relatively recent. Here, there have been search and destroy missions against the Daleks for “eight centuries” (p17). The lull in Dalek activity ties in with the one noted in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
. The incarnation of the Doctor featured here isn’t specified.

[
1164
] Dating
Forty-Five:
“Order of Simplicity” (BF #115b) - The year is given.

[
1165
]
The Curse of Peladon
and its various sequels are set at the time of a Galactic Federation. The date of its foundation is given in
Legacy
(p164); the words are those of Alpha Centauri and the Doctor from
The Curse of Peladon
. The justice machines named the Megara also follow “The Galactic Charter” in
The Stones of Blood
, and they are from 2000 BC. Many other stories refer to “Intergalactic Law”, “Intergalactic Distress Signals” and so on - there are clearly certain established standards and conventions that apply across the galaxy, although who sets and enforces them is unclear.

[
1166
] Dating “Cold-Blooded War!” (IDW
DW
one-shot #5) - Dating this story is difficult, and the internal evidence seems a little confused. It’s during the time of the Federation. As with
Frontier in Space
(set in 2540), Earth has a President, Draconia has an empire and Draconian females lack equality. Adjudicators dress as the Master did when he posed as one in
Colony in Space
(set in 2472). An Alpha Centaurian briefly runs past the Doctor, but it’s unclear if this is the same individual as seen in the Peladon stories, or just a member of the same race.

What muddies the waters is that it’s simultaneously implied that it’s been “five hundred years” since both the First Great Space War (presumably the Earth-Draconia conflict that forms the background of
Frontier in Space
, around 2520, meaning it’s now around 3020), and since women on Earth were judged to have more important qualifications than “how many words they could type in a minute” (suggesting it’s
currently
2540-ish). Tellingly, though, there have been three hundred years of “galactic harmony” preceding this story - meaning it can’t be either 2500 or 3040.

The novels established that the Adjudicators had become the Arbiters by
The Dark Path
(so this story is set before circa 3400). The novel
Legacy
(also written by Gary Russell) might provide the key - it establishes when the Federation was founded, that the process took around three hundred years (the “three centuries of galactic harmony” mentioned in this story?), and that Draconia was a founding member. If that’s the case, the Alpha Centauri we see here almost certainly can’t be the same individual from the Peladon stories.