B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (321 page)

[
1513
] Dating
Dalek Empire II: Dalek War
(no individual episode titles) - The blurb to
Dalek Empire II
episode four says that it’s “two thousand years” after the Great Catastrophe. This number is repeated - give or take a bit of phrasing - throughout
Dalek Empire III
.

[
1514
] “Twenty years” before
Dalek Empire III.

[
1515
] “Years” before
Dalek Empire III.

[
1516
] Dating
Dalek Empire III
(
The Exterminators
, episode one;
The Healers
, episode two;
The Survivors
, episode three;
The Demons
, episode four;
The Warriors
, episode five;
The Future
, episode six) - The mini-series takes place “twenty years” after Tarkov sets out from Velyshaa at the end of
Dalek Empire II
, and ends on something of a cliffhanger, with humanity in this region of space presumably gearing up to fight the resurgent Dalek threat.

[
1517
] “Five thousand years” after
Prisoner of the Daleks
.

[
1518
] “Just over one hundred fifty years” before the main events of “A Fairytale Life”. A holorecording showing the virus being released is timecoded “19-04-7711”.

[
1519
] Dating “A Fairytale Life” (IDW
DW
mini-series #3) - The Doctor is aiming for “the year 7704”, but has to concede it’s “Ah. Not the seventy-eighth century. More like the seventy-ninth ... ish.” Later, we learn the virus was released in 7711, “just over one hundred fifty years ago”.

[
1520
] Dating
The Catalyst, Empathy Games
and
The Time Vampire
(BF CC #2.4, 3.4, 4.10) - Leela says that it’s “centuries” after the Z’nai Empire ended, owing to the plague that Joshua Douglas released. The notion that Leela enjoyed an extended lifespan owing to her proximity to the Time Lords’ biofields, and that she’d rapidly age without them, was introduced in
Gallifrey: Spirit
.

[
1521
] Dating
The Judgement of Isskar
(BF #117) - It’s “sixteen thousand years” since the first part of the story. The Black Guardian rescues the Doctor and Amy at the start of
The Destroyer of Delights
.

[
1522
]
The Reaping
,
The Gathering.

[
1523
] The background of
The Darksmith Legacy
series, as given in
The Graves of Mordane
,
The Colour of Darkness
and
The Planet of Oblivion
. The Darksmiths are variously said to have kept the Krashoks waiting for the Eternity Crystal “for millennia” (
The Art of War
, p13) and (ungrammatically) for “
a
millennia” (p18). The Darksmiths
seem
to originate from circa 2012, and so must have travelled into the future more than once to meet up with the Krashoks.

[
1524
] The Mazuma Era

A number of stories from the mid-80s
DWM
strip were set in the same colourful, cosmopolitan far future period. It might be termed the Mazuma Era, after the galactic currency which seems to preoccupy a number of the characters. The first time we’re given a date for the story is in
Death’s Head
#8 - a
Doctor Who
crossover issue of the Marvel UK comic - which sees the Doctor dropping off the cyborg Death’s Head in the year 8162.

While Dogbolter’s holdings include Venus, Mars and Jupiter, no mention is ever made of Earth - which the TV show tells us ought to be uninhabited at this time. The solar flares clearly don’t affect the other planets of the solar system.

[
1525
] Dating “Free-Fall Warriors” (
DWM
#56-57) - The story sees the fourth Doctor meeting Dr Asimoff for the first time.

[
1526
] Dating “The Moderator” (
DWM
#84, #86-87) - The Free-Fall Warriors are mentioned.

[
1527
] Dating “The Shape Shifter” (
DWM
#88-89) - This story happens soon after “The Moderator” from the Doctor’s point of view, as he’s looking to avenge Gus’ death. Dogbolter is somehow aware that the Doctor has regenerated, but the wanted poster has images of both the fifth and sixth Doctors.

[
1528
] Dating “Voyager” (
DWM
#90-94) - It’s a “few weeks” since the end of “The Shape Shifter”.

[
1529
] Dating “Polly the Glot” (
DWM
#95-97) - It’s after “Voyager”, but there’s no indication of how much time has passed.

[
1530
] Dating “Once Upon a Time Lord...” (
DWM
#98-99) - The story follows on from “Polly the Glot”.

[
1531
] Dating
The Maltese Penguin
(BF #33 1/2) - No date is given, but this is clearly Frobisher’s native time zone.

[
1532
] “The Crossroads of Time”

[
1533
] Dating “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” (
DWM
#329) - This is an unspecified amount of years after Frobisher has returned to his native time.

[
1534
] Before
The Coming of the Terraphiles
, with Barsoom being Mars. Dogbolter profited from the war on Phobos, so it still existed at that point.

[
1535
] Dating
Turn Left
(X4.11) - No date is given on screen or in the script. Shan Shen appears to be a human colony.
The Time Traveller’s Almanac
, a chronology of the
Doctor Who
universe published by BBC Books, states that the story is set in the eighty-fifth century, without explanation.
SJA: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?
suggests that the Trickster’s Brigade is affiliated with the Trickster, a recurring villain in
The Sarah Jane Adventures
. A number of sources, such as the BBC website, refer to the beetle as a Time Beetle, but it’s not called that on screen.

[
1536
]
The Stolen Earth

[
1537
] The background to
The Crystal Bucephalus.
According to
Dalek Empire II
, there is a Galactic Union by 7500.

[
1538
] Earth’s colony worlds start burying their dead on Mordane “four hundred years” before
The Graves of Mordane.
Contrary to the TARDIS’ estimate, the young woman Catz - who has studied Mordane in detail, but is perhaps working from faulty records - says that Mordane serviced only a dozen races from more than thirty different worlds.

[
1539
] “A hundred and fifty years” before
The Planet of Oblivion
.

[
1540
]
The Graves of Mordane, The Depths of Despair, The Dust of Ages
,
The Vampire of Paris
. It’s never established that Brother Varlos has time travel capabilities, but the Darksmiths have a conglomeration of time technology by
The Dust of Ages
, so he could have nicked some bits of it beforehand.

[
1541
] In
The Graves of Mordane
, it’s said that the Darksmiths have been waiting “centuries”/“hundreds of years” since Brother Varlos absconded with the Eternity Crystal, that Varlos’ machine has been on Mordane for “hundreds of years” (p91), and that the dead have been walking there every night “for centuries” (p107). And yet, it’s twice said that the quarantine on Mordane has only been in operation for “eighty years” (p37, 82). Given that up to a thousand funerals a day were previously held on Mordane (p92), it doesn’t seem remotely credible that the Galactic Union failed to notice - or decided to ignore - that the dead were rising every night on Mordane for decades if not longer. The Darksmiths confirm (p96) that the Varlos’ test is what prompted the Mordane quarantine, making it unlikely that the machine lay dormant for centuries and flared to life for no apparent reason.

[
1542
] Dating
The Graves of Mordane
,
The Depths of Despair
and
The Planet of Oblivion
(
DL
#2, 4, 7) -
The Graves of Mordane
occurs when quite a few of humanity’s colony planets have been sending their dead to Mordane for “over four hundred years” (p37), and a “Galactic Union” (p82) passes a “galactic law” (p37) that quarantines Mordane. If the “Galactic Union” is the same “Union” mentioned in
The Crystal Bucephalus
, then
The Graves of Mordane
could occur more-or-less anywhere in the 8000s to 12000s.

The participants in
The Depths of Despair
are named as human (p96);
The Planet of Oblivion
does the same at least three times (pgs. 89, 90, 94), so both of these stories occur in humanity’s future, quite possibly in the same time zone that Brother Varlos conducted his experiments on Mordane.

[
1543
] Their adventures continue in
The Vampire of Paris
and
The Game of Death
.

[
1544
] The story continues in
The Pictures of Emptiness
and
The Art of War
.

[
1545
]
Pyramids of Mars

[
1546
] Dating
Dreamtime
(BF #67) - Some “thousands of years” have passed since the Uluru departed into space. Simon Forward says it’s possible that as much as ten thousand years have elapsed. This date is arbitrary.

[
1547
] Dating
The Children of Seth
(BF LS #3.3) - Date unknown, although the participants are identified as human. It’s tempting to think that the android technology seen here - and the fear of it - dates back to Sharez Jek’s android designs in
The Caves of Androzani
(which also takes place in Sirius), but no connection between the two is made. This dating is ultimately a guess, based upon no mention of Earth being made, and the empire’s wealth and prosperity being in excess of that seen in
The Caves of Androzani
.

[
1548
]
The Crystal Bucephalus

[
1549
] Dating
The Scarlet Empress
(EDA #15) - The novel itself gives no dating clues. The word “human” is continually used, although it’s frequently unclear if this means Earth-born humans or just “humanoid”. Mention is finally made, however, of a “colony of human beings” on a private moon of a vizier, which would seem to indicate this is in humanity’s future.

The short story “Femme Fatale” (
More Short Trips
, 1999), also by Paul Magrs, has the Doctor and Sam encountering Iris after events in
The Scarlet Empress
. “Femme Fatale” occurs in 1968 (concurrent with the radical feminist Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol), and Iris mentions to Sam that events on Hyspero took place “eight thousand years” ago. It’s a little unclear whether she means eight thousand years in the past or the future - she might mean the former, but the presence of Draconians, Ice Warriors and Spiridons (who presumably start space-travelling at some point after
Planet of the Daleks
) on Hyspero seems to indicate the latter. Portions of “Femme Fatale” are obviously apocryphal (rendering “the Doctor and Mrs Jones” as agents of the British government, and eventually waking up on a
Prisoner
-style island), but the dating reference occurs in a section that is as canonical as one can get in a story such as this.