B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (326 page)

[
1672
]
Goth Opera

[
1673
] Dating
Iris: Enter Wildthyme
(Iris novel #1) - It’s “millions of years” (p317) beyond the twenty-first century. Much of the book is spent trying to stop Marville from going to Hyspero to plunder its dark magic, but what happens after he reaches the planet is left unstated, beyond a homage to
The Face of Evil
.

[
1674
] Euphemia says she’s the first Scarlet Empress, but Cassandra made the same claim in
The Scarlet Empress
. The two of them don’t appear to be the same character, although it’s a bit hard to tell. Perhaps more than one empress has tried to augment her authority by claiming the mantle of being the “first”, or perhaps each empress - for whatever reason - genuinely believes that they
are
the first. Or, perhaps owing to Hyspero existing in “a permanent state of magical anarchy and evolution” (
Iris: Enter Wildthyme
), the lineage resets itself every so often.

[
1675
] Dating
Prison in Space
(BF LS #2.2) - No year given, nor is there any explanation as to how this story relates to the rest of Earth’s history. The audio was made from an unmade (for good reason, the authors of this guidebook would argue) script for Season 6.

While there’s little doubt that
Prison in Space
takes place in the future, the TARDIS crew suspect early on that they’ve arrived in Earth’s distant past, as part of a conversation that makes one wonder if the Doctor is entirely well. When Zoe very spuriously asks if they’ve arrived, “About what? Forty million years BC?”, the Doctor replies, “Give or take the odd million, yes. Somewhere between the Oligocene and the Miocene periods.” The Oligocene and Miocene
epochs
(subsets of
periods
of Earth prehistory) respectively ran from thirty-four to twenty-three million years ago, and from twenty-three to five million years ago - so the Doctor presumably means they’re at twenty-three million BC, give or take. (Which would mean that when he says “give or take the odd million [years]”, he actually means about “seventeen million [years]”, but let’s move on.)

Then the Doctor confirms, on the grounds that he’s spotted some maple and oak trees, that they’re in the Miocene [period], and that “It’ll be another fourteen million years before man sets foot in this part of the world... in any part of the world.” Calling upon the scientific consensus that man walked the Earth some four to six million years ago, it would further suggest the Doctor thinks they’re somewhere between eighteen to twenty million BC.

Once the travellers meet Chairman Babs and her people, however, all discussion that they might be in Earth’s past vanishes. At no point are Babs’ people treated as aliens who have colonised Earth in defiance of established history - or, alternatively, breed in such a way as to become humanity’s ancestors. They’re decisively identified as human, have technology that has eliminated general need, and possess a drug that extends human longevity by two centuries (much more effectively, then, than even the life-extending Spectrox from
The Caves of Androzani
). By any measure, then, Babs’ regime must exist in the future - the
far
future, even.

Earth and its environs (Paris, New York, Tokyo, Mars, Jupiter) are named so often, we probably have to accept (however reluctantly) that Chairman Babs’ regime
did
rule Earth for more than a century. Certainly, the Doctor seems certain when he tells his companions that they’ve arrived at, “Terra, with a capital T. What you call the British Isles, Jamie.” (Then again, this is the same man who misidentifies the era by at least twenty million years.) Funnily enough, the presence of oak trees - while a fairly terrible means of determining the year - supports the notion that this is humanity’s birthplace, per
The Android Invasion
establishing that oak trees being exclusive to Earth. At one point it’s commented that Zoe, “comes from a different world, a different culture” - but while it’s tempting to wish otherwise, this should, in the face of all the other evidence, be interpreted that she’s from “a different time period”.

Attempts were made to place
Prison in Space
in the pre-solar flare era, but it’s too difficult to find a century where Babs’ regime could have taken place without massively contradicting other stories, or at least being unavoidably referenced in them. The best option, then, is probably to set
Prison in Space
in the
very
far future, when mankind’s technology is greatly advanced, and the continued abandonment and restoration of Earth might provide an opening for a comparatively weak regime to rule the planet for a time. At a guess,
Prison in Space
might come before the collapse of Earth society in
The Sun Makers
- if nothing else, it’s a bit in keeping with the parody nature of the latter story.

[
1676
] Dating
The Sun Makers
(15.4) - Set unspecified “millions of years in the future” according to contemporary publicity material, but this is never stated explicitly on screen. Earth has had time to regenerate its mineral wealth, which would suggest the story is set a very long way into the future.
The Programme Guide
failed to reconcile
The Sun Makers
with other stories, claiming that the Company dominated humanity only from “c.2100” to “c.2200” (first edition), or “c.2200” to “c.2300” (second edition).
The Terrestrial Index
suggested that the Earth was abandoned some centuries after the “fifty-second century”, and recolonised “five thousand years” later.
The TARDIS Logs
suggested that the story was set “c.40,000”,
Timelink
“25,000”,
About Time
found it credible to think it was “millions of years in the future”.

[
1677
] Dating
Benny: Escaping the Future
(Benny audio #11.2) - Bev Tarrant says that the Deindum are based “four million years” in the future; as Benny and Peter have actually been there, one presumes Bev is in a pretty good position to know.
Benny: Secret Origins
says that the Deindum are from “billions” of years in the future, but this can probably be written off as misinformation spread by Robyn to hide her creators’ native time. Writer Eddie Robson concurs that, “Although it says billions of years [in
Secret Origins
], for practical reasons we might say that’s wrong and it’s actually millions.”

[
1678
]
Benny: Escaping the Future
. The exact timeframe isn’t given, but it’s after the Deindum’s empire - before Benny and Braxiatel erase it, that is - has run its course.

[
1679
] “Several million years” after
Benny: Present Danger:
“Excalibur of Mars”.

[
1680
] Dating
Scaredy Cat
(BF #75) - It is four million years after the previous part of the story, which roughly takes place during the time of the Earth Empire.

[
1681
] Dating
The Criminal Code
(BF CC #4.6) - Benny says that the story takes place “far, far into my future, and a long way from human space”; the Doctor is a little more specific in saying that the terraforming technology seen here is “a good few million years at least” in advance of her time. The terraforming tech is clearly of human manufacture, but there’s nothing to say that it was developed on Earth itself. The technology seen here appears unrelated to that of
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, although both involve nanobots/nanites that obey spoken command and create “magical” effects through transference of matter and energy.

[
1682
] Dating “4-Dimensional Vistas” (
DWM
#78-83) - The time it takes to grow the crystal is specified.

[
1683
] “Five million years” after “The World Shapers”.

[
1684
] “Five million years” after
Iris: The Panda Invasion
.

[
1685
]
Time and Relative
. No date is specified, but it’s safe to presume it wasn’t when the Company occupied Pluto.

[
1686
] “Many millions of years” after
The English Way of Death
(p189).

[
1687
]
The Ark
. Earth, and a number of races known to Earth - most notably the Daleks - achieved limited success with time travel experiments (one human scientist built a time machine in the nineteenth century, according to
The Evil of the Daleks
), but these have presumably been forgotten by now.

[
1688
] “Several million years” after
Parasite
(p304).

[
1689
]
Frontios

[
1690
] Dating
The Ark
(3.6) - The Commander states that this is “the Fifty-Seventh Segment” of time, which the Doctor instantly calculates to be “ten million years” after Steven and Dodo’s time.

[
1691
]
The Silent Stars Go By
. This is roughly in keeping with
The Ark
, save that such multi-generation vessels are cited as being more numerous than the TV story suggests. Also, there’s no sign of the colonists in
The Ark
having terraforming technology - they target Refusis II because “only it” has conditions akin to Earth. The colonists in
Frontios
might have possessed such terraforming tech, but lost it when they crashed.

[
1692
] Dating
Frontios
(21.3) - According to the Doctor, the story happens “on the outer limits. The TARDIS has drifted too far into the future”. The inhabitants of Frontios are among the very last humans, and they have evacuated the Earth in circumstances that sound very similar to those of
The Ark
. While this would seem to dictate that
Frontios
is contemporary with
The Ark
, there is room for debate: no date is given in
Frontios
, there’s no explicit link made to the earlier story, the colony ship is of a very different design, there is no sign of the Monoids and neither story refers to other arks. It is difficult to judge the level of technology, as virtually everything is lost in the crash, but it does not seem as advanced as that of
The Ark
.

[
1693
]
Excelis Dawns

[
1694
]
The Hollows of Time

[
1695
] Dating “The Child of Time” (
DWM
#438-441) - It’s a long while after Earth was obliterated in the human-Galatean war timeline. The present-day Galateans are said to be “the result of ten million years of robot evolution”.

[
1696
] Dating
The Silent Stars Go By
(NSA #50) - The Hereafter colonists left Earth owing to the same cataclysm as witnessed in
The Ark
. While it’s unclear how long it took them to travel to Hereafter, “twenty-seven generations” (i.e. six hundred seventy-five years) have passed since they arrived. It’s “winter” (p11).

[
1697
] Dating
The Ark
(3.6) - The last two episodes of the story take place at the end of the Ark’s journey, which occurs “seven hundred years” after the first two episodes.

[
1698
]
The Silent Stars Go By

[
1699
] In
Frontios
, a message flashes up on a TARDIS console screen: “Boundary Error - Time Parameters Exceeded”. Likewise, in
The Sun Makers
, the Doctor is worried that the TARDIS might have “gone right through the time spiral”. This limitation doesn’t seem to affect the TARDIS in
The Ark
or
The Savages
, or the New Adventures story
Timewyrm: Apocalypse
, which is also set in the distant future. The words quoted are those of the Doctor in
Frontios
. The novelisation of that story makes it clear that “ours” refers to the Time Lords, and that the story is set at the “edge of the Gallifreyan noosphere”. It may - or may not - be significant that the Time Lords are unable to travel beyond the time of Earth’s destruction.