Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
1864 - The Runaway Train
[989]
The Cei were on the losing side of an inter-planetary war, and their last warship attempted to use a terraformer to transform Earth into a Cei-compatible planet. The eleventh Doctor and Amy destroyed the terraformer, and the Doctor assisted the warship in returning to its homeworld.
1864 (30th July) - Renaissance of the Daleks
[990]
Nyssa and the knight Mulberry arrived in Petersburg, Virginia, via a wormhole from 1320. The Siege of Petersburg was underway, and Union troops set explosives in a mine tunnel running under Confederate lines. The bombs detonated early in the morning on 30th July, killing about three hundred Confederate soldiers.
(=) The fifth Doctor arrived too late to rescue them, and Nyssa and Mulberry were present at 3:15 am when the bombs exploded.
The Doctor overrode the TARDIS’ time-track crossing protocol, and rescued Nyssa and Mulberry at 3:14 am.
The brilliant Victorian scientist Harriet Dodd created a feasibility generator, and used it to make Wonderland - a subterranean locale designed to contain creatures that broke through from other dimensions. Dodd allied herself with the earliest form of the Ministry for Incursions and other Alien Ontological Wonders (MIAOW), but the group deemed her work as too subversive and weird, and sealed up Wonderland with Dodd inside. She and the whole of Wonderland slept for more than a century.
[991]
1865 (February to April) - Blood and Hope
[992]
The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem attempted to visit the Wild West but arrived in the waning days of America’s Civil War instead. The Doctor assisted the Union army as the medic “Doctor John Smith”, and was present on 26th March, 1865, when Billingsville Prison was captured. On 5th April, the Doctor saved President Lincoln from an assassination attempt in Richmond, Virginia. On the same day, Peri shot dead the Confederacy’s Colonel Jubal Eustace when he attempted to murder her friends as Union collaborators. Lincoln was killed days later.
The Doctor warned Lincoln not to go to the theatre.
[993]
Lord Kelvin laid transatlantic telegraph cables in 1865.
[994]
1865 (14th April) - Assassin in the Limelight
[995]
Dr Robert Knox had exchanged his Type 70 TARDIS for a newer model, and he imprisoned the Indo accompanying him within the Ship. The Indo summoned one of its own kind, who hoped to alter the events surrounding Lincoln’s assassination so that the American Civil War would resume, enabling both Indo to feast upon the resulting emotional trauma.
Knox died from his disease. The Doctor trapped the second Indo inside Knox’s TARDIS, then deactivated the Ship’s temporal shields and sent it hurtling through the Vortex - aging both creatures to death. Knox had absorbed some of the Indo’s power, and used it to put his consciousness in the dead body of Pops, a stagehand at Ford’s Theatre. In such a form, Knox adopted the identity of Arthur Conan Doyle and booked passage to England.
An earlier version of Knox was in the audience when Booth, as history dictated, killed Lincoln.
1865 - The Haunting of Thomas Brewster
[996]
Creek tried to interrogate Thomas Brewster after the fifth Doctor and Nyssa inquired about him, but lost his footing and drowned in the Thames. Brewster escaped with a fellow scavenger named Pickens.
The Doctor and Nyssa returned with Brewster’s older self, having identified this as the point when the “test signal” from the future formed a psychic link with Brewster’s mind. The older Brewster persuaded his younger self that the dreams he’d experienced of his mother were an illusion, and the younger Brewster’s conviction about this caused the alternate 2008 timeline to cease to exist.
Creek’s scavengers recovered the TARDIS from the Thames, where it had been buried since 1831. It would remain in Creek’s abandoned shop for two more years.
1865 - The Eleventh Tiger
[997]
Earth prepared to enter a unique stellar conjunction for the first time in two thousand years. Qin Shi Huang, controlled by the intelligence that revived him, assembled an army and started securing “sacred sites” that would serve as conduits to the intelligence’s power, enabling it to seize control of China. The first Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and their allies flooded a tomb seeped with the intelligence’s power. Qin took control of his host long enough to step into the water, shorting out the intelligence’s energy. Qin’s mind dissipated, and the possessed Abbot Wu recovered.
Major William Chesterton served in China at this time, and suffered a concussion while fighting bandits in Qiang-Ling. The Doctor and his friends encountered the Ten Tigers of Canton, the top ten kung fu masters in Guangdong.
(=) 1865 - World Game
[998]
The Countess created an alternate time line in which Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo. As she had foreseen, he died of pneumonia during his victory parade in Moscow, whereupon his empire collapsed. The Players took advantage of the empire’s disintegration and created numerous small territories, which they pitted against each other in endless “games” of war. The Countess described this as her “Grand Design”, but the second Doctor restored the correct timeline by travelling back and preventing Napoleon’s victory.
Following the Players’ defeat, they abandoned the Grand Design. All Games were suspended indefinitely due to the amount of disruption the Countess had caused, which drew the attention of the Time Lords.
1866 (2nd-3rd June) - The Evil of the Daleks
[999]
The second Doctor and Jamie were brought to the Waterfield household from 1966 by the Daleks, who ran tests on them in the hopes of discovering the Human Factor. That done, the Doctor, Jamie, Victoria Waterfield and her father Edward were taken to Skaro.
A massive time breach in the TARDIS caused the fifth Doctor to become separated from Nyssa, and he performed an emergency materialisation that caused him to arrive in London, on or about November 1866. While awaiting Nyssa’s arrival, he resided at 107 Baker Street as an English gentleman. As “Doctor Walters”, he became a Royal Society member so he could collect the materials he needed to repair the damaged TARDIS. For appearance’s sake, he took on Robert McIntosh - a medical student at Edinburgh - as his assistant-cum-protégé.
[1000]
K9 was programmed with all grandmaster chess games from 1866 onwards.
[1001]
The Doctor implied that he was present when Brighton’s West Pier opened in 1866.
[1002]
Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister, Genevieve, was left mentally handicapped owing to the birth trauma that killed her mother.
[1003]
The War Lords lifted a battlefield from the Mexican Uprising of 1867.
[1004]
1867 (14th November) - The Haunting of Thomas Brewster
[1005]
Nyssa, who had been expelled by the TARDIS, arrived in Seven Dials on the day the Doctor was addressing the Royal Society. He unreservedly lauded a paper by the physicist Leon Foucault, which calculated the speed of light as 298 km per second. The Doctor was now friends with physicist James Maxwell.
Under the direction of his mother’s shade, Thomas Brewster had spent the last two years stealing various bits of scientific paraphernalia - and thereby lashed together a machine capable of creating a time breach. Smoke-beings from an alternate 2008 travelled down this corridor to help guarantee that their timeline became the dominant one; they murdered Brewster’s friend Pickens and the Doctor’s protégé, Robert McIntosh. Their deaths, and others caused by the smoke beings, were attributed to yet-another lethal London smog.
The Doctor severed the time corridor, but the smoke-beings tricked Brewster into stealing the Doctor’s TARDIS and travelling to their native time. The Doctor and Nyssa retrieved an older version of the TARDIS that had been sitting in Creek’s shop since 1965, and followed Brewster into the future.
The travellers defeated the smoke beings, then returned to the Doctor’s house. Brewster, fearing a return to a life of scavenging and near-starvation, hijacked the TARDIS a second time.
[1006]
In 1868, the Doctor opened a bank account at Coutts Bank in London under the name R.J. Smith Esq.; Susan Foreman, Victoria Waterfield, Sarah Jane Smith, Melanie Bush and Bernice Summerfield were named as signatories on the account.
[1007]
In the same year, Wychborn House burnt down.
[1008]
In 1868, the Phiadoran spores enabled Professor Bryce-Dennison to create a solar-powered impeller drive.
[1009]
Shotgun manufacturer Purdeys received the Royal Warrant in 1868.
[1010]
c 1868 - The Boy that Time Forgot
[1011]
The fifth Doctor gathered twelve of the finest minds in the Empire - including Professor Quandry, the novelist Beatrice Mapp and the fraudulent explorer Rupert Von Thal - in Mapp’s sitting room in Bloomsbury to conduct an experiment. Those present read off ones and zeroes; by this use of Block Transfer Computation (BTC), the Doctor and Nyssa could locate the hijacked TARDIS. The Doctor’s subconscious guilt over Adric’s death usurped the BTC, creating a prehistoric timeline where Adric had survived. The Doctor, Nyssa, Beatrice and Rupert were transported there.
The Doctor, Nyssa and Beatrice - along with an aged Adric - returned six weeks after they’d left. Adric’s health was failing, and he died while using the last of his strength to recall the TARDIS. Adric was buried in the same cemetery as Thomas Brewster’s mother.
The Doctor said that other Time Lords, “Iris especially”, had travelled in this period.
The Doctor told Jules Verne to leave the Silurians out of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
.
[1012]
Bilis Manger served as the manager of the Amser Hotel in Roath, which never recovered from being gutted by “eerie pink flames” in 1869. The incident linked Bilis to a Rift entity - he simultaneously had to do its bidding and set about engineering its destruction.
[1013]
The Doctor visited the New York Natural History Museum quite a lot when it first opened, as he hadn’t properly cleaned up after himself, and some of the items recovered from the Gobi were “far too unstable” to be put on display.
[1014]
1869 (24th December) - The Unquiet Dead
[1015]
The ninth Doctor and Rose landed in Cardiff. A dramatic recital by Charles Dickens was interrupted by what seemed to be a ghost. These were gas creatures, the Gelth, who had travelled to Earth by a time rift, a.k.a. the Cardiff Rift. The Gelth posed as refugees, but sought to invade Earth. The Doctor and his allies sent the Gelth back through the Rift and closed it behind them. Dickens hoped to write the adventure as
The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Blue Elementals
, with the killer being an extra-terrestrial instead of the boy’s uncle as originally planned, but died the following year before completing it.
The “healed” Rift left a residual dimensional scar; this was harmless to humans, yet useful as a means of refuelling time vessels. The Rift would continue to attract all manner of alien beings and technology to the Cardiff area.
[1016]
The existence of the Rift created a “field of despair” over Cardiff that normally just made the people there a bit miserable, but intensified in times of approaching crisis and increased the suicide/homicide rate.
[1017]
Gwen Cooper, a future Torchwood operative, had an old Cardiff family dating back to the 1800s. Gwyneth Cooper, a maid the Doctor and Rose met and who died fighting the Gelth, was linked to her through “spatial genetic multiplicity”.
[1018]
Captain Jack Harkness used his vortex manipulator to travel back from the year 200,100 to find the Doctor. He arrived in 1869, would discover in 1892 that he was now immortal, and live on Earth until the early twenty-first century.
[1019]
The Doctor knew Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, the author of
Middlemarch
.
[1020]
The eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory and Kevin the Tyrannosaur met Sitting Bull.
[1021]
c 1870 - Industrial Evolution
[1022]
The sixth Doctor and Evelyn returned Thomas Brewster to the town of Ackleton in his native era. Rival bits of alien technology - a “catalyser” that dissected machines and improved upon their designs, and a living mechanical “inhibitor” (outlawed under intergalactic law) designed to create malfunctions, ruin research and make a planet’s inhabitants frightened of technological developments - competed with one another. Brewster saved the progress of the Industrial Revolution by destroying the inhibitor, but the Doctor was disgusted because Brewster had slain a living being. The Doctor and Evelyn left without Brewster, who struck up a partnership with “Samuel Belfrage” - a Karlean working the interplanetary black market. Their first haul was half a ton of Earth’s rock salt, which was considered a delicacy on other planets.