B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (71 page)

u - Jo Grant’s grandfather died when she was seven.
 [1749]

1953 (1st-2nd June) - The Idiot’s Lantern
 [1750]

An alien became an energy being after her people executed her, and fled to Earth in 1953. The Wire, as she was now called, conscripted Mr Magpie of Magpie’s Electricals to supply cheap televisions in the run-up to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. This enabled the Wire to feed off the electrical energy of viewers’ brains, which turned them blank-faced. The Wire wanted to connect with the twenty million people expected to watch the Coronation, and regain her corporeal body.

The tenth Doctor and Rose arrived on Florizel Street in London and learned of the Wire’s intentions. The Doctor sabotaged the transmitter at Alexandra Palace, which trapped the Wire onto a Betamax tape (that the Doctor intended to tape over) and restored her victims to health.

The Wire killed Mr. Magpie before she was captured, but his company would prosper without him.
 [1751]

1953 (20th November) - TW: Trace Memory
 [1752]

An Arctic expedition discovered a Vondraxian Orb, and sent it via a Scandinavian cargo ship to Torchwood Cardiff. The Orb reacted badly to the presence of the Rift and exploded - a dock worker, Michael Bellini, absorbed the Orb’s energy and was flung back to 1941.

(=) In 1953, the second President of the English Empire celebrated the fiftieth Jubilee of victory by executing one of his two captive Daleks.
 [1753]

The Toymaker beat Le Chiffre at baccarat.
 [1754]
On 18th December, 1953, a plane with three people on board fell through the Rift in Cardiff. They would emerge from it in late 2007.
 [1755]
An archaeological dig at Mynach Hengoed in 1953 uncovered an alien spaceship, which Torchwood acquired.
 [1756]

1954

In March 1954, Torchwood Cardiff carried out an inventory of its alien tech that took all five of its staff the best part of a month to complete.
 [1757]

1954 - “The Good Soldier”
 [1758]

The seventh Doctor and Ace drove up to a diner in the Nevada desert and found it full of American soldiers. The area lifted into space and docked with a flying saucer, which in turn docked with its mothership... and Cybermen emerged from the sand. The Doctor told Ace that the Mondasian Cybermen would have attacked Earth before 1986 if they’d had the right weapon... and that they were standing in it.

Meanwhile, the Cybermen had learned how to control human minds, and required aggression - which they lacked themselves - to power their warship. They installed Colonel Rhodes, the leader of the soldiers, into the device. Ace interfaced with the system, detaching the flying saucer. The Cybermen pursued, but the Doctor and Ace overloaded their reactor, destroying the warship.

1954 (9th November) - The Witch Hunters
 [1759]

The first Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan arrived after visiting Salem during the witch trials. Susan was distressed to think that some of the residents would be burnt as witches, and used the TARDIS’ Fast Return Switch in a bid to go back and save them. Returning to 1954, the time travellers attended the premiere of
The Crucible
in Bristol.

Later, the Doctor brought the condemned Rebecca Nurse to this era to view
The Crucible
and see memorials to the victims of the Salem witch trials.

Graham Greene received a tape from Alan Turing that explained his contact with the Doctor.
 [1760]
Circa 1954, the student Astrabel Zar vacationed on Gadrahadradon, a haunted planet that facilitated glimpses into the future. Zar received instructions from his future self on how to build Tomorrow Windows, devices that would similarly display images of future times. He would later pass on the secret of building Tomorrow Windows to one of his own students, Charlton Mackerel.
 [1761]

Warlord Hagoth’s group of Zygons infiltrated the music business, then branched out into mankind’s industrial operations. Their goal was to spur industry in a way that would promote global warming and damage the ozone layer - making Earth more habitable for Zygon-kind.
 [1762]

Peter Allen Tyler, the future father of Rose Tyler, was born 15th September, 1954.
 [1763]
George Limb survived being catapulted through time and landed in 1954. He loosely learned to navigate his time machine between 1940 and 1962, but his journeys created a number of alternate timelines. Limb’s final trip resulted in his being left in 1954 while his time machine jumped on ahead to 1959. He waited five years to retrieve it.
 [1764]

1955

In 1955, Chris Parsons was born. The Doctor visited Chris’ future College, St Cedd’s Cambridge.
 [1765]
Captain Jack signed items into the Torchwood Cardiff archive.
 [1766]

(=) In an errant timeline, George Limb saved the life of actor James Dean. The alternate Dean served as Limb’s assistant in the proper reality.
 [1767]

(=) To undo events at Colditz Castle, the seventh Doctor arrived at a border-crossing checkpoint in the Reich-controlled West. He arranged for himself to be gunned down, and regenerated in secret while the Nazis took the TARDIS away. He spent the next six years helping people evade the Reich’s ethnic cleansing programs.
 [1768]

1956

Lavinia Smith published her paper on the teleological response of the virus when her niece, Sarah Jane, was five years old.
 [1769]

In 1956, the Doctor met a Jesuit palaeontologist in Africa.
 [1770]
The vampires of Los Angeles culled their own kind to hide their numbers.
 [1771]
Joseph Heller told Kurt Vonnegut, future author of
Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969), about his meeting with the Doctor.
 [1772]

Ben Jackson, age 14, stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Singapore. The captain discovered him and offered him a job.
 [1773]
The Doctor prevented Santa Mira from being taken over by aliens in 1956.
 [1774]
The French colony of Kebiria was granted independence in 1956. Civil war started almost immediately.
 [1775]

By 1956, the Grimoire of Anubis had fallen into the hands of comedian Joey Bishop.
 [1776]

1957

A replica version of the 1957 edition of Agatha Christie’s
Death in the Clouds
was produced in the year five billion.
 [1777]
Douglas Caldwell of Torchwood died in 1957.
 [1778]

= c 1957 - FP: Warlords of Utopia
 [1779]

Scriptor had been a captive of the Nazis for sixteen years. The Council of Hitlers had made many gains, and Scriptor and Abschrift spent a lot of time together. Abschrift was from True Earth, and believed the Roman and Nazi Earths had been created by mysterious forces, very possibly to create armies to fight in the War in Heaven. The Nazi Worlds had, by now, launched attacks across the Divide and conquered one of the Roman Earths. The Hitler of Germania I had produced a son, August Hitler.

Scriptor escaped his captors, but failed to kill August. The Nazis destroyed a huge Roman invasion force with nuclear weapons. The Romans launched a massive counterattack, taking world after world.

1957 (18th September) - “Agent Provocateur”
 [1780]

The tenth Doctor and Martha materialised from the year five billion at Ainsworth Point, Cumbria. Martha was shot, and so the Doctor rushed her to Ainsworth House. They encountered Silas Wain - an agent provocateur working to test the Doctor on behalf of the Elite Pantheon of higher beings. Martha deduced that one of her nurses was a Catkind, and the Doctor discovered that Wain had been building a pan-dimensional sonic weapon - that their rival, Professor Tharlot, promptly stole. The Elite Pantheon returned the Doctor and Martha to the year five billion.

u - The Doctor became a member of the Progressive Club, a gentleman’s club in Mayfair.
 [1781]
Edwin Pratt became the vampire Slake in 1957.
 [1782]
Ace had a British Rail Card from 1957, the only form of ID she carried.
 [1783]

1957 (4th October) - First Frontier
 [1784]

On May Day 1957, the first
Sputnik
was destroyed before it completed an orbit of the Earth. News of this failure was never made public.

The Doctor visited the first official
Sputnik
launch at least twice. The same day, there was intense UFO activity over Corman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and the USAF engaged alien spaceships. These were the Tzun, now a race divided into three subspecies. They planned to cause a war between Washington and Moscow, then step in and pose as humanity’s saviours. The Master was helping them, but Ace shot the Master - who had used Tzun technology to upgrade his Trakenite body to be more akin to a Time Lord one - and caused him to regenerate. The seventh Doctor prevented chaos from ensuing as the Master betrayed the Tzun and destroyed their mothership.

On the 15th of the same month, a Time Lord using the name Louis approached Johannes Rausch, who possessed a degree in metallurgy from the University of Vienna. Louis offered to make Rausch’s life highly successful if Rausch agreed to take part in a painless procedure the day before he died. Rausch agreed, and the two of them would meet again almost fifty years later.
 [1785]

Department C19 was set up in Britain
 [1786]
in the late fifties to handle extra sensitive security matters.
 [1787]

Sputnik II
launched and carried Laika the dog into orbit. The third Doctor later recovered her body and buried it on the planet Quiescia.
 [1788]
In 1957, Noel Coward met Iris Wildthyme at the Royal Variety Performance. Their friendship led to Iris giving Noel a pair of pinking shears capable of cutting the Very Fabric of Time and Space, enabling him to time travel. Multiple Cowards began operating in various time zones.
 [1789]

@ The eighth Doctor was present when the Atomium - a monument representing an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times - was unveiled in Brussels.
 [1790]
The Ragman stoked the fire of racial violence between Teddy Boys and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Notting Hill and Notting Dale.
 [1791]

John Frobisher, a future civil servant, was born in Glasgow in 1958.
 [1792]
“When You Discover You’re Not Who You Thought You Were”, a Torchwood document pertaining to body dislocation and misplacement, was last revised in 1958.
 [1793]
In the same year, the Doctor played washboard in a skiffle band, The Geeks, which featured Brian “Ahab” Melville. Joe Meek was going to produce the group’s album, but it didn’t come to pass.
 [1794]

The tenth Doctor and Martha had a milkshake in Wisconsin, 1958.
 [1795]
In 1958, Operation Piper attempted to genetically engineer rats smart enough to spy on Russia, and pool information in a gestalt mind: the Rat King.
 [1796]

Professor Edgar Nelson-Stanley dug up the talisman of the Gorgons in Syria, and gave it to his wife Bea. A Gorgon turned Bea to stone, but the talisman returned her to normal. One of the two remaining Gorgons was killed.
 [1797]

On 23rd April, 1958, the Motor Torpedo Boat
Heroic
sank in a storm in the Thames. Elliott Payne translocated one of the doomed sailors, Johnny Skipton, to Victorian times as an experiment. The shades of Skipton’s drowned crewmen went back via a time break and retrieved him, giving them all eternal rest.
 [1798]

1958 - Dreamland (
DW
)
 [1799]

The tenth Doctor arrived in Dry Springs, a town not far from Area 51, looking to eat chili at a diner. He met waitress Cassie Rice and ranch worker Jimmy Stalkingwolf, and saw an ionic fusion bar sitting on the counter - a souvenir from a flying saucer crash five years before.