B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  [834] Dating Touched by an Angel (NSA #47) - The exact days are given (pgs 103, 126).

  [835] The Harvest, Project: Destiny. Actor Philip Oliver was born 4th June, 1980, making him - relatively speaking - about a year older than the character he’s playing.

  [836] It’s implied in The Doctor Dances that the Doctor gave it to her.

  [837] The Waters of Mars

  [838] Iris: The Panda Invasion. No such rain has occurred in real life, but this might be a reference to the frog downpour in Magnolia (1999).

  [839] FP: The Book of the War

  [840] TW: Miracle Day

  [841] From The Torchwood Archives. Lawson is cited as dead in TW: In the Shadows, and is presumably one of the slain Torchwood staff in TW: Fragments.

  [842] Dating FP: Warlords of Utopia (FP novel #3) - Scriptor gives the date.

  [843] Dating Auton 2: Sentinel and Auton 3: Awakening (Auton films #2-3) - It’s repeatedly said in Auton 2 that “two years” have passed since Auton, so it’s a year in the future of Auton 2’s release in 1998. Events in Auton 3 (released in 1999) continue from there.

  [844] Dating The King of Terror (PDA #37) - It’s “1 July 1999” (p5).

  [845] Dating Dominion (EDA #22) - On p35, Fitz reads a newspaper dated 31st July, 1999.

  [846] The Suns of Caresh, both the Child anomaly and Jo’s observation.

  [847] The Turing Test. Heller died 12th December, 1999.

  [848] Dating The Taking of Planet 5 (EDA #28) - It’s “1 October 1999” (p21).

  [849] Dating “Darkness Falling” / “Distractions” / “The Mark of Mandragora” (DWM #167-172) - It’s “the end of the twentieth century”, but not (as far as we’re told) New Year’s 1999 itself. It’s after Battlefield, and Mandrake first appeared in 1997 (so the story takes place after that). “Darkness Falling” and “Distractions”, both prologues to the main story, went untitled in The Mark of Mandragora graphic novel.

  [850] Dating Zygons: Homeland (BBV audio #15) - The audio was released in 1999 and seems contemporary.

  [851] Dating Krynoids: The Root of All Evil (BBV audio #18) - The audio came out in 1999 and seems contemporary, including mention of The X-Files and the fact that mobile use is not so universal that the protagonists, when trapped on the farm, can just call for help.

  [852] TW: Children of Earth

  [853] Dating Touched by an Angel (NSA #47) - The exact days are given (pgs 129, 133).

  [854] “The Forgotten”

  [855] The short story “That Time I Nearly Destroyed the World Whilst Looking for a Dress” (from Short Trips: Past Tense, 2004), here mentioned because it’s relevant to the continuity of The Five Companions.

  [856] Beautiful Chaos (p189). In a case of very awkward math, 31st December, 1999, is said to be “eight years” prior to 2009.

  [857] Dating “Plastic Millennium” (DWM Winter Special 1994) - The date is given. It’s tempting to link the contents of the phial with the Doctor’s “anti plastic” in Rose.

  [858] Dating Millennial Rites (MA #15) - The story revolves around the date, first confirmed on p34.

  [859] Dating TW: Fragments (TW 2.12) - The day and exact time of Alex’s death are given. There’s no sign of reality warping at midnight of the New Year per Doctor Who - The Movie, but this could simply owe to San Francisco being about eight hours behind Cardiff.

  [860] TW: Fragments

  [861] Dating Iris: The Panda Invasion (Iris audio #2.4) - The day and year are given. Bits of this audio resonate with Doctor Who - The Movie: Iris is taken to a hospital, and an x-ray says that she’s got two livers (rather than two hearts); the theft of a fancy dress costume is reported; and it’s said that “Daphne” (a reference to Daphne Ashbrook, who played Grace) is “on shift”. Even so, it’s not specified that Iris is taken to the same hospital as the wounded seventh Doctor, and there’s no reason why both stories can’t occur together, especially as the authorities ignore reports of the evil Pandas. Panda and Iris are reunited Iris: The Claws of Santa.

  [862] Dating Doctor Who - The Movie (27.0) - The date is first given when Chang Lee fills out the Doctor’s medical paperwork. On screen, the Master looks like a gelatinous snake, although The Eight Doctors attributes this to his swallowing a “deathworm”.

  [863] Tales from the Vault

  [864] Dating Millennium Shock (PDA #22) - It is “Christmas Eve” (p64).

  [865] Dating “The Forgotten” (IDW DW mini-series #2) - The Doctor and Romana are here to see the Millennium celebrations. While it isn’t specifically cited as being New Year’s Day, a sign on a structure that’s presumably meant to be the Eiffel Tower says “2000”, and the Doctor wishes his opponent, “Happy New Year”.

  [866] Happy Endings

  [867] Captain Jack, Torchwood Series 1 and 2.

  [868] Seeing I (p86).

  [869] Cat’s Cradle: Warhead, System Shock.

  [870] The ecu is in use by Iceberg, at the exchange rate of one ecu to two dollars. In Warlock, the drug enforcement agent Creed McIlveen has a suitcase full of “EC paper money”, although Sterling is still used on a day-to-day basis.

  [871] The Shadow of the Scourge

  [872] Psi-ence Fiction

  [873] So Vile a Sin

  [874] Blink. Allowing for wherever Sally’s taste in DVD entertainment might take her, Billy must have inserted the Easter Eggs over the course of a few years at least, and prior to 2007.

  [875] Tooth and Claw (TV)

  [876] The Taking of Chelsea 426

  [877] “The Immortal Emperor”

  [878] The Mind Robber. Zoe was a fan, which would seem to imply that she is from the year 2000, but see the dating notes on The Wheel in Space. Alien Bodies says the adventures of the Karkus are still running in the 2050s.

  [879] Christmas on a Rational Planet, via The Mind Robber and The Wheel in Space. The Harvest has the Wheels operating in 2021.

  [880] Escape Velocity, referenced as occurring “last year”.

  [881] “Five years” before SJS: Fatal Consequences. The “alien visit” the Chapters were expecting (i.e. the return of the Mandragora Helix) actually happened on schedule in “The Mark of Mandragora”, but, following the Helix’s defeat by the seventh Doctor and Ace, the Chapters had no way of knowing this.

  [882] “The last three years” before Eternity Weeps.

  [883] Benny: The Sword of Forever

  [884] A Death in the Family

  [885] The blurb for Project: Destiny says that Cassie left for London in 1999, but Nimrod says that this happened “two years” after Hex was born in October 1998.

  [886] “Two decades” before House of Blue Fire.

  [887] TW: The Undertaker’s Gift

  [888] Dating “The Glorious Dead” (DWM #287-296) - The year isn’t specified, but it is the “present day”.

  [889] Dating Sontarans: Old Soldiers (BBV audio #22) - The audio was released in February 2000 and seems contemporary. Brak repeatedly says that it’s been “eighty years” since World War I.

  [890] Dating Time and the Rani (24.1) and The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind (BBV audio #28) - There isn’t much doubt that The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind - BBV’s sequel to Time and the Rani, one of the famously undatable Doctor Who TV adventures - takes place in (or, worst case, very near to) 2000. The Tetraps kidnap two humans, Sam and Lucy, from Earth via conventional spacecraft, and the Rani later returns the two of them home via the same means. Sam, a neurochemist, has scientific knowledge on par with 2000 (when the audio was released), and - very tellingly - he refers to the Millennium Dome (completed in 1999, and opened to the public on 1st January, 2000) as a “twenty-first century folly” in London.

  Whether or not Time and the Rani occurs in the same year is entirely contingent on if any temporal displacement is involved when the Tetraps tie the Rani up and return home in her TARDIS at the end of that story. It’s unlikely that the Rani would have given the Tetraps the know-how to pilot her Ship in through space-time in an unfettered fashion - then again
, they might know enough to operate the TARDIS on preprogrammed coordinates that do, in fact, involve time travel. The choice remains fairly clean-cut, however: either no time travel happens and Time and the Rani occurs in 2000, or time travel does occur and the story should once more be designated undatable.

  [891] Dating Grave Matter (PDA #31) - Peri thinks it’s the “twentieth century” (p201); there’s nothing to suggest it’s not set the year the book was published, in 2000.

  [892] Dating Imperial Moon (PDA #34) - “Some time in the early twenty-first century” (p7). The book was published in 2000.

  [893] Dating The Marian Conspiracy - No year is given. Evelyn is from the present day, and has a mobile phone.

  [894] 100: “My Own Private Wolfgang”

  [895] Doctor Who and the Pirates

  [896] Dating The Spectre of Lanyon Moor (BF #9) - Lethbridge-Stewart has been retired “a few years now”. Evelyn phones one of her friends, so this is her native time. The first meeting of the sixth Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart is portrayed both here and in Business Unusual. Given that the Doctor first meets Mel in Business Unusual, and that he clearly travelled with Evelyn before her, it’s fair to assume that from the sixth Doctor’s perspective, he first encounters the Brigadier in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. But the Brigadier first meets the sixth Doctor in Business Unusual, which takes place about eleven years previous in 1989.

  [897] Dating Excelis Rising (BF Excelis series #2) - The story is set a thousand years after Excelis Dawns and three hundred before Excelis Decays.

  [898] TW: Adrift; Torchwood.org.uk gives the date.

  [899] Dating Touched by an Angel (NSA #47) - The exact day is given (p137).

  [900] Verdigris (p2). Iris: Wildthyme on Top suggests that Tom returns to Earth in the mid-90s... about five years, then, before he joined Iris on her travels.

  [901] Made of Steel

  [902] Unnatural History (p33), picking up on a line from Doctor Who - The Movie.

  [903] “Six months” before SJS: Comeback, which opens with Sarah Jane at Lavinia’s gravesite, very shortly after her funeral. Brendan appeared in K9 and Company. Lavinia’s death is sometimes implied in The Sarah Jane Adventures; Comeback and Ghost Town are explicit about it. SJA: The White Wolf, set in 2010, both confirms Lavinia’s death and loosely agrees with the dating given here, mentioning an article Sarah wrote “about five years ago” after her aunt’s passing.

  The framing sequence of Millennium Shock, set in 1998, entails Sarah telling Harry, “I have to get back to Morton Harwood, sort out Aunt Lavinia’s things” (p2) - possibly an indicator that Lavinia has died, possibly an indicator that she’s still alive but is moving house, or possibly just meaning that Lavinia is leaving for/returning from a lecture tour, and wants Sarah to help her pack/unpack.

  [904] Let’s Kill Hitler. No date is given, but Amy, Rory and Mels are all pupils at Leadworth Comprehensive (named in a sign above the anti-bullying poster).

  [905] SJA: The Mad Woman in the Attic

  [906] Borrowed Time

  [907] SJS: Fatal Consequences, SJS: Dreamland.

  [908] The Quantum Archangel

  [909] Dating Escape Velocity (EDA #42) - The exact date is given (p26).

  [910] Time Zero

  [911] Dating The Shadow in the Glass (PDA #41) - According to the blurb, it’s “2001”.

  [912] Dating FP: This Town Will Never Let Us Go (FP novel #1) - The Red Uranium detonation seems to be linked, although this isn’t directly established, to the start of humanity’s “ghost point” (an era in which humanity’s scientific and cultural progress greatly stagnates, and becomes vastly less relevant to the War in Heaven) as detailed in FP: The Book of the War. The same text says that the “ghost point” begins in 2001, and while This Town Will Never Let Us Go was published in 2003, the story fits either year reasonably well, with the participants displaying a cultural awareness relevant to that time. (For instance, Inangela and Valentine’s bafflement as to how Orwell could appear on The Muppet Show.) Inangela is presented as very young woman, and she was “15” (p34) when Princess Diana died (in 1997).

  The bigger question is to what degree events in This Town Will Never Let Us Go are to be taken as actually occurring within the timeline of Doctor Who - or within that of Faction Paradox, for that matter. To what degree is this book a treatise on culture, not to be taken overly literally? To what degree is the narrator unreliable? Are the timeship’s tendrils so interwoven into the town that the town exists in its own little cul-de-sac of history, hence why the national government has no evident response to the town being sometimes pelted by rockets? All of that said, there’s nothing to resolutely rule against This Town Will Never Let Us Go being part of the greater Doctor Who canon either.

  The “Black Man” who supplies Valentine with the Red Uranium previously appeared as an agent of the Celestis in Alien Bodies. Page 243 establishes that the timeship buried beneath the town is the same lineage of War-vessel as Compassion, citing her as the mother (conceptually, if nothing else) of future Ships.

  [913] Dating The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories: “Special Features” (BF #142d) - The commentary is slated for the 25th Anniversary release of Doctor Demonic’s Tales of Terror (1976).

  [914] Dating Psi-ence Fiction (PDA #46) - The year isn’t given, but there’s a modern day setting, with references to (for example) The Blair Witch Project and CCTV cameras. The book was released in 2001.

  [915] Dating Touched by an Angel (NSA #47) - The exact day is given (p161).

  [916] Dating Project: Twilight (BF #23) - No year is given, but it’s the present day (or close enough) for Evelyn, and Tony Blair is the Prime Minister. Project: Destiny says that Cassie went missing on “23rd August, 2001” - as that story was also written by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, this is presumably the same day that the Doctor and Evelyn visit The Dusk.

  [917] Dating Animal (BF LS #2.5) - Writer Andrew Cartmel scripted the story as taking place in 2011, but this was changed - both in the dialogue and the blurb - to 2001. It’s during the school year, and it’s after the Doctor and Ace meet Bambera in Battlefield.

  [918] Earth Aid

  [919] Dating Head Games (NA #43) - It is “2001”, some time before December 2001, and “953 years” (p150) before Cwej is born (in 2954, p205). The bit with the pop can is on p165-166.

  [920] Head Games. The kids might have been born prior to 2001, as Bambera is on duty in Head Games and Animal, both set in that year. Alternatively, it’s possible that Brigadier Fernfather (The Shadow in the Glass) covered Bambera’s maternity leave.

  [921] According to Owen’s comments and a computer graphic related to Lucy’s death in TW: Greeks Bearing Gifts.

  [922] Touched by an Angel

  [923] TW: Miracle Day. The fact that the CIA has “456 files” indicates some knowledge of the UK’s contact with the 456 in the 60s, despite the great pains that the UK government takes to keep it secret in TW: Children of Earth.

  [924] “A year” before Rutans: In 2 Minds.

  [925] Dating “The Fallen” (DWM #273-276) - According to the Doctor, it’s “2001. Somewhere in November judging by the temperature”.

  [926] “The Widow’s Curse”

  [927] “Five years” before Rise of the Cybermen.

  [928] The Hollow Men (p74).

  [929] “Fifty years” after Amorality Tale.

  [930] Sometime Never. The Doctor, Fitz and Trix visit Sam’s grave in The Gallifrey Chronicles, which gives her date of death as 2002. From The Bodysnatchers onwards, some of the EDAs hinted that Sam would meet a premature death. Others, such as Interference, hinted that she would live into great old age; Beltempest even alluded that she was now immortal.

  Alien Bodies and Unnatural History reveal that contact with the Doctor changed Sam’s timeline, preventing her from becoming “Dark Sam” (dark-haired, sexually active and a drug user) and making her squeaky-clean instead. Further complicating things, some of the “companion deaths” the Council of Ei
ght arranged were either ambiguous or retconned away after their defeat. As of The Gallifrey Chronicles, it’s clear that Sam died in 2002 and “stayed dead”.

  [931] Sometime Never

  [932] “Seven years” before TW: The Undertaker’s Gift.

  [933] Happy Endings

  [934] Dating The Ratings War (BF promo #2, DWM #313) Beep’s early appearances on Earth are roughly contemporary. Previous to The Ratings War, he was imprisoned in “Star Beast II”, a comic story in the 1996 DWM Annual. The tone and heavy amount of reality TV in this story suggests author Steve Lyons had a contemporary or near-contemporary setting in mind.

  [935] Dating The Forge: Project: Valhalla (BF New Worlds novel #3) - The year is given.

  [936] Dating Tales from the Vault (BF CC 6.1) - Ruth names the exact date, and it’s “about ten years” before the story’s linking material, set at time of release in 2011. The Doctor says that he and Romana have arrived in “Kensington on a wet Wednesday afternoon”, but in 2002, 6th June was actually a Thursday.

  [937] Dating Benny: Secret Origins (Benny #10.4) - It’s the day that England played Argentina for the World Cup: 7th June, 2002.

  [938] Dating Sarah Jane Smith Series 1 (SJS: Comeback, #1.1; SJS: The Tao Connection, #1.2; SJS: Test of Nerve, #1.3; SJS: Ghost Town, #1.4; SJS: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, #1.5) - The five Big Finish audios that compose Sarah Jane Smith Series 1 were released from August to November 2002, and occur in fairly rapid succession. The setting seems contemporary - tellingly, Ghost Town occurs “six months” after events described in a scientist’s journal, which is dated to “22nd November, 2001”.

  [939] SJS: Comeback. Details about the Crimson Chapter’s role in Sarah’s professional downfall are revealled in SJS: Fatal Consequences. Winters and Think Tank were seen in Robot.