B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  In the Doctor’s personal timeline, his “recent exploits” include “giant rats, killer robots, skulls from the dawn of time” (i.e., the end of Season 14 and Image of the Fendahl). In Hive of Horror, he recalls events from The Invisible Enemy. With no mention of Leela or Romana, the Hornet’s Nest series may take place for the Doctor between The Invasion of Time and The Ribos Operation.

  [1338] Hornets’ Nest: The Dead Shoes

  [1339] Hornets’ Nest: The Circus of Doom

  [1340] Hornets’ Nest: A Sting in the Tale

  [1341] Dating Hornets’ Nest: Hive of Horror (BBC fourth Doctor audio #1.5) - The story follows directly on from Hornets’ Nest: A Sting in the Tale. It’s Christmas Eve when the fourth Doctor, Mike and Mrs Wibbsey defeat the Hornets, and they have Christmas dinner on Christmas Day. The End of Time (TV) implies that at some point later that day, Mrs Wibbsey and Mike Yates would have transformed into copies of the Master.

  [1342] Demon Quest: The Relics of Time

  [1343] Dating The End of Time (X4.17-4.18) - No year is given, but it’s after Planet of the Dead. The story begins on Christmas Eve, and unfolds over the next two days. In SJA: Death of the Doctor, set in 2010, Sarah acknowledges seeing the tenth Doctor as part of his “goodwill tour”. The same story establishes that the dying Doctor visited every one of his former companions, not just those of his tenth incarnation.

  [1344] The End of Time (TV). As humanity - including some billions with no Wi-Fi - spends an entire day as the Master, it seems very unlikely that many people would swallow this story.

  [1345] Hornets’ Nest: Hive of Horror

  [1346] Events in 2010 include the last half of The Sarah Jane Adventures Series 3; the present day sequences of Doctor Who Series 5 and The Sarah Jane Adventures Series 4.

  [1347] As revealled in Demon Quest: Sepulchre. This happens “earlier in the year”, i.e. 2010.

  [1348] The year prior to TW: Miracle Day.

  [1349] “Hotel Historia”

  [1350] Mad Dogs and Englishmen

  [1351] “Decades” before the first portion of Singularity.

  [1352] In Amy’s time, and “by 2010” according to The Coming of the Terraphiles.

  [1353] An alternative timeline seen in So Vile a Sin.

  [1354] Dating Shadow of the Past (BF CC #4.9) - The story’s framing sequence is probably concurrent with the audio’s release in April 2010. Liz says that it’s been “nearly twice” as long since the Mim incident (in the UNIT era) as the young troopers slain during the event (who were “barely out of school”) were alive.

  [1355] Dating Cuddlesome (BF promo #7, DWM #393) - It’s been three years since the main part of the story. Angela says that her ex-partner and his fiancé have a wedding planned “for June”.

  [1356] Dating The Macros (BF LS #1.8) - The Doctor gives the year as 2010, and twice generalises that it’s “over sixty years” since 1943. The TARDIS has been refitted with a Zero Room (also seen in Renaissance of the Daleks and Patient Zero), following its destruction in Castrovalva.

  [1357] Dating Memory Lane (BF #88) - No specific year is given, but most signs indicate that Kim and Tom hail from near the present day. Kim is familiar with iPods; Tom is acquainted with both Space Lego (1978-2001) and Star Wars Lego (first introduced in 1999) and the Doctor explicitly names their ion jet rocket as the product of the twenty-first century. It’s further said that the rockets come into being “thirty-five years” after the Earth-recreation of Tom’s childhood on Lucentra, and although this stems from a composite of Tom’s memories and isn’t very reliable, it does tie in with the date for The Seeds of Death in this chronology.

  Kim expects Tom to recognise the names of female astronauts Eileen Collins (who flew in 1995 and 1997, and commanded missions in 1999 and 2005) and Pamela Anne Melroy (who piloted space shuttle missions in 2000 and 2002, and was selected to command one in June 2006).

  [1358] Dating Situation Vacant (BF BBC7 #4.2) - The story seems to be contemporary, and was released in July 2010. The Monk’s involvement is revealled in The Resurrection of Mars.

  [1359] The Resurrection of Mars, as partially revealled in The Book of Kells.

  [1360] Dating Apollo 23 (NSA #37) - It’s twice said (pgs. 30, 147) that it’s “thirty years” after Apollo 22 launched in June 1980, which would roughly coincide with the novel’s publication in April 2010. The time of year is more indeterminate, although mention that it’s a “cold, grey day” in Texas (p7) tends to imply that it’s not summer. Either way, the story cannot fit into the one-day gap between The Eleventh Hour and The Big Bang, as it takes the Doctor and company a full day (pgs. 147, 160) to prep Apollo 23 for launch, and another two days (p147) to reach Base Delta. The Doctor says that it’s “a few hundred years” (p55) before a penal colony is built on the moon (Frontier in Space) and that T-Mat won’t be established there (p87) “for a while yet” (The Seeds of Death). M3 Variant fuel was developed for the Mars Probe missions (The Ambassadors of Death). Mention of “Keller impulses” doubtless refers to The Mind of Evil.

  [1361] Dating Code of the Krillitanes (Quick Reads #5) - The year is given.

  [1362] Dating The Forgotten Army (NSA #39) - The Doctor says it’s 2010. The Doctor’s mention of the Ood Food Guide praising June 2010 might suggest the month. It’s “a Saturday night” (p110, p151).

  [1363] Presuming for even a second that the Doctor isn’t just having Amy on with his wild claims of “the Doctor Burger”, his having purchased an entire street on her behalf and his having banned ketchup on said street, it’s not specified which street he’s named after her. A “Pond Street” exists in Staten Island, but not Manhattan, where the story seems to take place.

  [1364] Dating “The Golden Ones” (DWM #425-428) - The story was published in 2010, and looks contemporary. It’s after UNIT has changed its name to become the Unified Intelligence Taskforce.

  [1365] “The Child of Time” (DWM). Chiyoko’s temporal undoing of her actions (meaning “The Golden Ones” was erased from history) is fortunate, given that events in this story heavily contradict The Feast of Axos.

  [1366] Dating Doomsday (X2.13) - Pete states that “three years” have passed since the end of The Age of Steel; this must mean that it’s 2010. In “our” universe, it’s still 2007 (confirmed in TW: Everything Changes and The Runaway Bride, and as can be inferred from Jackie saying she’s “forty” in Army of Ghosts and telling Pete he “died twenty years ago” in Doomsday).

  Perhaps the disruption caused by travelling between the two universes has knocked them out of sync. It means that Mickey, Pete and Jake are all three years older in Army of Ghosts than they were in The Age of Steel (even though they all look exactly the same as before), and that Jackie is “officially” three years older there than her actual age (which presumably she’s not happy about).

  Jackie is three months pregnant by the time the Doctor contacts Rose, so it takes at least three months (of parallel universe time, at any rate) for him to do so.

  [1367] Dating Vincent and the Doctor (X5.10) - The Doctor tells Vincent that it’s “Paris, 2010 AD”; he and Amy first visit the museum “a few days” beforehand.

  Like Martha before her, the main “present day” events of Amy’s first season are compressed into a very short period, so, technically, other “present day” stories (in Amy’s case, this story and The Lodger) must happen out of sequence with those events and can be safely placed elsewhere. There’s snow on the ground outside Musee d'Orsay, everyone is wrapped warmly and their breath is visible - snow in Paris is very rare in April, although it did happen, without much accumulation, in 2008. Further research into this was thwarted because neither of this guidebook’s authors speak French.

  [1368] Dating The Big Bang (X5.13) - The scene occurs the same day as The Lodger (TV).

  [1369] Dating The Lodger (X5.11) - An advert on Craig’s fridge for a “Vincent Van Gogh: The Great Innovator” exhibit is dated “13th March-29th August, 2010”. (This isn’t the same exhibit that the Doc
tor and Amy visit in Vincent and the Doctor, especially as Craig has never been to Paris and can’t see the point of it.) It’s a time of year when people are wearing jackets and even gloves. The population of the Earth is given as 6,000,400,026 ... fewer people than were on Earth in The End of Time (TV), which either suggests that The Lodger is set before that, or that the Cracks in Time have temporarily “erased” some of Earth’s population (see the Cracks in Time sidebar). Either way, it’s preferable that The Lodger occurs before the other “modern-day” stories in Series 5, as at least two years elapse between this story and Closing Time, which likely occurs in spring 2012 (see the dating notes on that story).

  [1370] Dating TW: The House of the Dead (TW audio drama #7) – Jack tells Ianto’s shade, “Six months ago, you died in my arms”, so this is just prior to Jack’s leaving Earth in the epilogue of TW: Children of Earth. Barring on any further stories that address the topic, the Rift is here sealed forever – which might explain why Jack finally feels at liberty to relinquish his duty to Cardiff and depart into space.

  [1371] Dating TW: Children of Earth (TW 3.05) - It’s “six months” after the defeat of the 456.

  [1372] The End of Time (TV). This occurs after TW: Children of Earth.

  [1373] Dating TW: First Born (TW novel #17) - Gwen is currently “seven months” pregnant (p5). It’s possible that this scene is the start of Gwen and Rhys being forced to go underground, following their meet-up with Jack in March 2010 at the end of TW: Children of Earth. No reason is given as to why the government has left them alone this long, although TW: The Men Who Sold the World hints that the UK has a new coalition government, which might have negated the damning video evidence collected against Prime Minister Green’s administration in Children of Earth.

  [1374] Dating The End of Time (X4.17-4.18) - We’re told that Donna planned to marry in the spring.

  [1375] Dating Death and Diplomacy and Happy Endings (NA #49-50) - The Virgin version of Ahistory dated Death and Diplomacy to the present day, based upon the synopsis. The final book has Benny asking Jason the year, and him replying that it’s “Nineteen ninety-six when I last looked. Mind you, that was something like fifteen years ago, more or less. I had a watch once, but it broke and I lost count” (p123).

  While it’s reasonable to take Jason’s “something like fifteen years” comment to mean precisely fifteen years, and thereby date Death and Diplomacy to circa 2011, it also seems justifiable to place it before Happy Endings - which is repeatedly said to be set in 2010, with the season specified as “spring” (p11). Given the vagueness of Jason’s remarks and with the two stories occurring so close together regardless, why would the Doctor have decided to hold the wedding in the year before Benny and Jason actually met? A wedding invite in Happy Endings (p90) specifies Benny and Jason’s nuptials as taking place on “Saturday, 24th April, 2010” (which in real life was actually a Tuesday).

  In Prime Time, the director of Channel 400, Lukos, tells Ace’s younger self that her mother died age 85, haunted by never knowing what happened to her daughter. As Ace’s mother was born in 1943 (The Curse of Fenric), this would place her death in 2028. However, Channel 400’s account is specifically tailored to torment Ace and is therefore suspect, especially given the older Ace’s reunion with her mother in Happy Endings. Ricky McIlveen is the son of Vincent and Justine from Warchild. Time was first mentioned in Love and War, and the seventh Doctor is often cited as “Time’s Champion”.

  [1376] The Shadows of Avalon, following on Lethbridge-Stewart’s rejuvenation as a result of events in Happy Endings. This explains how the Brigadier lives well past a normal human lifespan.

  [1377] Demon Quest: The Relics of Time. We see Mike with the Brigadier at Benny’s wedding, so perhaps he told him then.

  [1378] Dating The Sarah Jane Adventures Series 3 (SJA: The Eternity Trap, 3.4; SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge, 3.5; SJA: The Gift, 3.6) - The remainder of Series 3 occurs in the spring of 2010, with the last story, The Gift, appearing to finish at the very end of the school year. This isn’t directly said, but the children are doing GCSE preliminary exams, and the final scene - with Sarah and company enjoying a backyard BBQ without jackets on, and basking in the sunshine - looks and feels as if they’re celebrating the start of the summer holiday. Either way, The Gift definitely occurs later in the spring - established green plants are shown as the Rakweed pollinates everywhere, and Rani goes off to school without a jacket on as birds chirp in the warm sun.

  [1379] Dating SJA: The Eternity Trap (SJA 3.4) - Rani and Darkening separately (and broadly) say that 1665 was “three hundred forty years ago”. Lord Marchwood’s shade claims, twice, that he’s been searching “over three hundred years” since 1665 for the souls of his children. Clyde and Rani have school “on Monday”, so it’s during the school year.

  [1380] Dating SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge (SJA 3.5) - The International Gallery curator mentions “the Cup of Athelstan fiasco at Easter” (Planet of the Dead). He definitely doesn’t say “last Easter” - so this is possibly evidence that Mona Lisa’s Revenge occurs before Easter 2010 (4th April, in that year). It’s not impossible, of course, that the “at Easter” reference denotes that Mona Lisa’s Revenge (and by extension SJA: The Eternity Trap) take place at the very tail end of 2009, but that would necessitate forcing a five-month gap between The Gift and the rest of Series 3 where none was meant to exist. Moreover, the more Series 3 stories one wedges into the waning weeks of 2009, the more the total absence of bitterly cold weather and holiday decorations becomes conspicuous.

  [1381] Luke is said to be 15. The Blathereen first appeared in The Monsters Inside.

  [1382] Extrapolating from Gwen being three weeks pregnant in TW: Children of Earth.

  [1383] Dating TW: The Twilight Streets (TW novel #6) - The exact dating for this is unclear, but it’s possible that Gwen’s pregnancy parallels the one in the real timeline. Bizarrely, Gwen here gives birth to a son - on screen, she has a daughter.

  [1384] Dating TW: “Shrouded” (TWM #21-22) - Gwen has now given birth. John Hart says he met Beatrice in 2010, and Rhys tells Ianto in 2008 that Beatrice will “come to find” him in “two years”.

  [1385] “Six weeks” before TW: The Men Who Sold the World.

  [1386] SJA: The Nightmare Man

  [1387] Or so the Doctor claims in The Forgotten Army (p17).

  [1388] Dating TW: First Born (TW novel #17) - The year at two points is implied to be 2011: Sebastian 1 (born 3rd March, 1981) is “thirty years old”(p134), and Jenny, one of the oldest Scions following the Juniper Tree being relocated to Rawbone in 1991, is “twenty” (pgs 81, 166). Both pieces of evidence need to be taken as approximations, however, as Anwen’s age mandates that the year is 2010 (Gwen’s family settles in Rawbone “two months”, p9, after Gwen was “seven months” pregnant, p5, and Gwen throughout the story is hampered by lactation issues). The story proceeds over at least ten weeks (Anwen’s stated age on p88) if not longer. The life-cycle of the potatoes that Rhys plants seems a bit strange - he puts them in the ground three weeks after he and Gwen move to Rawbone, but the plants are “just starting to come up” (p248) at story’s end, when they should have emerged within two, maybe three weeks.

  The ages of the last natural-born Rawbone children (Sasha, Davydd and Nerys) aren’t of much help in making a determination. The town went sterile in 1987, Nerys is currently in her “early 20s” (p40), Davydd is “mid-20s” (p30) and Sasha is 24 (p112), but could easily have been born in 1986.

  There’s a continuity glitch in that Gwen and Rhys covertly take Anwen to meet Gwen’s parents (p128), but TW: Miracle Day is presented as their first meeting.

  [1389] Dating TW: The Men Who Sold the World (TW novel #18) - No date is given, but it’s been at least “nine months”(p121) since the Department’s salvage team - in an operation that commenced in October 2009, judging by TW: Long Time Dead - recovered the Reality Gun from the Hub. So, it’s most likely summer 2010 at present.

  [1390] Dating �
��The Age of Ice” (DWM #408-411) - The Doctor says that they’ve arrived in “Sydney, Australia, early twenty-first century”, on a “glorious summer’s day”. A UNIT officer says that the Doctor and his allies saved the entire universe from the Daleks “just last year” (in Journey’s End, set in 2009). It very much looks as if the story-creators forgot about the “year ahead” rule governing Series 4, meaning that the “last year” reference places “The Age of Ice” in 2010 rather than (as was perhaps intended) 2009, its year of publication. Consequently, for the Doctor and Majenta, this story and “Ghosts of the Northern Line” must chronologically happen out of order.

  [1391] “Six months” before The Crimes of Thomas Brewster.

  [1392] “Spam Filtered”

  [1393] Dating The Eleventh Hour (X5.1) - It’s the night before Amy’s wedding, the exact date of which (“26/6/2010”) is first established in Flesh and Stone. Surprisingly given that time of year, the Doctor and Amy’s breath is visible. (Did the recalibrated TARDIS cause a heat exchange upon materialisation?) Rory’s badge to the emergency unit of the Royal Leadworth Hospital, where he works, is something of an anomaly given Rory’s age: it was issued “30/11/1990”.

  [1394] Dating Flesh and Stone/The Vampires of Venice (X5.5-5.6) - In Flesh and Stone, the clock ticks over to 12 am on 26th June, the date of Rory and Amy’s wedding. Rory says in The Vampires of Venice that he’s “getting married tomorrow” - either he hasn’t noticed that it’s past midnight already, or the Doctor nips back in time a little.

  [1395] Dating The Pandorica Opens (X5.12) - River checks the TARDIS instruments and confirms the date as “the 26th of June, 2010”. The alien intruders broke down Amy’s front door, so both they and River presumably go to Amy’s house after the Doctor and Amy stopped there in Flesh and Stone. The clock ticked over to 12 am of the morning of the 26th as they left, so the action described in The Pandorica Opens probably occurs in the darkened morning hours.