The TARDIS data bank cites that the Silver Devastation was created “one hundred billion years ago” - a comment unlikely to have any relation to this story, as Utopia takes place in 100,000,000,000,000, and the state of humanity there is in no way similar to what’s seen in The Game of Death. It’s unlikely that the Nocturns are moving their victims through time to this era: time travel isn’t mentioned (save for TARDIS and the Agent pursuing it), and such a feat - given the Doctor’s claim in Utopia that even the Time Lords didn’t venture out as far as the year 100,000,000,000 - would represent an enormous exertion of power for the comparatively frivolous purpose of killing a few people in a habitat dome. It’s an arbitrary guess, but this story feels like it takes place during mankind’s early colonial era - say, in the 2200s. The story continues in The Planet of Oblivion.
[492] Dating SLEEPY (NA #48) - The Doctor states it is “2257” (p29).
[493] Benny: Genius Loci. It’s some “centuries” (p71) prior to 2561, so this must be the early phase of humanity’s colonial period, even though Pinky and Perky are far advanced from the technology generally available at this time.
[494] Dating The Daleks (1.2) - No date is given in the story, but the Doctor says in The Edge of Destruction that “Skaro was in the future”. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Doctor tells Ian that the first Dalek story occurred “a million years ahead of us in the future” and the twenty-second century is part of the “middle of the history of the Daleks”. Where he acquires this information is unclear - he had not even heard of the Daleks when he first met them (whereas the Monk knows of them in The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Five Doctors reveals that the Time Lords’ ancestors forbid the use of the Daleks in their Games).
However, the Thals in Planet of the Daleks [2540] have legends of events in The Daleks as being from “generations ago”.
In the original storyline for The Survivors (as the first story was provisionally titled), the date was given as “the year 3000”, with the war having occurred two thousand years before. A revised synopsis dated 30th July, 1963, gave the date as “the twenty-third century”.
The Terrestrial Index and The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book both suggested that the Daleks from this story were “new Daleks” created by “crippled Kaled survivors”, and that the story is set just after Genesis of the Daleks - this is presumably meant to explain the Dal/Kaled question and also helps tie the Dalek history into the TV Century 21 comic strip, although there is no evidence for it on screen. The TARDIS Logs dated the story as “2290 AD”. The American Doctor Who comic suggested a date of “300 AD”, on the grounds that the Daleks do not seem to have developed space travel. The FASA Role-playing Game dated the story as “5 BC”. “Matrix Databank” in DWM #73 suggested that The Daleks takes place after The Evil of the Daleks and that the Daleks seen here are the last vestiges of a once-great race. This ties in with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but contradicts Planet of the Daleks.
Timelink suggests 900. The Virgin version of Ahistory speculated that the Doctor had returned Ian and Barbara to 1963, but on the wrong side of the galaxy. If it was set at the time of broadcast, it would be a couple of months after they left London, so - stretching a little - it qualifies as “the future”.
The main problem is that, whenever it’s set, we have to reconcile the Daleks seen in first Dalek story - stuck in their city unaware of any life beyond it who are all killed - with the Daleks as galactic conquerors seen in all subsequent stories. We have to postulate (without any evidence from the series) that a faction of Daleks left Skaro at some point between becoming confined to their travel machines and the Neutronic War and they subsequently lost contact with Skaro. This faction of Daleks had a powerful space fleet (Lucifer Rising) invaded the Earth (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) and the rest of the solar system (GodEngine), and fought the Mechanoids (The Chase). They developed internal power supplies and (at some point after The Dalek Invasion of Earth) the “slatted” design, rather than the “banded” one seen in the first two stories. Following this - possibly licking their wounds following their defeat in The Dalek Invasion of Earth - the survivors of this faction returned to their home planet. They would have discovered a city full of dead Daleks - and perhaps the Doctor’s role in their cousins’ defeat.
While unsupported by evidence from the show, and a little awkward, it fits in with the facts we learn at the end of The Space Museum and The Chase - the Daleks now live on Skaro, their influence stretches across time and space, they have limited knowledge of the Doctor, advanced science and a desire for revenge specifically against the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan.
[495] The Gallifrey Chronicles
Last Contact
It’s not recorded when the Daleks discover key facts about the Doctor. By The Chase, they can recognise the TARDIS (which they didn’t see in the two TV stories up to that point, as it was either deep in the petrified forest or buried by rubble), and they also know the Doctor can travel in time. In The Chase, the Daleks refer to “The Doctor and these three humans”, which might imply that they don’t think the Doctor is human. Except that one of the other three is his granddaughter Susan, and later in the story they do refer to the Doctor as “human”. In The Chase, it doesn’t even occur to them that Susan might have left, so it’s unlikely they’ve got records of other incarnations of the Doctor or companions. They think he’s “more than human” (by virtue of his being a time traveller) in The Evil of the Daleks, and Chen claims that the Doctor was from “another galaxy” in The Daleks’ Master Plan. When the Daleks deal with the Monk and the Master, they don’t ever make the connection on screen that they are from the same planet as the Doctor.
Contrast all of this with Resurrection of the Daleks, where they refer (for the first time) to the Doctor as a Time Lord and identify his home planet as Gallifrey.
On the other hand, the Time Lords certainly know of the Daleks - they’re referred to in the Doctor’s trial in The War Games, plus the Time Lords send the Doctor on missions against them in Planet of the Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks. The Monk and the Master also know about the Daleks. In the time of Rassilon, the Daleks were banned from the Games of Death on Gallifrey, so the Gallifreyans then knew of the Daleks, but there’s no evidence that the two races made contact. There’s another continuity problem here - why is it that the Doctor and Susan don’t know about the Daleks before they meet them in The Daleks? It’s a particular problem because by The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Doctor seems au fait with their complete history. It’s possible, as with so much history of that period, that the modern Time Lords had long lost or filed away their knowledge of the Daleks.
We hear the Daleks and Time Lords have all but wiped each other out in Dalek and The Parting of the Ways.
[496] In The Space Museum, the Moroks have a Dalek specimen from “Planet Skaro”, one with horizontal bands rather than vertical slats. It seems likely that the Moroks raid Skaro at some undisclosed time around The Daleks. It’s unlikely it was before, as it’s implied that the Daleks have no knowledge of life on other planets. Although this in turn contradicts Genesis of the Daleks, in which both Davros and the Dalek leader express a wish to conquer other worlds once they know the Doctor is an alien.
[497] Three centuries before Benny: The Vampire Curse: “The Badblood Diaries”.
[498] Spiral Scratch
[499] The Romance of Crime
[500] The Leisure Hive
[501] Many stories feature Earth colonies that supply the home planet and are subject to tyrannical regimes. This is typically treated as a specific era in future history, when space travel and interplanetary communications are limited, and so most of these stories have been placed together just prior to the Earth Empire’s formation. The New and Missing Adventures attempted to weave a more systematic and consistent “future history” for Earth, and many concerned themselves with this period of early colonisation, corporate domination and increasing centralisation.
[502] Theatre
of War
[503] “Centuries” before The Dark Flame, although there’s some confusion about this; see the dating notes for this story. Tranagus was named in Benny: The Draconian Rage.
[504] Dating The Prisoner’s Dilemma (BF CC #3.8) - It’s “generations” after Erratoon is established as a prison planet. The dating here is otherwise a bit arbitrary, but the adventure likely occurs when hyperspace vessels are already in use, as Elysium ore will be used to refine the hyperspace process only “a generation” after this.
The robot wardens of Erratoon subject Ace to memory-wiping, and although the Doctor is confident that he can repair her lost memories using the TARDIS, the idea seems to be that Ace loses her memories of the New Adventures. This move was designed to help reconcile Ace’s status later in the novel range (Spacefleet-trained adventurer with a motorbike that travels through time and space) with the Big Finish version (older sister to Hex, is still travelling with the Doctor). The seeming discrepancies in Ace’s character, however, can be just as easily accounted for by the not-so-terribly controversial idea that people are different in their 20s, 30s and even 40s. Writer Simon Guerrier concedes that he added the memory-wiping angle “more for my own amusement than anything else”, that it’s certain that Ace gets back her memories of the Doctor and the TARDIS, and that the whole incident is a tool that continuity keepers can use or ignore as they wish.
[505] Benny: Dragons’ Wrath
[506] “Nearly a quarter of a century” before Lords of the Storm.
[507] “About a hundred and fifty years” before The Romance of Crime.
[508] About fifty years after 2234, according to Benny: The Sword of Forever.
[509] Dating Vengeance on Varos (22.2) - The Governor states that Varos has been a mining colony for “centuries” and it has been stable “for over two hundred years”. Peri tells the Governor that she is from “nearly three centuries before you were born”. The story takes place before Mindwarp. Mentors must live longer than humans, as the Mentor Sil appears in both stories (although he changes colour from brown to green between the two). The novelisation set it in “the latter part of the twenty-third century”, as did The Terrestrial Index. The Discontinuity Guide set a range “between 2285 and 2320”. Timelink said “2324”.
[510] Dating Mission to Magnus (BF LS #1.2) - Sil’s operation on Magnus is a direct consequence of his defeat on Varos, so it’s probably not long after Vengeance on Varos. Peri reads off that it’s the “twenty-third century” on one of the TARDIS read-outs as the Ship is pulled through the Vortex. The novelisation of this story, released in 1990, had the Doctor telling Peri that it’s “Midway through the twenty-third century”, but the likely dating of Vengeance on Varos suggests it’s a bit later than that. A minor continuity glitch exists in that both here and in Mindwarp, Sil implies that he last saw the Doctor and Peri on Varos.
[511] Dating The Leisure Hive (18.1) - Romana establishes that the war was in “2250”, “forty years” before.
[512] The Highest Science
[513] “Seventy years” before The Infinity Race.
[514] “Centuries” before Benny: Oh No It Isn’t!.
[515] Centuries before Benny: Dry Pilgrimage.
[516] Dating The Stones of Venice (BF #18) - The story itself says that it’s the “twenty-third century”, but Neverland gives a firm date of 2294.
[517] Dating Whispers of Terror (BF #3) - No date given, but references to the play The Good Soldiers relate to information given in Theatre of War. The story is set within a generation of the first performance of the play.
[518] Dating “Dreadnought” (Radio Times #3775-3784) - No date given, but Placebo Effect claims that Stacey’s parents are from the “twenty-third century”.
[519] Placebo Effect
[520] “Fifteen years” before “Space Squid”.
[521] Interference
[522] About five years before Excelis Decays.
[523] “Four hundred years” before The Sensorites. There is also a Central City on Earth in the year 4000, according to The Daleks’ Master Plan.
[524] In The Dimension Riders, Ace tells Lieutenant Strakk that she comes from Perivale, and he says that the area is a “forest” (p68).
[525] “About four hundred years” after the 1909 section of Birthright.
[526] Synthespians™
[527] The Stone Rose
[528] The Highest Science (p49).
[529] Jake and Madelaine appear in Goth Opera, and we learn of their fate in Managra (p64).
[530] SLEEPY
[531] “Fifteen hundred years” before A Device of Death.
[532] The Pyralis Effect
[533] The Big Bang. The date of this is completely unknown, but the name suggests a connection to Earth, and it might be a leisure planet as seen in The Leisure Hive.
[534] A generation after The Prisoner’s Dilemma.
[535] The Taking of Planet 5 (p219).
[536] The Twin Dilemma
[537] “Almost one hundred years” before LIVE 34.
[538] “Fifty years” before The Price of Paradise, which is set in the late twenty-fourth century. The reference to the Draconians apparently contradicts the timescale established in Frontier in Space, although other novels (such as Love and War) also suggested that humans and Draconians met before their “official” first contact.
[539] Dating Excelis Decays (BF Excelis series #3) - It is three hundred years before Benny: The Plague Herds of Excelis.
[540] “Centuries” before Benny: The Mirror Effect.
[541] Dating The Slow Empire (EDA #47) - No date is given, but it’s before Burning Heart, because the Piglet People of Glomi IV are mentioned here and extinct there. This date is completely arbitrary. The realm is typically referred to just as “the Empire”, and is here called “the Slow Empire” for clarity.
[542] “Hundreds of years” before Benny: Absence.
[543] “A few years” before “When Worlds Collide”, and in an incarnation before his eleventh.
[544] Dating Graceless: The Sphere (Graceless #1.1) - The trappings of the Sphere - whisky, roulette, hotel-casinos and even the term “Faraday cage” - suggests that the participants are descended from humanity. The fact that Amy and Zara’s time rings don’t function aboard the Sphere either suggests that its technology is incredibly advanced... or that it’s just a fluke. The pirate Kreekpolt has illegal warpships that can travel through time, but there’s no way of establishing that if such technology is native to this era. It would be lying to say this placement is much more than a shot in the dark.
[545] Dating The Mists of Time (BF promo, DWM #411) - The archaeology members seem human. Jo says that it’s “the far future”, then specifies that it’s “centuries and centuries” after her time. Calder agrees that it’s “hundreds of years” since Jo’s native era.
[546] Dating The Twin Dilemma (21.7) - In his novelisation, Eric Saward places the story around “2310”. This is neither confirmed nor contradicted on screen. The freighter disappears “eight months” before The Twin Dilemma, which the novelisation sets in August. A computer monitor says that the “last contact” with the freighter was made on “12-99”. If the twelve stands for the twelfth month, the ninety-nine might stand for the last year of a century. The Programme Guide set the story “c2310”, The Discontinuity Guide in “2200”, Timelink in “2200”, About Time seemed comfortable with “2300”.
[547] Dating “When Worlds Collide” (IDW DW Vol. 2, #6-8) - No date is given. Lisa Everwell is from Basildon, in an era where she can save up and travel to Multiworld. There’s enough interest in Earth’s past to justify Multiworld patterning its zones after periods of it. There are twelve “fantasy” zones - the ones named are the Prehistoric, Old West, World War II, King Arthur, Swinging Sixties, Roman, Arabian Nights and Futuristic. There are four we can infer from the costumes of the duplicates: Samurai-era Japan, a soccer zone, Seventies USA and some sort of hospital-themed one. We might infer that this is
the era of the Leisure Planets, which is consistent with the levels of artificial intelligence seen.
[548] Dating “Space Squid” (IDW DW Vol. 2, #9) - No date is given; this dating is arbitrary, but allows Kevin to settle in his native time. The level of technology might suggest this is relatively early in mankind’s progress into space.
[549] SLEEPY
[550] Benny: The Joy Device
[551] “Profits of Doom”
[552] “Two hundred and fifty years” before The Also People.
[553] Fear of the Dark. The book’s internal dating is confused. On p81, the Doctor finds a record dated “2319.01.12”, which puts these events seventy-three years before the novel takes place. However, Tegan claims this happened “one hundred and fifty years ago” (p81), and the Doctor says it was “over one hundred and sixty years” ago (p93).
[554] Dating “Profits of Doom” (DWM #120-122) - It’s “eight decades out from Earth” and escaping “twenty-fourth century Earth”. Although as the date is soon specified by a monitor robot as “January 7th 2321”, they actually left twenty-third century Earth.
[555] The Cradle of the Snake specifies that the Mara comes to power in “Manussan Year 2326”, here presumed to be the same as the Earth calendar; see the dating notes under Snakedance.
[556] The Also People (p54).
[557] Recorded Time and Other Stories: “A Most Excellent Match”
[558] “Thirty years” before Lords of the Storm (p263).
[559] Dating Valhalla (BF #96) - The story would seem to occur in a year ending in 45, as “9-1-46” (the date given on a sales catalogue) is said to be “next month”. Funnily enough, the actual century is never specified. One clue is that the Doctor says he has “overshot [Valhalla’s] glory days” - meaning the gas mine rush there - by “about a century”. This is probably related to mankind’s original breakout from the solar system in the third millennium, but it’s unlikely to have occurred in the twenty-second century (the Dalek invasion would surely have disrupted such a boom time, and no mention is made of this). We know from Lucifer Rising that people were living on Callisto as early as the early twenty-second century, and To the Slaughter (c.2505) depicts Jupiter’s moons as being so worthless, they can be blown up in accordance with the principles of feng shui. The best compromise, then, is probably to say that the boom occurs in the twenty-third century, and Valhalla takes place in the twenty-fourth. (Callisto itself survives To the Slaughter and seems to have obtained greater significance by So Vile a Sin, set in 2982, as it’s home to the Emperor’s palace.)
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