[839] Patience vanishes mysteriously in Cold Fusion, and reappears in The Infinity Doctors
[840] Interference (p113).
[841] Dating The Bernice Summerfield New Adventures - The twenty-three New Adventures novels featuring Benny start with her joining the staff of St. Oscar’s in 2593 (a year first established in The Dying Days) and roughly acknowledge the real-world passage of time during the two and a half years the Benny NAs were in publication. The series ends with Benny: Twilight of the Gods, set in 2596. See the individual entries for more.
Terminology in the Benny Books and Audios
The New Adventures books continued after Virgin lost the Doctor Who licence in 1996. They were unable to use characters and concepts that originated in Doctor Who, but those created for the New Adventures (Benny, Jason Kane, Chris Cwej, Roz Forrester, the People of the Worldsphere from The Also People, Irving Braxiatel, etc.) were fair game. For legal reasons, a number of new terms were coined when referencing characters or concepts firmly lodged in Doctor Who.
The Dalek Wars that were so influential to Benny’s background were more generically referred to as “the Galactic War”. Braxiatel in both the NAs and the Big Finish audios broadly has “time technology” or “owns a time machine”, although his timeship’s inter-dimensional nature - as prominently seen in Benny: Tears of the Oracle and various audios - leaves no doubt that it’s a TARDIS, a notion reinforced by Big Finish’s use of TARDIS-like noises. The Time Lords - who were still involved in the New Adventures, unnamed, as the signatories to the treaty with the People (Benny: Walking to Babylon), as Irving Braxiatel’s race and as Chris Cwej’s employers (Benny: Dead Romance) were occasionally called “the Watchmakers”. Big Finish was similarly coy about naming the Time Lords, even though the status of “Braxiatel’s people” mirrors developments with the Time Lords in the Gallifrey mini-series, and the Time Lord Straxus appears in both the BBC7 audios and Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel. While the Benny stories frequently refer to the Time Lords as “Braxiatel’s people”, Ahistory has used the terms “Time Lords” and Braxiatel’s “TARDIS” for clarity.
The Benny equivalent of the Ice Warriors is less straightforward... in Benny: Dragons’ Wrath, writer Justin Richards introduced the recurring character of Commander Skutloid, whose description (p109) leaves no doubt that he’s an Ice Lord in all but name. Richards named Skutloid’s species in Benny: The Medusa Effect (p14) as “Neo Arietian” before establishing the more commonly used spelling of “Neo-Aretian” in Benny: Tears of the Oracle (p37, 40, etc.). Skutloid hails from “Neo Ares” (The Medusa Effect, p19), either an alternate name for “New Mars” (Legacy), a.k.a. “Nova Martia” (GodEngine) - a “Neo-Aretian” (i.e. “New Martian”) could feasibly hail from either - or, more likely, Neo Ares and Nova Martia are separate Ice Warrior colonies, hence the different nomenclature. Big Finish wound up trying to have this both ways, using the term “Neo-Aretians” in Benny: A Life of Surprises: “Might”, before having Benny encounter the actual, licensed Ice Warriors in Benny: The Dance of the Dead. In Benny: A Life Worth Living, Big Finish settled for calling the Braxiatel Collection gardener, Hass, “a Martian” (even if temporal distortion retroactively turned him into a Yesodi in Benny: Something Changed).
[842] Benny: Oh No It Isn’t!
[843] Benny: Ship of Fools
[844] Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion
[845] Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet
[846] Dating The Dying Days (NA #61) - The date is given. It’s a bit of an oddity that Wolsey is still in the TARDIS even though the eighth Doctor is now “twelve hundred” years old. As Wolsey was initially the seventh Doctor’s cat, and the seventh Doctor regenerated age 1009 (according to Vampire Science), the math would seem to suggest that, somehow, Wolsey has been living in the TARDIS for about two centuries.
[847] Benny: Down
[848] The Well-Mannered War
[849] Dating Benny: Oh No It Isn’t! (Benny NA #1) - The year was given in The Dying Days.
[850] Six months before Benny: Deadfall.
[851] Gallifrey: Disassembled, in a scene dramatised from Dragons’ Wrath.
[852] Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day
[853] The art forger Menlove Stokes, also seen in Demontage, is here murdered.
[854] Dating Beyond the Sun (Benny NA #3) - In Benny and Jason’s timeline, eight months have passed since they last saw each other, and got divorced, in Eternity Weeps.
[855] Cat’s Paw is the same type of Catan-made artificial lifeform as the Stratum Seven agent from Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion and Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet.
[856] Benny: Down
[857] Dating Benny: Down (Benny NA #5) - It’s now “early 2594” (p8). Benny arrives on Tyler’s Folly no later than “January 14th” (p152), but the action opens at St. Oscar’s some time beforehand. After Benny is apprehended, an interrogation report and an arrest report are respectively dated to ”15/01/94” (p165) and “22/1/94” (p8). Benny is subjected to “the sound of the Young Nazi Male Voice Choir of the year 2594” (p151).
[858] Dating Benny: Deadfall (Benny NA #6) - It’s said that Benny has now been at St. Oscar’s for “six months”; it’s actually been more like nine, although it’s possible she’s counting from the start of the term. Either way, it’s January 2594 at the latest.
[859] This is a sequel to the New Adventures novel Shakedown.
[860] Dating Benny: Walking to Babylon (Benny NA #10) - An extract from Benny’s memoirs (p27) says that it’s still 2594. She’s currently procrastinating on writing An Eye for Wisdom, slated for publication in 2595.
[861] The Schirron Dream crew formerly appeared in Sky Pirates! and Death and Diplomacy.
[862] “Chateau Yquatine” presumably references The Fall of Yquatine, also by Nick Walters. Café Vosta, an establishment at the Braxiatel Collection, is also cited as serving it (Benny: Collected Works). All of which is very curious, since The Fall of Yquatine claims that the Yquatine system won’t be colonized for a couple of centuries yet.
[863] Superior Beings (p108).
[864] Interference
[865] Dating Benny: The Sword of Forever (Benny NA #14) - The chapter headings reiterate that it’s 2595.
[866] Benny: Walking to Babylon. Obviously, publication must occur before St. Oscar’s is ravaged in Benny: Where Angels Fear. The Ikkabans were mentioned in SLEEPY.
[867] Dust Breeding ends with the seventh Doctor and Ace giving Bev a lift in the TARDIS, and the idea seems to be that after some unspecified adventures, she left their company “two years” prior to 2597 (according to Benny: The Judas Gift), and became a fixture of Benny’s native era.
[868] Dating Benny: Buried Treasures: “Making Myths” / “Closure” (Benny audio #1.5b) - The Buried Treasures CD was released as a bonus for customers who purchased Big Finish’s (apocryphal) CD adaptations of Walking to Babylon, Birthright and Just War. The two stories within Buried Treasures are slightly problematic to place within Benny’s lifetime - “Closure” establishes that it’s during Benny’s tenure at St. Oscar’s (so, prior to Benny: Where Angels Fear), but the CD was released in August 1999, concurrent to Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet. The placement here is arbitrary.
[869] Youkali University appeared in Return of the Living Dad.
[870] Dating Benny: Beige Planet Mars (Benny NA #16) - The day is given (p7). Benny here celebrates her thirty-fifth birthday, but she must be counting in absolute terms, allowing for her travelling through time with the Doctor. The book was published in October 1998, just before the thirty-fifth anniversary of Doctor Who.
[871] Benny: Venus Mantrap
[872] The Infinity Doctors
[873] Dating Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion (Benny NA #18) - Four months have passed since Benny: Where Angels Fear.
[874] Dating Benny: Dead Romance (Benny NA #19) - Events in the outside universe are set between The Mary-Sue Extrusion and Tears of the Oracle. Within the bottle universe, events
unfold from 27th September to 12th October, 1970. The universe-in-a-bottle also appears in Interference and The Ancestor Cell. FP: The Shadow Play, strongly implies that Christine ends up joining Faction Paradox as “Cousin Eliza”, a main character in the Faction audios.
[875] Dating Benny: Tears of the Oracle (Benny NA #20) - Allowing that Benny: Twilight of the Gods takes place “a year” after Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion, the calendar-flip from 2595 to 2596 likely occurs somewhere in this vicinity. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Sam visit Vega Station in Demontage.
[876] Interference, “two years” after Fitz is initiated into Faction Paradox.
[877] Dating Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet (Benny NA #21) - Benny: Tears of the Oracle ended with Benny having only “a month to live” owing to a brain illness, and she’s here cured.
[878] Dating Benny: Twilight of the Gods (Benny NA #23) - Benny and company here reunite after spending a bit on their own pursuits, so some time has passed since Benny: The Joy Device. Moreover, it’s said on p48 that “it had almost been a year since [Benny] had seen [Dellah]” (in Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion), which roughly coincides with the real-life duration of ten months that passed between the two books. The Ferutu first appeared in Cold Fusion.
The Benny New Adventures end in 2596, but Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield range don’t rejoin her life until the very end of 2599, starting with the Benny anthology The Dead Men Diaries. As much as anything else, the relaunch dating was presumably meant to accommodate the release of Big Finish’s first full-length Benny novel, Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript, in 2000 - nonetheless, this does create a three-year gap in Benny’s timeline. In The Dead Men Diaries, Benny mentions arriving at the Braxiatel Collection after having endured “fraught adventures” that include “Time travel, other universes, the destruction of everything I’d previously relied upon to define me” and Jason being lost... all of which seems to refer to her New Adventures tenure. It’s possible that Benny whittled away a year or three at Vremnya until construction of the Braxiatel Collection was complete - but it’s somewhat astonishing that she goes such a prolonged period with nothing particularly exciting happening to her.
[879] Benny: Resurrecting the Past. It’s possible that Braxiatel learned of the energy field near KS-159 after all the business concerning the Oracle of the Lost (Benny: Tears of the Oracle), and only then decided to make it the home of the Collection.
[880] “Ten years” before Benny: Beyond the Sea.
[881] Benny: The Judas Gift
[882] Benny: Secret Origins, Benny: Resurrecting the Past and Benny: Escaping the Future. Braxiatel says Buenos Aires is destroyed “in the late twenty-sixth century”, and Robyn says that it was “2598, or was it 2599?”
[883] Original Sin (p204).
[884] Two hundred years before Nocturne.
[885] The Stealers of Dreams
[886] From Benny: The Dead Men Diaries. The framing sequence says “it’s now 2600”, but the stories within predate Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript - which opens on New Year’s Eve - and so must occur in 2599.
[887] Benny: Glory Days. Death to the Daleks mentions the “Wonders of the Universe”, so this is a different convention.
[888] Benny: The Dead Men Diaries (p73).
[889] Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript. The new Joseph is presumably built using what remains of the omnitronic processor that the seventh Doctor recovered from Victor Farrison’s Joseph drone in The Dark Flame.
[890] Benny: The Dead Men Diaries: “The Door Into Bedlam”
[891] Benny: The Infernal Nexus, playing off a theory established in Benny: Walking to Babylon.
[892] Benny: Resurrecting the Past, Benny: Escaping the Future. Exactly when Braxiatel learns of Benny’s significance to the Deindum’s creation is unclear, but it motivates his actions and manipulations throughout much of the Big Finish Benny range.
Irving Braxiatel vs. Cardinal Braxiatel
Irving Braxiatel is one of Bernice Summerfield’s best friends and most invaluable allies throughout the New Adventures, but the Big Finish Benny range recasts him as someone far more ruthless and amoral - a manipulator who (even under the caveat of acting for a greater good) aggressively rewrites the personal histories of Benny and her associates, brings the Mim to the point of extinction, and goads Benny’s son Peter into savagely murdering Jason Kane.
In large measure, the difference in character owes to historical revision. Gallifrey Series 1 establishes that in Braxiatel’s original history, he became so horrified by the destruction of Minyos (Underworld) that he left Gallifrey and founded the Braxiatel Collection to preserve the universe’s great cultural treasures. Braxiatel’s history changes, however, when a renegade Time Lord goes into Gallifrey’s past and steals the timonic fusion device that obliterated Minyos, preventing the planet’s annihilation and (inadvertently) robbing Braxiatel of his motive to leave Gallifrey. Alterations to Gallifrey’s history are exceedingly rare - most of the tie-in ranges presume that safeguards created by Rassilon or his associates stop anyone from tampering with Gallifrey’s past, although this isn’t ever established on TV. Here, though, Gallifrey’s timeline undeniably changes.
The second version of Braxiatel - the one who stays on Gallifrey long enough to become a Cardinal (as first seen in Zagreus) - presumably pops into existence and overwrites his previous self the exact moment the fusion device is stolen. Crucially, it’s Cardinal Braxiatel and Romana (in Gallifrey: The Inquiry) who restore Gallifrey’s history by facilitating the device’s detonation - but as their existence is vital to the restoration of the timeline, they’re presumably insulated when Gallifrey’s history returns to normal.
Romana’s history remains largely the same, save that Cardinal Braxiatel (Gallifrey: Lies) served as her tutor. For Cardinal Braxiatel, the result is that he stays on Gallifrey long enough for events to force him to trap a small part of Pandora’s mind within his own. After he’s subsequently exiled from Gallifrey (in Gallifrey: Pandora), events seen in the New Adventures run much the same - he still founds the Collection, etc. Benny: The Wake dramatizes scenes from Theatre of War, Happy Endings and Benny: Tears of the Oracle, helping to confirm that the NAs still occur, word for word (or near enough), in Braxiatel’s revised history.
Whether the Pandora component directly warps Braxiatel’s personality - or whether it just enhances his innate greed and arrogance - is a subject of some debate. Either way, it’s surely not coincidence that the first instance of Braxiatel’s machinations being exposed, Benny: The Crystal of Cantus, has one of Braxiatel’s victims telling him, “The thing in your head... it’s still there,” presumably denoting the Pandora segment.
Odd as it might sound, the whole of Braxiatel’s involvement in non-Gallifreyan time - all of the New Adventures with him, and the entire history of the Collection - seem to occur, from Gallifrey’s perspective, between Gallifrey Series 2 and 3. While this seems to violate the unspoken idea that Time Lords meet in sequence, it’s not unprecedented (see The Apocalypse Element).
Finally, in Gallifrey: Mindbomb, Braxiatel returns to Gallifrey after the Collection is defunct and attempts to salvage something of Time Lord society before the oncoming Last Great Time War. Largely failing, he once again allies with Romana, is lost to the Time Vortex (Gallifrey: Disassembled), emerges into history just prior to Benny: Dragons’ Wrath, and has to spend years eluding his younger self before leaving a message for Benny in 2616 (Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day) that she should contact him.
[893] Benny: The End of the World and the framing sequence to Benny: A Life of Surprises (which takes place in Benny’s future, and presumably doesn’t occur after Braxiatel rewrites her history). Potential versions of Keith Summerfield-Kane appeared in Return of the Living Dad and Benny: A Life of Surprises: “Might”; he was 18 months in the former, and killed as an adult in the latter. In Benny: The Summer of Love, Benny claims to know that she and Jason are fated to birth Keith and Rebecca, but that things aren’t turning out as they
should. Fan-commentators sometimes suggest that Braxiatel changed Benny’s history to facilitate Peter’s birth as a sort of oddity - the product of a human-Killoran mating - but there’s little evidence to support this. An enigmatic man named “Kane” appears in Burning Heart, and is alluded to as being one of Benny and Jason’s descendants (or possibly not, after Braxiatel’s revisions to Benny and Jason’s histories).
[894] Benny: The End of the World. The change to Keri’s background explains why she participates in the Benny audios, having first appeared in Legacy.
[895] Benny: Escaping the Future. Van Statten was said to have cured the common cold in Dalek, and a vaccine exists at the time of Fear Itself (PDA). The secret was lost in the Tenth Segment of Time, according to The Ark.
[896] Benny: Epoch: Private Enemy No. 1
[897] Dating Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript (Benny BF novel #1) - The story opens on New Year’s Eve; Benny declares that it’s “January the first” (p40) while tumbling into bed at three in the morning. Benny’s diary cites the end date of the adventure as on or about “January 6th” (p125), and also confirms the year as 2600.
[898] Dating Benny: The Secret of Cassandra (Benny audio #2.1) - The audio takes place between Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript and Benny: The Squire’s Crystal. Chosan is named in Benny: The Poison Seas.
[899] Benny: The Poison Seas
[900] Dating Benny: The Squire’s Crystal (Benny BF novel #3) - The month is given, which means that The Squire’s Crystal takes place before Benny: The Gods of the Underworld, even though it was published afterwards.
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