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[1068] “A thousand years” before The Blue Angel, according to Iris: Enter Wildthyme.
[1069] “Some” Mendeb years before Independence Day.
[1070] Original Sin (p127).
[1071] Dating Independence Day (PDA #36) - It’s “four hundred years” after the Galactic Wars (p22), which would place it in the mid-thirtieth century.
[1072] Dating Master (BF #49) - Perfugium is a colony, part of a human empire ruled by an Empress, where Adjudicators enforce the law; so the story is set during the Earth Empire period.
[1073] According to Andy Lane’s discussion document about Roz and Cwej, and confirmed in Head Games (p205). The month and day is given in The Room with No Doors (p20).
[1074] Original Sin (p32, p219).
[1075] Benny: Oblivion
[1076] This takes the Doctor’s remark to the Black Dalek in Remembrance of the Daleks that the Daleks are “a thousand years” from home literally, although it’s fairly clear the statement is rhetorical.
[1077] Dating The Space Museum (2.7) - There’s no date given in the story itself. However, it must fall somewhere before the collapse of the Morok Empire in Roz’s time (mentioned in The Death of Art), and after the Moroks capture a “banded” Dalek (ie: one with the “bands” seen in The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, not the “slatted” ones seen in all subsequent appearances). This date is arbitrary.
[1078] The Death of Art
[1079] Within living memory of “Children of the Revolution”, but presumably before The Evil of the Daleks.
[1080] Dating The Evil of the Daleks (4.9) - There is no date given for the Skaro sequences in the scripts. About Time and Timelink note that Maxtible says he and Victoria have undertaken a “journey through space” to get from Victorian England to Skaro, possibly indicating that the Skaro sequences are set in 1866. However, Waterfield calls the device used to get to Skaro a “time machine” and the story is based around the idea that humans have always beaten the Daleks in the long run - something that’s not yet the case in the nineteenth century. The Doctor murmurs that this is “the final end” of the Daleks, and some fans have taken this statement at face value when they come to date the story. However, a line cut from the camera script of Day of the Daleks stated that the Daleks survived the civil war and that the human-ised Daleks were defeated. The surviving telesnaps are indeterminate - at the very end of the story, a Dalek has a bit of a lifeglow, but that could just be part and parcel of the carnage around it, not an indicator from the production team that perhaps the Daleks aren’t entirely finished after all.
The Doctor knows his way into and around the Dalek city. The only previous time we’ve seen him on Skaro was in The Daleks, and the city is destroyed here - clearly indicating that The Daleks is set before The Evil of the Daleks. In Mission to the Unknown, Cory states that the Daleks have not been active in Earth’s galaxy “for a thousand years” (so, from 3000-4000), but also says that they’ve conquered one hundred and ten planets elsewhere “in the last five hundred years”, so The Evil of the Daleks is apparently not set between 3000 and 4000. As the Doctor sees the Daleks active in the year 4000, logically he wouldn’t think this was “the final end” of the Daleks unless he thought it was set after that date.
Taking what we’re told at face value, this story has to be set before the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks. If Skaro wasn’t really destroyed, as War of the Daleks states - and Doctor Who - The Movie and the new series imply - that needn’t be a problem. However, Destiny of the Daleks seems to be set in the ruins of the Dalek city (built over the Kaled Bunker seen in Genesis of the Daleks). Again, the Doctor knows his way around. The Evil of the Daleks would seem to be set before Destiny of the Daleks (and so, therefore, the rest of the Davros Era, including Remembrance of the Daleks).
The Terrestrial Index set The Evil of the Daleks “a century or so” after The Daleks’ Master Plan. John Peel and Terry Nation “agreed that The Evil of the Daleks was the final story” (The Frame #7), but did so before Remembrance of the Daleks was written. Peel’s novelisation of The Evil of the Daleks is set around the year 5000. “A History of the Daleks” in DWM #77 claimed that The Evil of the Daleks is set around “7500 AD”. Timelink suggests “4066”. About Time equivocates, but says it’s after The Daleks’ Master Plan.
In Matrix #45, Mark Jones suggested that the Hand of Omega is sent into Davros’ future, thousands of years after Dalek History ends.
We suggest that the civil war in The Evil of the Daleks is not the “final end” of the Daleks, but it does represent a severe defeat, one that removes them from the Milky Way for five hundred years (as referred to in Mission to the Unknown). The Doctor might be referring to the “final end” of the Dalek city, the Daleks’ presence on Skaro, or the reign of the Dalek Emperor. Or he may just be optimistic (he also thinks he’s finally wiped out the Daleks in The Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, Dalek and The Parting of the Ways, after all).
[1081] Dating “Bringer of Darkness” (DWM Summer Special 1993) - It’s shortly after The Evil of the Daleks.
[1082] “Children of the Revolution”
[1083] Carnival of Monsters, “a thousand years” after Jo’s time.
[1084] So Vile a Sin (p10, p182).
[1085] The Also People (p101).
[1086] Eternity Weeps
[1087] Happy Endings
[1088] Dating Original Sin (NA #39) - The Doctor tells us that this is the “thirtieth century” (p23). Although we are told at one point that “2955” was “four years” ago (p86), the year appears to be 2975 - this ties in with the birthdates established for Cwej and Forrester in Andy Lane’s discussion document, and the fact that Cwej’s father graduated “seventy years” before, in “oh-five”.
[1089] The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (p17).
[1090] So Vile a Sin, with Roz declared dead “six” years beforehand. The Decalog 4 anthology covers the history of the Forrester family; Thandiwe appears in the short story “Dependence Day”.
[1091] Hope
[1092] Dating So Vile a Sin (NA #56) - The date is given (p25).
[1093] So Vile a Sin (p33). An elephant is seen in the far future in The Ark. Leabie surely misspeaks in claiming that elephants have been “extinct for almost two millennia”.
[1094] Return of the Krotons
[1095] Terror of the Vervoids
[1096] Instruments of Darkness
[1097] Dating Terror of the Vervoids (23.3) - The Doctor tells the court that this is “Earth year 2986”. A monitor readout suggests it is “April 16”.
[1098] The Mutants
[1099] Frontier in Space
[1100] Burning Heart, The Ultimate Treasure.
[1101] Genocide (p274-275).
[1102] Dating “Children of the Revolution” (DWM #312-317) - Kyrol was colonised “a few centuries in the future” according to Izzy, and this is “a few short decades” after The Evil of the Daleks according to Alpha.
[1103] Dating The Mutants (9.4) - The Doctor tells Jo that they have been sent to “the thirtieth century”. The story must take place many years after Original Sin, where events are set into motion that will eventually mean the Empire’s collapse. The Programme Guide set the story slightly later (“c.3100”), Timelink in 2971, and About Time in “3000-ish”.
[1104] Dating The Fall of Yquatine (EDA #32) - The date is given (p43, p150).
[1105] Dating Superior Beings (PDA #43) - The year is given (p108).
[1106] Three hundred years before The Beast Below. The Doctor cites this migration as owing to Earth being roasted by solar flares, but see the dating notes on this story for why that’s probably not the case.
[1107] Hope
[1108] In Mission to the Unknown, set in the year 4000, Lowery confidently says, ‘“The Daleks invaded Earth a thousand years ago,” and Marc Cory replies, “That’s right.” Even allowing for figures of speech, this surely can’t refer to The Dalek Invasion of Earth, set around 2157.
[1110] The Dark Path
[1111] Night of the Humans
[1112] The Eye of the Jungle
[1113] Iris: Enter Wildthyme. Iris’ companion Jenny muses (p169), “We’re leaving our system and our millennium”, so it’s the third millennium if not later.
[1114] The Daleks’ Master Plan
[1115] Placebo Effect
[1116] Hope
[1117] “A thousand years” before The Book of the Still.
[1118] “A few years” before Festival of Death.
[1119] Dating The Space Age (EDA #34) - The year is given (p216). The people there think it is 2019.
[1120] Dating Festival of Death (PDA #35) - The year is given (pgs 115, 116, 194).
[1121] Flip-Flop
[1122] Vanderdeken’s Children
[1123] There are some distinct continuity problems raised by the Silurian leader Eldane’s voiceover at the end of Cold Blood. Eldane says “now as my people awaken from their thousand year sleep, ready to rise to the surface...”, so they explicitly haven’t emerged yet, meaning it’s a little early to automatically see this as a triumph for interspecies co-operation. It’s possible that Eldane (and Nasreen and Tom) woke early, to prepare the way and to double-check that the conditions were agreeable to human-Silurian co-habitation. The New Adventures established (in books such as Eternity Weeps) that other Silurians emerged in the twenty-first century and peacefully co-existed with mankind until at least the time of Original Sin (shortly before Eldane’s group emerges)... but it’s also established in both the books and the TV series (particularly in The Mutants, and further detailed in Original Sin) that the thirty-first century in the Doctor Who universe is that of the overpolluted and corrupt Earth Empire - not exactly the best time for the Doctor to arrange for Eldane’s group to awaken from stasis. The only real alternative makes even less sense, as it entails Earth in this era having been sterilised by solar flares (see the dating notes on The Beast Below). Finally, it’s also unclear how Eldane knows of “the far greater losses yet to come” for the Doctor (in Series 5), if he’s been asleep for so long.
[1124] Dating The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (MA #12) - The TARDIS crew discover a spaceship built in “2976” (p17), which leads the Doctor to suggest this is the “end of the thirtieth century” (p33, p48). We learn that the colony was founded in 2145 (p203), eight hundred forty-six (Avalonian?) years ago (p33), making it the year 2991. Later, though, we learn that the “city riots” seen in Original Sin were “fifty years ago” (p156), so it must be nearer 3025.
[1125] Dating Kinda (19.3) - An arbitrary date. The colonists have recognisably English names, so it seems reasonable to assume that they are from Earth. On screen they only refer to a “homeworld”, which Todd says is overcrowded. Sanders’ attitude perhaps suggests an early colonial period, and the story would seem to be set after Colony in Space, in which colonists are seen as “eccentric”. The colonists are from Earth in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation, where the Doctor suggests they are from the time of the “Empire”. Earth’s Empire is in decline in this era, but while it would be preferable to date Kinda to the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth centuries, “overcrowded” certainly describes Earth’s state of affairs in The Mutants (set circa 2990). It’s also plausible that the Empire would still be assessing new planets for colonisation and resource exploitation, even as it exhausts or loses control of long-standing ones. Previous versions of Ahistory dated Kinda as “? 2782”, but the new placement of Snakedance in this edition necessitates pushing that date forward some, in accordance with the Mara being banished to the dark places of the inside circa 2926.
The TARDIS Logs set Kinda in the “25th Century”. Timelink set it in 1981, reasoning that Deva Loka isn’t an Earth colony.
[1126] “A thousand years” before The Bride of Peladon.
[1127] “The Love Invasion”
[1128] Dating Flip-Flop (BF #46) - The dates are given.
[1129] “Eighteen years” before The Ribos Operation.
[1130] Dating The Ultimate Treasure (PDA #3) - Rovan Cartovall disappeared in 1936 BC, which was “five thousand years ago” (p37).
[1131] Dating Palace of the Red Sun (PDA #51) - The journalist Dexel Dynes appeared in The Ultimate Treasure and remembers Peri from that story, which he describes as a “few years” ago (p39).
[1132] Dating The Ribos Operation (16.1) - A date is not given on screen. While this date is arbitrary, Ribos is close to the Magellanic Clouds, suggesting that humans have developed at least some level of intergalactic travel. Lofficier placed the story in “the late twenty-sixth century”, apparently confusing the Cyrrhenic Alliance with the force established to fight the Cybermen in Earthshock. Timelink says 3010. About Time couldn’t quite decide, but thought that “some time in the 5000s when humanity is once again expanding away from Earth” seemed the most likely.
[1133] Dating “Spider’s Shadow” (BF #109b) - The participants seem human, and the action presumably takes place on one of Earth’s colony worlds in the future. Also, the Doctor says he’s got signed copies of half the books in the princess’ library - not a guarantee that the books were written by humanity, but it seems likely. Proton-knives are mentioned, and there’s an aristocracy, but otherwise the details are so vague that this placement is a shot in the dark.
[1134] Managra
[1135] Dating Superior Beings (PDA #43) - It’s “over five hundred years” after 2594 (p108).
[1136] Peri and the Piscon Paradox
[1137] The English Way of Death
[1138] Decades before I.D.
[1139] Dating Warmonger (PDA #53) - The story is a prequel to The Brain of Morbius, set when Solon was a young, renowned surgeon.
[1140] Legacy, expanding on The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon. Warmonger sees a huge Alliance between many alien races, and talk of a United Planets Organisation being formed.
[1141] Timewyrm: Genesys (p217).
[1142] Dating The Brain of Morbius (13.5) - The Doctor informs Sarah Jane that they are “considerably after” her time. If the Mutt at the beginning of the story originated on Solos, that might affect story dating. The TARDIS Logs suggested “3047”, Apocrypha gave a date of “6246 AD”. The Terrestrial Index supposed that the “Morbius Crisis” takes place around “10,000 AD”. The original version of this chronology set the story around the time of Mindwarp. Timelink says “2973”, and Warmonger - the prequel to the story - seems roughly to concur. About Time speculated that if the space pilot was a Mutt from The Mutants, and given that the inhabitants of Solos underwent that transformation every two thousand years, “The 4900s would fit.”
[1143] Dating Vanderdeken’s Children (EDA #14) - The year is given (p3). The Galactic Federation exists, although neither Emindar nor Nimos are members.
[1144] Dating I.D. (BF #94) - It’s the “thirty-second century” according to the back cover blurb and the Doctor, who makes his dating solely on the presence of organic digital transfer - suggesting that the technology fell into disuse in centuries to come.
[1145] Burning Heart. This happened when Mora Valdez, who is 21 (p15), was “five years old”.
[1146] Dating The Beautiful People (BF CC #1.4) - The back cover specifies that the story takes place in the “thirty-second century”. Morestrans appeared in Planet of Evil. A Tythonian was the titular Creature from the Pit.
[1147] Dating Burning Heart (MA #30) - The year is given (p20).
[1148] Lucifer Rising. An excommunicated Knight of Oberon, Orcini, appears in Revelation of the Daleks. The suggestion that the order was based on the moon of Uranus was first postulated in the Virgin edition of this book, and confirmed in GodEngine.
[1149] “Thirty generations” before Bang-Bang-A-Boom!.
[1150] Dating Death Riders (BBC children’s 2-in-1 #1) - The Doctor says that according to the TARDIS instruments, it’s “the thirty-third century” (p16).
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bsp; [1151] Spiral Scratch
[1152] Dating Managra (MA #14) - The Doctor sets the co-ordinates for “Shalonar - AD 3278”, and the TARDIS lands in the same timezone, but the wrong location (p26). Later, Byron states that he was created “in the middle of the thirty-third century” (p113).
[1153] Dating Real Time (BF BBCi #1) - It is “millennia” since the creation of the Cybermen, who are thought to be extinct. The story is set after Sword of Orion. The online notes name the planet as Chronos.
[1154] Dating The Beast Below (X5.2) - At time of writing, The Beast Below is, without a doubt, the New Who episode that’s trickiest to place on a timeline.
We can calculate the date. Amy is said in dialogue to be “1306” - as she’s seven in 1996 (Flesh and Stone), that means it’s now 3295. However, the screen Amy looks at actually says “1308”, which seems like a production error, possibly caused by confusion over the extra two years the Doctor keeps Amy waiting right at the end of The Eleventh Hour. If the screen’s right, it’s now 3297. The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011 similarly derived a dating of 3297 by favouring the screen and number-crunching Amy’s birth year of 1989 with 1308.
Consistent with this, the Doctor dates the solar flares to “the twenty-ninth century”, and Liz X says her mask is “nearer three hundred” years old than the Doctor’s estimate of two hundred. As the mask was custom made so Liz could explore the mysteries of Starship UK incognito, the ship has been in flight at least three hundred years, probably four hundred (it would mean the mask was made around 2995, which is nearly a hundred years after the end of the twenty-ninth century). Those are the dates given in the story, and they’re clear and consistent.
Where this dating scheme runs aground is that while Earth is completely abandoned a number of times (see The Abandonment of Earth sidebar), it seems implicit that these solar flares are meant to be the same ones that cause Nerva Beacon to be converted into an Ark (as seen in The Ark in Space/The Sontaran Experiment). “The Keep” dates this to the fifty-first century, a time period that was already busy enough before the new series made it the native time of both Jack Harkness and River Song (neither of whom, though, have said much about Earth itself in their era). See the dating notes on Revenge of the Cybermen for where the “twenty-ninth century” date for the solar flares comes from, and The Solar Flares sidebar for why this chronology places them around 6000AD. The issue is that there are a number of classic Doctor Who stories (The Mutants, Terror of the Vervoids, etc.) definitely set in a thirtieth century where Earth isn’t just populated, it’s overpopulated, and there are even more set afterwards (say, The Daleks’ Master Plan, set in 4000) where Earth has a highly functional/non-solar-flare-roasted society. There’s no real wriggle room for any of this in The Beast Below itself - according to the Doctor, the solar flares have already happened, and so “the entire human race”, not just some Britons, “packed its bags”.