[1499] The Ark in Space. As the colonists are scheduled to revive after “five thousand years” [c.11,000 AD], the Wirrn Queen must arrive on Nerva before that time.
Andromeda
Andromeda is mentioned a number of times in Doctor Who, sometimes as a reference to the constellation, other times as the galaxy of the same name. According to the TARDIS Information File entry that the Master fakes in Castrovalva, Castrovalva itself is a planet in the Phylox series in Andromeda. There is some evidence that Zanak (The Pirate Planet) raided worlds there, as the ground is littered with Andromedan bloodstones. In The Daleks’ Master Plan, an intergalactic conference was held in Andromeda. In The Ark in Space, we learn that Star Pioneers from Earth reached Andromeda and discovered that it was infested with the Wirrn. The two races fought each other for a thousand years, until humanity succeeded in destroying the Wirrn’s breeding grounds. Mankind went on to colonise the galaxy, and by the time of The Mysterious Planet, the civilisation was established on planets such as Sabalom Glitz’s homeworld, Salostopus. At that time, Andromedans capable of building advanced robots and harnessing black light stole Matrix secrets and fled the wrath of the Time Lords. The Doctor considers visiting “the constellation of Andromeda” in Timelash. The Doctor took the mer-children to a water planet in the Andromeda galaxy at the end of Evolution. According to Trix in The Gallifrey Chronicles, the currency in Andromeda is the Andromedan Euro, although Dragonfire, Legacy and Business Unusual all agree it is the grotzi in Glitz’s time.
The threat in Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space comes from Andromeda in the far future. “A lot of Andromedan planets are full of Migrators”, large amoeba like creatures protected by external antibodies, according to the Doctor in the short story “Danger Down Below” (Doctor Who Annual 1983), although they are usually only found on otherwise uninhabited worlds. Shining Darkness depicts a highly advanced Andromedan galactic civilisation where organic and machine live exists together in relative harmony.
[1500] The Sontaran Experiment
[1501] Dating Patient Zero (BF #124) - The story takes place in a region of space-time so remote, it causes a glitch or two in the TARDIS’ translation system. The only tangible dating clue is that the Daleks seen here hail from the distant future (their time controller claims, almost wistfully, that they’ve travelled “so far back in time”) and have a warfleet at their disposal. The Amethyst station-manager, Fratalin, hasn’t heard of the Daleks - possibly indicating that Patient Zero takes place in an era free of Dalek interference, or possibly just that Amethyst is so remotely located, not even the Daleks have visited its galaxy before now. The Daleks don’t know about the Viyrans, but given the Viyrans’ habit of erasing the short-term memories of any being they encounter, this perhaps isn’t surprising. It’s unclear if Etheron, a very minor character and commander of the Interstar Cargo Carrier Blaze, has any connection to humanity or not. The back cover copy says “the Doctor must travel back in time, beyond all known civilisations”, suggesting this is the very deep past.
However, To the Death (set circa 2190, and also written by Nicholas Briggs) so repeatedly says that Patient Zero occurs in the future, it has to be taken as correct. The Doctor says that Amethyst station was destroyed “relative to when we are now? Thousands of years in the future...”, that the Dalek Time Controller “survived in the future and somehow travelled back”, that he intends to rectify things by going forward in time to destroy Amethyst more conclusively this time, and so forth. The Monk, echoing the Daleks’ claims, also says that the Dalek Time Controller was injured aboard Amethyst station “in the future”. So, an arbitrary sum of five thousand years has been added to To The Death to derive a year for Patient Zero.
Patient Zero marks the genesis of Big Finish’s “Virus Strand” story arc - which formally encompasses “Urgent Calls”, “Urban Myths”, “The Vanity Box” and Mission of the Viyrans. The viruses that appear in The Death Collectors and Forty-Five: “Order of Simplicity” might also stem from Amethyst.
It’s implied that the invisible Mila stowed away aboard the TARDIS during The Chase. She impersonates Charley in Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet.
[1502] Blue Forgotten Planet
[1503] To the Death
[1504] Real Time. No date given. The CyberController in this era is an alternate history version of Evelyn Smythe.
[1505] “The Flood”. No date is given, but the eighth Doctor declares the Cybermen to be the most advanced he’s ever seen. This places the story after Real Time and The Reaping - two stories which also feature time-travelling Cybermen from the unspecified far future.
[1506] The Reaping. Presumably this occurs after Real Time, but this date is otherwise arbitrary.
[1507] Dating The Time Vampire (BF CC #4.10) - The year is given. The Doctor and Joshua’s encounter with the Z’nai was largely detailed in The Catalyst, but is actually depicted here. Mention is made of “the Naxian recession”, which could refer to the aliens from the Iris Wildthyme audios.
[1508] The Catalyst
[1509] Dating The Time Vampire (BF CC #4.10) - It’s fifty years after the “Great Plague” that Joshua Douglas unleashed against the Z’nai.
[1510] The Quantum Archangel
[1511] The Quantum Archangel. No date is given, but it’s before the Federation splits.
[1512] Dating The Skull of Sobek (BF BBC7 #2.4) - It’s said that the “culture” of Sobek extends back ten thousand years on various worlds, and it cannot be coincidence - although it curiously isn’t mentioned - that the ancient Egyptians worshipped a crocodile-headed god of the same name. This must be yet another example of extra-terrestrials influencing Earth civilisation (as with Death to the Daleks, etc.). In real life, Sobek is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest of which date to 2400-2300 BC. The dating of The Skull of Sobek to 7500 AD - i.e. about ten thousand years later - is somewhat arbitrary, but represents the latest that the adventure can feasibly occur. Conditions on Indigo 3 do, though, somewhat match with the “new dark age” of this era, as described in The Crystal Bucephalus.
[1513] Dating Dalek Empire II: Dalek War (no individual episode titles) - The blurb to Dalek Empire II episode four says that it’s “two thousand years” after the Great Catastrophe. This number is repeated - give or take a bit of phrasing - throughout Dalek Empire III.
[1514] “Twenty years” before Dalek Empire III.
[1515] “Years” before Dalek Empire III.
[1516] Dating Dalek Empire III (The Exterminators, episode one; The Healers, episode two; The Survivors, episode three; The Demons, episode four; The Warriors, episode five; The Future, episode six) - The mini-series takes place “twenty years” after Tarkov sets out from Velyshaa at the end of Dalek Empire II, and ends on something of a cliffhanger, with humanity in this region of space presumably gearing up to fight the resurgent Dalek threat.
[1517] “Five thousand years” after Prisoner of the Daleks.
[1518] “Just over one hundred fifty years” before the main events of “A Fairytale Life”. A holorecording showing the virus being released is timecoded “19-04-7711”.
[1519] Dating “A Fairytale Life” (IDW DW mini-series #3) - The Doctor is aiming for “the year 7704”, but has to concede it’s “Ah. Not the seventy-eighth century. More like the seventy-ninth ... ish.” Later, we learn the virus was released in 7711, “just over one hundred fifty years ago”.
[1520] Dating The Catalyst, Empathy Games and The Time Vampire (BF CC #2.4, 3.4, 4.10) - Leela says that it’s “centuries” after the Z’nai Empire ended, owing to the plague that Joshua Douglas released. The notion that Leela enjoyed an extended lifespan owing to her proximity to the Time Lords’ biofields, and that she’d rapidly age without them, was introduced in Gallifrey: Spirit.
[1521] Dating The Judgement of Isskar (BF #117) - It’s “sixteen thousand years” since the first part of the story. The Black Guardian rescues the Doctor and Amy at the start of The Destroyer of Delights.
[1
522] The Reaping, The Gathering.
[1523] The background of The Darksmith Legacy series, as given in The Graves of Mordane, The Colour of Darkness and The Planet of Oblivion. The Darksmiths are variously said to have kept the Krashoks waiting for the Eternity Crystal “for millennia” (The Art of War, p13) and (ungrammatically) for “a millennia” (p18). The Darksmiths seem to originate from circa 2012, and so must have travelled into the future more than once to meet up with the Krashoks.
[1524] The Mazuma Era
A number of stories from the mid-80s DWM strip were set in the same colourful, cosmopolitan far future period. It might be termed the Mazuma Era, after the galactic currency which seems to preoccupy a number of the characters. The first time we’re given a date for the story is in Death’s Head #8 - a Doctor Who crossover issue of the Marvel UK comic - which sees the Doctor dropping off the cyborg Death’s Head in the year 8162.
While Dogbolter’s holdings include Venus, Mars and Jupiter, no mention is ever made of Earth - which the TV show tells us ought to be uninhabited at this time. The solar flares clearly don’t affect the other planets of the solar system.
[1525] Dating “Free-Fall Warriors” (DWM #56-57) - The story sees the fourth Doctor meeting Dr Asimoff for the first time.
[1526] Dating “The Moderator” (DWM #84, #86-87) - The Free-Fall Warriors are mentioned.
[1527] Dating “The Shape Shifter” (DWM #88-89) - This story happens soon after “The Moderator” from the Doctor’s point of view, as he’s looking to avenge Gus’ death. Dogbolter is somehow aware that the Doctor has regenerated, but the wanted poster has images of both the fifth and sixth Doctors.
[1528] Dating “Voyager” (DWM #90-94) - It’s a “few weeks” since the end of “The Shape Shifter”.
[1529] Dating “Polly the Glot” (DWM #95-97) - It’s after “Voyager”, but there’s no indication of how much time has passed.
[1530] Dating “Once Upon a Time Lord...” (DWM #98-99) - The story follows on from “Polly the Glot”.
[1531] Dating The Maltese Penguin (BF #33 1/2) - No date is given, but this is clearly Frobisher’s native time zone.
[1532] “The Crossroads of Time”
[1533] Dating “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” (DWM #329) - This is an unspecified amount of years after Frobisher has returned to his native time.
[1534] Before The Coming of the Terraphiles, with Barsoom being Mars. Dogbolter profited from the war on Phobos, so it still existed at that point.
[1535] Dating Turn Left (X4.11) - No date is given on screen or in the script. Shan Shen appears to be a human colony. The Time Traveller’s Almanac, a chronology of the Doctor Who universe published by BBC Books, states that the story is set in the eighty-fifth century, without explanation. SJA: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? suggests that the Trickster’s Brigade is affiliated with the Trickster, a recurring villain in The Sarah Jane Adventures. A number of sources, such as the BBC website, refer to the beetle as a Time Beetle, but it’s not called that on screen.
[1536] The Stolen Earth
[1537] The background to The Crystal Bucephalus. According to Dalek Empire II, there is a Galactic Union by 7500.
[1538] Earth’s colony worlds start burying their dead on Mordane “four hundred years” before The Graves of Mordane. Contrary to the TARDIS’ estimate, the young woman Catz - who has studied Mordane in detail, but is perhaps working from faulty records - says that Mordane serviced only a dozen races from more than thirty different worlds.
[1539] “A hundred and fifty years” before The Planet of Oblivion.
[1540] The Graves of Mordane, The Depths of Despair, The Dust of Ages, The Vampire of Paris. It’s never established that Brother Varlos has time travel capabilities, but the Darksmiths have a conglomeration of time technology by The Dust of Ages, so he could have nicked some bits of it beforehand.
[1541] In The Graves of Mordane, it’s said that the Darksmiths have been waiting “centuries”/“hundreds of years” since Brother Varlos absconded with the Eternity Crystal, that Varlos’ machine has been on Mordane for “hundreds of years” (p91), and that the dead have been walking there every night “for centuries” (p107). And yet, it’s twice said that the quarantine on Mordane has only been in operation for “eighty years” (p37, 82). Given that up to a thousand funerals a day were previously held on Mordane (p92), it doesn’t seem remotely credible that the Galactic Union failed to notice - or decided to ignore - that the dead were rising every night on Mordane for decades if not longer. The Darksmiths confirm (p96) that the Varlos’ test is what prompted the Mordane quarantine, making it unlikely that the machine lay dormant for centuries and flared to life for no apparent reason.
[1542] Dating The Graves of Mordane, The Depths of Despair and The Planet of Oblivion (DL #2, 4, 7) - The Graves of Mordane occurs when quite a few of humanity’s colony planets have been sending their dead to Mordane for “over four hundred years” (p37), and a “Galactic Union” (p82) passes a “galactic law” (p37) that quarantines Mordane. If the “Galactic Union” is the same “Union” mentioned in The Crystal Bucephalus, then The Graves of Mordane could occur more-or-less anywhere in the 8000s to 12000s.
The participants in The Depths of Despair are named as human (p96); The Planet of Oblivion does the same at least three times (pgs. 89, 90, 94), so both of these stories occur in humanity’s future, quite possibly in the same time zone that Brother Varlos conducted his experiments on Mordane.
[1543] Their adventures continue in The Vampire of Paris and The Game of Death.
[1544] The story continues in The Pictures of Emptiness and The Art of War.
[1545] Pyramids of Mars
[1546] Dating Dreamtime (BF #67) - Some “thousands of years” have passed since the Uluru departed into space. Simon Forward says it’s possible that as much as ten thousand years have elapsed. This date is arbitrary.
[1547] Dating The Children of Seth (BF LS #3.3) - Date unknown, although the participants are identified as human. It’s tempting to think that the android technology seen here - and the fear of it - dates back to Sharez Jek’s android designs in The Caves of Androzani (which also takes place in Sirius), but no connection between the two is made. This dating is ultimately a guess, based upon no mention of Earth being made, and the empire’s wealth and prosperity being in excess of that seen in The Caves of Androzani.
[1548] The Crystal Bucephalus
[1549] Dating The Scarlet Empress (EDA #15) - The novel itself gives no dating clues. The word “human” is continually used, although it’s frequently unclear if this means Earth-born humans or just “humanoid”. Mention is finally made, however, of a “colony of human beings” on a private moon of a vizier, which would seem to indicate this is in humanity’s future.
The short story “Femme Fatale” (More Short Trips, 1999), also by Paul Magrs, has the Doctor and Sam encountering Iris after events in The Scarlet Empress. “Femme Fatale” occurs in 1968 (concurrent with the radical feminist Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol), and Iris mentions to Sam that events on Hyspero took place “eight thousand years” ago. It’s a little unclear whether she means eight thousand years in the past or the future - she might mean the former, but the presence of Draconians, Ice Warriors and Spiridons (who presumably start space-travelling at some point after Planet of the Daleks) on Hyspero seems to indicate the latter. Portions of “Femme Fatale” are obviously apocryphal (rendering “the Doctor and Mrs Jones” as agents of the British government, and eventually waking up on a Prisoner-style island), but the dating reference occurs in a section that is as canonical as one can get in a story such as this.
[1550] The Crystal Bucephalus
[1551] Killing Ground. The ArcHivists first appeared in the reference book Cybermen.
[1552] The Quantum Archangel
[1553] Dating The Crystal Bucephalus (MA #4) - The Doctor claims they are “six or seven centuries into the tenth millennium” (p27), but also says that it is the “108th century” (p40, whi
ch is in the eleventh millennium). The latter date is correct - elsewhere we learn that “10,663” was in the recent past (p69). Although the novel doesn’t specify the exact date, author Craig Hinton assumed that it was set in the year 10,764 and that date has been adopted here.
[1554] Combining accounts given in The Crystal Bucephalus and Synthespians™, both novels by Craig Hinton. Synthespians™ claims that Chen’s empire is finished before the Union is formed, and yet someone else claiming descent from Mavic Chen (evidently not the beheaded emperor) is either the leader of the Junta (which follows on from the Union) or has some form of authority as mankind seeks out its lost colonies (p273).
[1555] Dating Synthespians™ (PDA #67) - The events of The Crystal Bucephalus were “several centuries” ago.
[1556] Synthespians™
[1557] The Crystal Bucephalus
[1558] The Ark in Space. Vira notes that scientists had calculated it would be “five thousand years before the biosphere was viable” on Earth after the solar flares. In The Sontaran Experiment, we learn that humanity has spread across the galaxy, and that Earth has been habitable for “thousands of years” but has remained abandoned.
[1559] Before “Final Sacrifice”. There’s some confusion in the story about the time that elapses during the civil war, which is variously given as “tens of thousands of years”, “ten thousand years”, “over ten thousand years” and simply “millennia” before.
[1560] The Also People (p247).
[1561] According to the Doctor in The End of the World. This would seem to fall at the time Earth was thought to be abandoned by humanity following the solar flares. Perhaps the New Roman Empire wasn’t based on Earth, or there was a shortlived resettlement of the planet.
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