Timelink offers the theory that as Zentos refers to “the Fifty-Seventh Segment of Earth life” and the Commander says “The Earth also is dying, we have left it for the last time”, that Earth has been “left” before, and each Segment ends with the abandonment of Earth. It’s neat and, as noted elsewhere in this book, Earth is certainly totally evacuated more than once. However, Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways have the Daleks active after the first abandonment of Earth, and, if the Commander is right, they were only part of the history of the First Segment.
[1626] The Parting of the Ways. The Controller says the Daleks have been there for “hundreds and hundreds of years”, the Doctor says “generations”, and the Emperor Dalek says “centuries passed”.
[1627] Dating “War of the Words” (DWM #51) - The story is set after the twentieth century, because parliamentary records from that period are stored here. The head librarian robot has just had his two thousand year service, suggesting the facility has been around for millennia. Beyond that, no date is specified, so this is completely arbitrary.
[1628] Dating Home Truths (BF CC #3.5) - It’s “a thousand years” before the linking sequences of Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System.
[1629] The background to DWM’s Crimson Hand storyarc, given in “Mortal Beloved”, “The Age of Ice”, “The Crimson Hand” and “Hotel Historia”. Majenta’s “relative age” is given as “eighty-one Earth years” in “The Age of Ice” (which may or may not include the time she’s spent TARDIS-travelling), so under the dating scheme in this chronology, she would have been born circa 199,919.
Majenta Pryce
The Crimson Hand storyarc running through the Doctor Who Magazine comic (DWM #394, 400-420) is remarkably circumspect when it comes to identifying the home era of the super-criminal Majenta Pryce, a companion of the tenth Doctor. We know that Majenta can travel in time, as she’s operating a time-travel holiday hotel when the Doctor first meets her (in the early twenty-first century, “Hotel Historia”). We also know that the Intersol agents who incarcerate her in the future at Thinktwice prison (“Thinktwice”) have time-travel capabilities.
Does Majenta originate from the modern day or the future, though? Is the time travel tech in play indicative of her society? Does the Crimson Hand also have time technology? We’re never told within the story itself - just as it’s not expressly said whether or not the storyarc’s finale (“The Crimson Hand”, DWM #416-420) takes place in the present or the future. The Intersol agents “time-lock” the TARDIS to prevent it escaping when the story begins, but it’s not stated if the Intersol ship then time-jumps before Majenta gets free, rejoins the Crimson Hand and conquers a vast sector of space to establish the Crimson Age. Admittedly, if the Crimson Age was contemporary, it would be nothing short of miraculous that the Hand’s sweeping and tyrannical empire seems far removed from Earth and in no way affects it, but that’s the best evidence that can be cited for Majenta and the Hand being future-based.
Author Dan McDaid had privately decided that Majenta, the Crimson Hand, the Thinktwice prison and Intersol all originated from the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire - his intention being that the grubbiness of the Thinktwice facility nicely emulated the moral and social decay seen in The Long Game. “Intersol”, McDaid commented over email, “have acquired time travel from somewhere (probably misappropriated from a Time Agent), so they’re able to pursue their targets across time and space.” He added, “[The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire] is also Majenta’s ‘home’ era... but you don’t have to take any of this as gospel, and feel free to monkey about with it if you need to.”
With the actual story evidence being so vague, it seems best to follow McDaid’s lead and presume that Majenta and the Hand hail from in or near the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. It also seems fair to think that time travel in this era is limited to parties such as Intersol, because widespread time tech would radically alter the equation when the Daleks launch an all-out attack on Earth (The Parting of the Ways).
[1630] “The Age of Ice” and “The Crimson Hand”, although there doesn’t appear to be a point in the story when this could have occurred.
[1631] Dating “Thinktwice” (DWM #400-402) - The warden mentions his intention to spread use of the Knowsall machine through “The entire human empire!” The “cosmic bailiffs” who bring Majenta to Thinktwice presumably belong to Intersol - the justice organisation (“The Crimson Hand”) that has access to time travel technology, but whose members aren’t necessarily part of humanity.
[1632] Dating “The Crimson Hand” (DWM #416-420) - This resolves DWM’s ongoing Crimson Hand storyarc; see the Majenta Pryce sidebar.
[1633] Dating The Long Game (X1.7) - The Doctor gives the date. It’s established in Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways that the Jagrafess was a tool of the Daleks.
[1634] Bad Wolf
[1635] “Twenty years” before Bad Wolf, according to the Big Brother contestant Lynda Moss.
[1636] Dating Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways (X1.12-1.13) - The Doctor says in Bad Wolf that “it’s the year two-zero-zero-one-zero-zero”, and the opening caption says it is “one hundred years” after The Long Game. Lynda says the Game Station has ten thousand channels, although the Doctor’s Big Brother game is broadcast on Channel 44,000. Lucifer is (almost certainly) the planet featured in Lucifer Rising. It’s unclear whether Rose used her power to restore anyone or anything other than Captain Jack - it’s not stated that she, for example, reset the devastated Earth. Jack’s journey to the nineteenth century is referenced in Utopia.
[1637] Jack in TW: Miracle Day, summarising the immortality that he exhibits throughout Torchwood and Doctor Who.
[1638] Dating “Mortal Beloved” (DWM #406-407) - It’s been “centuries” since Majenta Pryce abandoned Sparks. The application of tachyonics seen here is independent from the Argolis experiments seen in The Leisure Hive. Mazumas are a currency mentioned in the DWM comic (see The Mazuma Era); grotzis are a currency mentioned by Glitz (The Trial of a Time Lord, Dragonfire).
[1639] Dating Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Cold Equations (BF CC #3.5, 4.1, 5.12) - The linking material in this trilogy of audios featuring Sara Kingdom takes place on an island at Ely, and although the historical clues are fairly numerous, no actual date is given. Cold Equations all-but names the Cahlians as being responsible for the very same sleeping sickness that afflicts Earth in The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System. Given that Simon Guerrier wrote all four audios, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
The claim in Cold Equations that the continents of Earth are “all different shapes” brings to mind the devastation seen in The Parting of the Ways, and suggests - but doesn’t confirm - that the sharp decline of Earth in the Kingdom trilogy is the result of the devastation of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. That Empire is so advanced that it might well have facilitated the creation of the wish-granting house - or the house might result from the plethora of alien tech that accumulates on Earth over the millennia in numerous Doctor Who stories. The Drowned World establishes that humanity’s encounters with the Daleks are now the stuff of legend, suggesting that it’s not the immediate aftermath of The Parting of the Ways but rather some time later, and that humanity has in large measure forgotten (assuming they even had time to register what was happening before the Dalek onslaught) the cause of its current plight.
For benefit of non-UK residents, the Lion of Knidos is a giant stone lion on display in the British Museum, London.
[1640] Dating The Guardian of the Solar System (BF CC #5.1) - The Sara Kingdom audio trilogy concludes ten years after the end of The Drowned World.
[1641] The Five Companions
[1642] The Forgotten Army
[1643] Dating Night of the Humans (NSA #38) - The Doctor says (p19), “To be precise, it’s 14 March 250,339. And it’s six minutes past one in the afternoon”, based upon the atomic clock he retrieves from the P
ioneer 10 probe. The day and year are confirmed in the Sittuun situation reports (pgs 7-9), which seem to use the Julian calendar. The existence of the Lux Academy (doubtless referencing the family prominent in Silence in the Library) suggests that Earth has greatly recovered from the devastation the Daleks wrought in The Parting of the Ways. Somewhat uniquely, the Sittuun’s natural language isn’t translatable through the TARDIS’ systems just because... it just isn’t.
[1644] ‘“Fifteen years” before The Eyeless. There is plenty of evidence that this was an incident during The Last Great Time War. The Doctor already knows of the Fortress, its Weapon and who built them. He also knows that both sides in the war are dead, and that one side had “footholds in different galaxies”. The Eyeless probe the Doctor’s mind, and see he was somehow involved with the firing of the Weapon. A number of Dalek stories have established that Skaro is in the Seventh galaxy; The Daleks: “The Destroyers” says it’s in the eighth. On the other hand, the Doctor says that “pretty much whoever your enemy is”, you would destroy yourself by using the Weapon against them, but The War in Heaven offers an obvious candidate for an Enemy for which that would not be the case. Possibly, the Weapon was built for the War in Heaven but used in the Last Great Time War.
[1645] Dating The Eyeless (NSA #30) - The date is given.
[1646] Dating The Eyeless (NSA #30) - It’s “twenty years” since the main events of the story.
[1647] Dating The War Games (6.7) - It is stated that humanity has been killing itself for “half a million years” before this story takes place, which (coincidentally) ties up with the date 309,906 established for the Doctor’s first trial (or “Malfeasance Tribunal”) in The Deadly Assassin. The TARDIS Logs suggested a date of “48,063” for this story, Apocrypha offered “5950 AD”.
The aliens in this story are unnamed on screen, yet they’re referred to as “the War Lords” in The War Games novelisation by Malcolm Hulke, The Making of Doctor Who 1972 edition, the Lofficier Programme Guide, and Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks. They’re simply “Aliens” in the 1973 Radio Times Special. As both Hulke and Dicks independently use the name “War Lords” in their other work, it has been adopted in this volume to avoid confusion with other unnamed alien races.
How Many War Zones are There?
The War Games establishes in dialogue that the aliens have “ten” zones under their control. The map we see shows eleven, not including the Control Zone. Three more appear in dialogue, making a total of fifteen... map: Greek Zone [c500BC]; “two thousand years ago” map: Roman Zone; map: 30 Years War Zone [1618-1648]; map: English Civil War Zone [1642-1646]; “1745”, Jacobite Rebellion; “1812”, Napoleon’s advance into Russia; map: Peninsular War Zone [1808-1814]; map: Crimean War Zone [1853-1856]; “1862”, map: American Civil War Zone; map: Mexican Civil War Zone, “Mexican Uprising” (?1867); Franco-Prussian War [1870-1871]; map: Boer War Zone [1899-1902]; The Boxer Rising [1900]; “1905”, map: Russio-Japanese War Zone; “1917”, map: 1917 War Zone.
[1648] Dating The Eight Doctors (EDA #1) - This happens during The War Games.
[1649] The War Chief is shot in The War Games, and reappears in Timewyrm: Exodus.
[1650] “Three hundred and seventeen thousand years” after 40 BC, according to The Gallifrey Chronicles.
[1651] The English Way of Death
[1652] Only Human
[1653] Dating Only Human (NSA #5) - The Doctor calculates the precise date.
[1654] Dating The Girl Who Never Was (BF #103) - The Cybermen seem to generalise the year as “500,000”, but the eighth Doctor - using the TARDIS’ scanning equipment - specifies the date as 500,002. This is further confirmed by the sixth Doctor in The Condemned, and Charley in Brotherhood of the Daleks.
[1655] “Half a million years” after The Curse of Fenric. When the Reverend Wainwright asks the Doctor how he knows about the Haemovores’ future, the Doctor says “I’ve seen it”. Some commentators (including The Discontinuity Guide and the previous editions of this chronology) have presumed that the Haemovore timeline was created when the Ancient One poisoned the Earth, and erased when he/she refrained from doing so, but this isn’t actually said on screen. The Doctor attributes the Haemovore era to “half a million years of industrial progress”, not something as sudden and cataclysmic as a single chemical release.
The next story to deal with Earth is The Mysterious Planet, set around the year two million - meaning that if the Haemovore timeline is “real”, there are 1.5 million years for the dying Earth, “its surface a chemical slime”, to recover. It perhaps sounds like a cheat to assume the Earth could simply “get over” such a catastrophe, but it’s no less plausible than the idea that humanity’s homeworld recuperates after the Daleks bombard it with enough firepower to change the shape of the very continents (in The Parting of the Ways, set in 200,100).
[1656] Goth Opera, in which Ruath says the Haemovore timeline is a “possible future” (p44).
[1657] Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Possum Kingdom”, supporting the “haemovore future” from The Curse of Fenric being part of established history.
[1658] Dating K9 and the Missing Planet (The Adventures of K9 #4) - It’s after “The human race had swarmed like locusts across the galaxy”. Earth becoming known as Tellus isn’t referenced in any other story, so dating when this could have occurred is a matter of sheer guesswork. That the miners on the unnamed planet have the technological nous to move between universes when they come across Star Crystal, and that they know of the Time Lords, suggests that it’s the far future.
[1659] Dating Timelash (22.5) - No date given on screen. This has been arbitrarily set in the same year that the Time Traveller met the Eloi and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. There is no indication on screen exactly when the third Doctor visited Karfel; the novelisation suggests it was “at least one hundred years” before this story, during the time of Katz’s grandfather.
[1660] The Ark
[1661] Date unknown, but it’s in the “far distant future” of To the Death.
[1662] Dating “The Neutron Knights” (DWM #60) - No date is given, but if it truly is Earth’s last battle, the story would seem to be set either before The Ark or somewhere in vast gap between that story and The End of the World. The Doctor speculates that “past and future are flowing into the same event”, which doesn’t really help. It doesn’t seem to be set during the Millenium Wars. While the link isn’t made in either story, it’s been placed during the Primal Wars mentioned in The Ark.
[1663] Dating “Descendance” / “Ascendance” (Radio Times #3785-3804) - No date given. The Doctor and Stacy open the story by witnessing “an early [Martian] period ascendancy rite”, which could equally suggest that this is old Mars before the downfall of Ice Warrior civilisation, or that it’s a traditional rite taking place in contemporary/future times. The surface of Mars is habitable - again, either an indication that it’s prior to the decline of the Martian ecology (The Judgement of Isskar), or that it’s after Mars has been terraformed (in stories such as The Resurrection of Mars). Either way, there are large Martian cities that modern-day astronomers and space probes would be unlikely to miss.
Two details suggest a future dating: The Martians are familiar with both Christmas and humanity (the Doctor is told, “You have all the outward appearance of a typically human buffoon”). No mention is made of the Federation. The Silent Stars Go By establishes that the Martians re-settle Mars at an unspecified point prior to the sun expanding and rendering the planet uninhabitable once more (The Ark). So while an old Mars dating is certainly feasible, a future dating was here chosen because the phrases “typically human buffoon” and Ssard’s “It’s the Martian equivalent of what humans call Christmas, Stacy” are rather hard to wave away as figures of speech.
As this was the last entry to be placed in Ahistory Third Edition, its exact placement (working to the parameters specified above) was literally chosen using the stairwell method - slips of paper were flung into th
e air, and the one reading “one million AD” reached the bottom of the stairs first.
[1664] Dragonfire
[1665] The Mysterious Planet
[1666] Dating The Mysterious Planet (23.1) - The Doctor consults his pocket watch and suggests that it is “two million years” after Peri’s time. Both the camera script and the novelisation confirm this date. The Terrestrial Index attempted to rationalise the various “ends of the Earth” seen in the series, but in doing so it ignored virtually every date given on screen. It is claimed, for example, that this story was set “c.14,500”. The TARDIS Special gave the date as “two billion” AD, an understandable mishearing of the Doctor’s line. About Time speculates that this is the same destruction of Earth seen in The Ark (the first Doctor was confused about the date), but doesn’t explain why Time Lords who would covertly sterilise the Earth to prevent their secrets getting out give humanity notice this would happen, and enough notice to build a giant evacuation ship to boot.
The setting reminds Peri of “a wet November”, perhaps suggesting the month. There’s nothing on screen to suggest this isn’t Glitz’s native time.
[1667] The Eight Doctors
[1668] Before Dragonfire. The Curse of Fenric unveiled Fenric’s involvement in Ace arriving in the future.
[1669] “Ten hundred million years” (a billion) before Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space.
[1670] Dating Dragonfire (24.4) - No date is given on screen, but Glitz’s presence suggests the story takes place after The Mysterious Planet. Iceworld services “twelve galaxies”, and Glitz comes from Andromeda, suggesting that intergalactic travel is now routine (and that it’s after Andromeda was colonised). According to the novelisation, Svartos is in the “Ninth galaxy”.
Head Games claimed it was “a few thousand years into the future”, at the time of the Galactic Federation. Head Games also establishes that Earth is devastated at this time, a reference to The Mysterious Planet/The Ultimate Foe (but one that might also support a dating around the time of the solar flares). Assuming it’s the Galactic Federation from the Peladon stories, that and the dating of Mission: Impractical would seem to agree that Glitz’s native time - and the events of Dragonfire - is much earlier than two million years in the future. Glitz is working for the Master in The Mysterious Planet, so could have been taken to the far future. However, with absolutely no evidence for this, or for Glitz having his own time machine, it seems better to conclude that he was in his native time in The Mysterious Planet.
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