B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (12 page)

• Sometimes, stories occur with the sort of impact that means it seems odd that they weren’t mentioned in an earlier story. For instance, no-one from
The Power of the Daleks
and
The Moonbase
(both shown in 1966) recalls the Daleks and Cybermen fighting in
Doomsday
(shown in 2006). For that matter, when the Doctor and his companions refer to their past adventures on TV, they rarely mention the events of the Missing Adventures, Past Doctor novels, comic strips or Big Finish audios. (There are exceptions, however, usually when a writer picks up a throwaway line in a TV episode.) In
Doctor Who
itself, this may point to some deep truth about the nature of time - that events don’t become part of the “Web of Time” until we see the Doctor as part of them... or it may be simply that it was impossible for the people making
Doctor Who
in the sixties to know about stories authored by their successors - many of whom hadn’t even been born then.

• And, in a related note, few people making
The Tenth Planet
(in 1966, depicting the distant space year 1986) would have imagined anyone in the early twenty-first century worrying how to reconcile the quasi-futuristic world they imagined with the historical reality. Whenever the UNIT stories are set, it was “the twentieth century”, and that’s history now. Some of the early New Adventures took place in a “near future” setting, which is now the present day for the eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory. We’ve therefore accepted the dates given, rather than said that - for example - as we still haven’t put a man on Mars,
The Ambassadors of Death
is still set in our future. There’s clearly a sensible reason why the “present day” stories made now look like our present day, not
The Tenth Planet: The Next Generation
. The in-story explanation / fudge would seem to be that most
Doctor Who
stories take place in isolated locations, and that there are agencies like UNIT, C19 and Torchwood tasked with keeping alien incursions covered up. This paradigm has broken down over time, however, given the sheer number of public events involving aliens in the new series,
The Sarah Jane Adventures
and (to a lesser degree)
Torchwood
.

• There are still errors of omission, as when a later story fails to acknowledge an earlier one (often in other media) that seems relevant. No-one in
The Christmas Invasion
, for example, notes that it’s odd Britain is making a big deal about sending an unmanned probe to Mars, when there were manned UK missions there in the seventies (in
The Ambassadors of Death
) and the nineties (
The Dying Days
). As with Sarah in
School Reunion
remembering
The Hand of Fear
but not
The Five Doctors
, there’s got to be an appeal to clarity in storytelling. With so many
Doctor Who
stories in existence, it’s almost impossible to tell a new one that doesn’t explicitly contradict an earlier story, let alone implicitly. The reason no-one, say, remarks that the second Doctor looks like Salamander except in
The Enemy of the World
is the same reason that no-one ever says Rose looks like the girl who married Chris Evans - it gets in the way of the story, and doesn’t help it along.

The Stories

This book restricts itself to events described in the BBC television series
Doctor Who
, and its original full-length fiction, audio plays and comics; the spin-off series
The Sarah Jane Adventures
,
Torchwood
,
K9
and their full-length fiction, audio plays and comics; and any spin-off books, audios, comics and direct-to-video/DVD films involving characters that originated in the above, and were used with permission by their rights holders (see Section No. 4 below). To be included in this Third Edition of
Ahistory
, a story had to be released before 31st December, 2011.

This is not an attempt to enter the debate about which stories are “canon” (although we have been compelled to make such determinations at times), it is simply an attempt to limit the length and scale of this book. There are two types of information in this book - evidence given in TV stories, and anything provided in another format - and these are distinguished by different typefaces.

1. The Television Series. Included are the episodes and on-screen credits of the BBC television series
Doctor Who
from
An Unearthly Child
(1963) to
The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
(2011), the
K9 and Company
pilot episode (1981),
Torchwood
(2006-2011),
The Sarah Jane Adventures
(2007-2011), the
K9
TV series (2009-2010), and extended or unbroadcast versions that have since been commercially released or broadcast anywhere in the world - there are few cases of “extended” material contradicting the original story.

Priority is given to sources closest to the finished product or the production team of the time the story was made. In descending order of authority are the following: the programme as broadcast; the official series websites; official guidebooks made in support of the series (
Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia
, etc.), the
Radio Times
and other contemporary BBC publicity material (which was often written by the producer or script editor); the camera script; the novelisation of a story by the original author or an author working closely from the camera script; contemporary interviews with members of the production team; televised trailers; rehearsal and draft scripts; novelisations by people other than the original author; storylines and writers’ guides (which often contradict on-screen information); interviews with members of the production team after the story was broadcast; and finally any other material, such as fan speculation.

Scenes cut from broadcast were considered if they were incorporated back into a story at a later time (as with those in
The Curse of Fenric
VHS and DVD). Not included is information from unreleased material that exists, is in release but was kept separate from the story (for instance, the extra scenes on the
Ghost Light
DVD) or that no longer exists (such as with
Terror of the Autons
,
Terror of the Zygons
and
The Hand of Fear
). Neither does the first version of
An Unearthly Child
to be filmed (the so-called “pilot episode”) count, nor “In character” appearances by the Doctor interacting with the real world on other programmes (e.g.: on
Animal Magic
,
Children in Need
,
Blue Peter
etc.).

2. The
Doctor Who
,
The Sarah Jane Adventures
and
Torchwood
books, audios and webcasts. This present volume encompasses the
Doctor Who
New and Missing Adventures published by Virgin (1991-1997), the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures (1997-2005), the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures (1997-2005), the BBC’s New Series Adventures (up through
The Silent Stars Go By
, 2011), the
Torchwood
novels (up through
TW: The Men Who Sold the World
, 2011), all of the Telos novellas (2001-2004), the four
K9
children’s books (1980), and a number of one-off novels:
Harry Sullivan’s War
,
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma
and
Who Killed Kennedy
.

The audios covered include
The Pescatons
,
Slipback
,
The Paradise of Death
and
The Ghosts of N-Space
; the BBC fourth Doctor mini-series (
Hornets’ Nest
,
Demon Quest
and
Serpent Crest
); and the extensive Big Finish
Doctor Who
audio range... its monthly series (up to
Army of Death
, #155), the Companion Chronicles (up to
The First Wave
, #6.5), the eighth Doctor audios initially broadcast on BBC7 (up to
To the Death
, #4.10) and various promotional audios (up to
The Five Companions
).

The Big Finish Lost Stories, which adapt unmade TV scripts for audio, have been included (up through
The Children of Seth
, #3.3) because Big Finish, while having no formal policy regarding the Lost Stories’ canonicity, isn’t averse to the Lost Stories being cross-referenced in obviously canonical adventures and - very tellingly - considers Raine Creevy (from the audio adaptations of the unmade Season 27 stories) as “real” as any Big Finish companion. Without an express directive to keep the Lost Stories in a separate continuity, the cross-pollination with the established
Doctor Who
audios will only increase over time, so it seemed fair to include them.

The BBC webcasts
Real Time
,
Shada
and
Death Comes to Time
(the last one somewhat controversially) are also included, as well as the webcast
Torchwood
story
Web of Lies
.

A handful of stories were available in another form -
Shakedown
and
Downtime
were originally direct-to-video spin-offs, some Big Finish stories like
Minuet in Hell
and
The Mutant Phase
are (often radically different) adaptations of stories made by Audio Visuals.
Ahistory
deals with the “official” versions, as opposed to the fan-produced ones.

This volume covers two stories that appear in two different versions, because they were told in two media that fall within the scope of the book and were adapted for different Doctors:
Shada
and
Human Nature
. Those have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Doctor Who
fans have long had different versions of the same story in different media - the first Dalek story, for example, was televised, extensively altered for the novelisation, changed again for the movie version and adapted into a comic strip.

We haven’t included in-character appearances in nonfiction books (e.g: the
Doctor Who
Discovers
... and
Doctor Who
Quiz Book of
series), and
Make Your Own Adventure
/
Find Your Fate
-style books where it’s impossible to determine the actual story. It was tempting, though.

3. The
Doctor Who
comics, including the strip that has been running in
Doctor Who
Weekly
/
Monthly
/
Magazine
since 1979 (up through “The Child of Time”,
DWM
#438-441), along with all original backup strips from that publication, and the ones from the various Specials and Yearbooks. With a book like this, drawing a line between what should and shouldn’t be included is never as simple as it might appear. Including every comic strip would include ones from the Annuals, for example. This book doesn’t include the text stories that
Doctor Who
Magazine
has included at various points during its run.