B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (273 page)

[
1
] Gryffen is a regular character in the
K9
TV series.
K9: Taphony and the Time Loop
establishes the year of his birth.

[
2
]
The Condemned

[
3
] Dating
The God Complex
(X6.11) - No year is stated, but there’s no evidence that the station can abduct people through time, and the participants seem contemporary: mention is made of blogging, of the Internet, of the American CIA and of the Klingon language being the purview of geeks. Everyone’s attire, Joe’s horseshoe tie-tack included, is consistent with the modern day. The prison is made to look like a 1980s hotel, and, tellingly, Rita is familiar enough with such décor that it “takes her by surprise” to be trapped in it.

The Doctor returns Amy and Rory to Earth at a point between
Let’s Kill Hitler
and
Closing Time
. The wild card here is to what degree he knows about the horrific events of
TW: Miracle Day
and - presuming he can’t intervene in order to let history unfold as scheduled - whether he would deposit his best friends back on Earth in the thick of it. It seems reasonable to think that he drops Amy and Rory off after the worst consequences of the Miracle have come and gone; he might even drop them off in early 2012, after civilisation has recovered somewhat.

[
4
] Dating
Closing Time
(X6.12) - The story unfolds over three days, ending on a Sunday (the Doctor: “Even with time travel, getting glaziers on a Sunday, tricky”), and is predicated on the idea that Sophie has gone away for the weekend and left Craig alone with Alfie. The time of year is indicated when the Doctor and Craig stand next to an advert for a “Spring Season” sales event. All well and good, but otherwise, this story’s dating clues and continuity concerns make its placement very difficult.

The central question is whether, when the Doctor repeatedly says he will die “tomorrow” (“tomorrow is the day I [die]”, “tomorrow I’m going to die”, etc.), he means it’s
chronologically
tomorrow (i.e. 22nd April, 2011, as first mentioned in
The Impossible Astronaut
) or that it’s tomorrow in his personal timestream. The latter seems more likely - as a time traveller, he could (and already has) spend years if not decades postponing his getting shot at Lake Silencio. It’s only halfway through
The Wedding of River Song
, in fact, that he fully resigns himself to his fate and goes there.

The piece of evidence most in support of
Closing Time
literally occurring before 22nd April is a newspaper that Craig reads with the headline “Britain’s Got Torment” - this appears to have been published two days before the story’s end (at the very least, it’s topical, with Nina the local girl being on
Britain’s Got Talent
), and has the barely visible dateline of “19th April, 2011”. This would mean, however, that the
Doctor Who
calendar is even more askew than normal... 22nd April was a Friday in 2011, so either the same day in the
Doctor Who
universe is actually a Monday (given that
Closing Time
ends on Sunday), or 22nd April
is
in synch with real life and is a Friday, meaning Tuesday through Thursday (when Sophie is gone) has somehow, someway, been re-designated as “the weekend”. It’s always regrettable to disregard a date blatantly given on screen, but it’s probably fair to ignore it in this case.

Two elements support a dating for
Closing Time
of later than April 2011... the first is that the Doctor spies Amy and Rory from afar. In their timelines, this must happen after he dropped them off in
The God Complex
- not because Amy has a previously unmentioned modelling career (for all we’re told, she could already be making a living that way in the two months before
The Impossible Astronaut
), but because the name of the fragrance she’s advertising, “Petrichor” (meaning the smell of dust after rain), presumably derives from Amy and Rory learning about petrichor in
The Doctor’s Wife
. Either way, Amy and Rory’s presence helps to rule out
Closing Time
coming before
The Impossible Astronaut
.

The Doctor ends
Closing Time
intending to send Amy and Rory the invite to his death, which is delivered to their Leadworth address (on or prior to 22nd April) in
The Impossible Astronaut
, but it’s unlikely that he would trust such a vitally important message to the vagaries of Royal Mail. If the time-travelling justice agents deliver the invite with the Doctor’s other invitations (in
The Wedding of River Song
), Amy and Rory’s invite must be stamped for Overnight Mail just for show.

The tipping point for a later dating for
Closing Time
, ultimately, is Alfie’s age. Babies typically say their first words at around eleven to fourteen months, so unless the Doctor’s conversations with Alfie boosted his vocabulary, Alfie must be at least a year old if he can say the words “doctor who”. Add on the duration of Sophie’s pregnancy, and it must have been at least two years since Craig and Sophie became a couple in
The Lodger
(set in 2010).

The Cybermen in this story, as with those in
A Good Man Goes to War
, don’t bear the Cybus logo and are presumably the ones from our universe, having incorporated the technology of the alternate-reality ones first introduced in
Rise of the Cybermen
/
The Age of Steel
.

[
5
] Dating
The Wedding of River Song
(X6.13) - No date given for this epilogue, but it’s after the Doctor drops Amy and Rory off at the end of
The God Complex.

[
6
]
Turn Left
,
The Stolen Earth
,
Journey’s End
. The dimension-jumping Rose is glimpsed throughout Series 4, starting with
Partners in Crime
.

[
7
] Dating
Journey’s End
(X4.13) - The placement of these events is accomplished by (a little arbitrarily) adding two years (the same as passed in real life) to Rose parting ways with the Doctor in
Doomsday
. Jackie was pregnant in
Doomsday
and has now given birth, so that time-span seems reasonable.

[
8
]
Autonomy

[
9
] Dating
Fear Her
(X2.11) - The year is given as “2012”, and the story ends with the opening of the London Olympics, which was scheduled for 27th July, 2012. At present, pop singer Shayne Ward has no Greatest Hits collection.

[
10
] Dating
The Shadows of Avalon
(EDA #31) - The story starts in “July 2012” (p1).
The Ancestor Cell
specifies that Compassion is the first Type 102 TARDIS, and
FP: The Book of the War
establishes that she’s the
only
Type 102. That said, we did see another in
The Dimension Riders
, but it didn’t take the form of a person.

[
11
] This statement appears odd in the light of the wide array of alien attacks in the new
Doctor Who
,
Torchwood
and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
.

[
12
] Dating
Dalek
(X1.6) - The Doctor gives the date.

[
13
] Dating
The Long Game
(X1.7) - No date is given, but it’s clearly after
Dalek
. Adam’s mother says she hasn’t seen him for six months.

[
14
] “Five years” before
The Enemy of the World.

[
15
]
The Time of the Daleks
. The Doctor restores some wayward history at the end of the story, but it’s clear that the “real” history includes Learman coming to power, and she’s mentioned in
Trading Futures
.

[
16
]
The Face-Eater
(p55).
Trading Futures
(p68) - there’s a New Kabul in that book, implying the original city was destroyed, so Afghanistan was also a battleground.

[
17
]
Trading Futures

[
18
]
The Taking of Planet 5

[
19
]
Instruments of Darkness
. Presumably a reference to Tony Blair’s son and Prince Andrew’s daughter.

[
20
] Dating
Christmas on a Rational Planet
(NA #52) - The date is given.

[
21
] Dating
Frozen Time
(BF #98) - The year is given. The veiled implication is that Genevieve shares some adventures with the Doctor before returning home.

[
22
] Dating
Martha in the Mirror
(NSA #22) - “One hundred years, three months and six days” (p38) before the main part of the story.

[
23
] Dating
The Darksmith Legacy
(
The Dust of Ages
, #1;
The Graves of Mordane
, #2;
The Colour of Darkness
, #3;
The Depths of Despair
, #4;
The Vampires of Paris
, #5;
The Game of Death
, #6;
The Planet of Oblivion
, #7;
The Pictures of Emptiness
, #8;
The Art of War
, #9;
The End of Time
(
DL
), #10) - This ten-book children’s series entails the tenth Doctor and his one-off companion, the android girl Gisella, racing between different time zones.

Two of these are fairly easy to place: most of
The Art of War
occurs in medieval times, and
The Vampires of Paris
happens in “1895”. Four more (
The Dust of Ages
, the opening sequences of
The Graves of Mordane
,
The Pictures of Emptiness
and the opening sequences of
The Art of War
) occur together relatively close to the books’ publication in 2009. Another three (
The Depths of Despair
,
The Planet of Oblivion
and most of
The Graves of Mordane
) contain references to humans in space, and so must be placed in the future.

The intent of those making
The Darksmith Legacy
was that the Darksmiths themselves were contemporaneous with the first book,
The Dust of Ages
, and so originated from circa 2012. Said intent has been reflected in this chronology, even though many of the details in the series are vague, absent or maddeningly contradictory. Brother Varlos must have access to time technology (that he presumably nicked from the Darksmiths) for the plot to function, but this isn’t explicitly stated. The Darksmiths use up “every last item of temporal engineering” at their disposal in creating their Agent (
The Dust of Ages
), and yet they can still dispatch an entire Dreadnought through into the future after the Doctor (
The Depths of Despair
), and travel to the world of Oblivion (
The Planet of Oblivion
, also in the future).