B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (315 page)

[
1350
] “Many years” before “War-Game”.

[
1351
] “Four centuries” before
The Time of Angels.

[
1352
]
Heart of TARDIS

[
1353
] Dating “War-Game” (
DWM
#100-101) - The Doctor meets Kaon again in “Warrior’s Story” (which takes place before this in Kaon’s timeline) and that adventure sets the rough date for this one. The Draconians rule “a third of the galaxy” at this point. Kaon crashed “many years ago” - enough for Kara to be born and grow to womanhood (although we don’t know how long that takes for a Draconian).

[
1354
]
Trading Futures.
Magnus Greel (from the year 5000) feared Time Agents tracking him down in
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
, Time Agents appeared in
Eater of Wasps
, and in
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
, Captain Jack claims to have been a Time Agent, and knows that other Agents will be tracking him down. It’s interesting to note that in the original, unbroadcast version of
An Unearthly Child
, the Doctor and Susan claim to be aliens, but Susan says she was born in the forty-ninth century.

[
1355
]
I am a Dalek

[
1356
] “A Glitch in Time”. It’s never specified when the time travellers come from, but this would seem to be the only era in which humanity develops time travel.

[
1357
] The Fennus disaster is said to have happened “long ago” prior to the main events of
Helicon Prime
, but as Mindy herself is portrayed as a young woman and we meet three members of the rescue team sent to Fennus, the disaster presumably - depending on human longevity in this era - happened decades rather than centuries before
Helicon Prime
opens.

[
1358
] Dating
Helicon Prime
(BF CC #2.2) - The dating clues are very vague. Mindy is specified as human, but as Helicon Prime is such a great distance from Earth, this is presumably a long time into humanity’s expansion into space. It’s not specified how, exactly, Mindy travels back to find a post-TARDIS Jamie, raising the possibility that time travel technology is available. Even so, this placement represents a stab in the dark.

Victoria is still studying graphology, so for the Doctor and Jamie, this story likely occurs during Season 6B.

[
1359
]
TW: The Undertaker’s Gift

[
1360
] “Three hundred years” before “Fire and Brimstone”.

[
1361
]
The Taking of Planet 5
(p222).

[
1362
] “Three thousand years” after
Ghosts of India
. The metamorphic nature of Zytron energy, and the similar-sounding name, suggests it bears some relation to Zeiton-7 ore (
Vengeance on Varos
).

[
1363
] “Two hundred years” before
The Time of Angels
.

[
1364
]
Borrowed Time.
See the World Wars sidebar.

[
1365
] In the century before
The Ice Warriors.

[
1366
]
Interference.
The Doctor has a pair of those binoculars, no doubt acquired when he was with the Filipino army (mentioned in
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
).

[
1367
]
The English Way of Death

[
1368
]
The Gallifrey Chronicles

[
1369
] According to Gryffen in
K9: Jaws of Orthrus
. This may mean K9 is a production model, and Marius built him from a kit. Or it may simply mean that other unique robots were built to look like dogs. It could also mean that once Marius gets back to Earth, he markets K9s commercially. The Doctor apparently acquires the Mark 2 and Mark 4 K9s very quickly - he seems to have them stored in the TARDIS, but likewise it’s impossible to say if he built or bought K9s Mark 2 to 4.

[
1370
]
The Resurrection of Mars

[
1371
] “A thousand years” before
City at World’s End
.

[
1372
]
The Art of Destruction
. Given the catastrophes that afflict the Earth in the fifty-first century, it’s tempting to speculate that the Doctor does this somehow to protect the painting.

[
1373
]
The Company of Friends:
“Izzy’s Story”

[
1374
]
Trading Futures

[
1375
] Dating
The Invisible Enemy
(15.2) - The Doctor states that it is the year “5000, the year of the Great Breakout” and implies that the human race has not yet left the solar system. This contradicts virtually every other story set in the future - indeed,
The Invisible Enemy
would fit very neatly into this timeline about the year 2100.

The Breakout might be to other
galaxies
, and this is supported by the audio
Davros
, which has humanity poised to dominate the whole galaxy and eager to expand. Alternatively, perhaps a big section of humanity wants to leave because they’ve had enough of the Ice Age, lack of scientific progress, threat of World War and genocidal dictators we hear are on Earth in
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
. If so, no-one mentions it in
The Invisible Enemy
, and Marius’ main concern with returning to Earth is that he has too much stuff to take home.

Looking more closely at the history of Earth since the collapse of the Earth Empire around the year 3000, it’s clear that there are many human colonies - but there’s no evidence that Earth has any political influence on them. While it’s a major player on the galactic political stage, Earth’s civilisation does seem to be confined to the solar system in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
, the Peladon stories and the Davros Era stories (which even following the Peel timeline would fall between 3000 and 5000). Earth maintains a military capable of (small) missions across the galaxy, but the fact that it’s ignorant of massive Dalek conquests in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
- even the fact that Earth needs to name a fleet as “the Deep Space Fleet” in
Destiny of the Daleks
and finds it hard to fund or reinforce Davros’ prison station in
Resurrection of the Daleks
- suggests that Earth doesn’t dominate the galaxy. In
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
, we learn that Earth’s in a technological cul-de-sac.

In short, it actually ties in with other stories that human civilisation is confined to Earth’s solar system for a couple of millennia before 5000, by which time it’s ripe for a “breakout”, a new wave of colonisation.

The Gallifrey Chronicles
gives the story the “relative date one-one-one-five-zero-zero-zero”.
The TARDIS Logs
offered the date “4778”.

[
1376
] Dating
The Girl in the Fireplace
(X2.4) - The caption cuts from events in eighteenth-century France to the future with the caption “3000 years later”, making it around 4759. However, the tenth Doctor tells Rose and Mickey that it’s “three thousand years into your future, give or take”, which would make it around 5007. Still later, the Doctor states it’s the fifty-first century. The SS
Madame de Pompadour
is in the Dagmar Cluster, two and a half galaxies from Earth, and the intergalactic travel probably supports the later date.

[
1377
] Dating
K9 and the Beasts of Vega
(
The Adventures of K9
#2) - No date is given, but as this is set at a time when humans are mounting a massive colonisation effort, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to say it’s around K9’s home time.

[
1378
] Dating
The Ice Warriors
(5.3) - The date of this story is never given on screen. Base leader Clent says that if the glaciers advance, then “five thousand years of history” will be wiped out. If he’s referring to Britannicus Base, a Georgian house, this would make the date about 6800 AD. If he is referring to human or European history, the date becomes more vague. It has to be set well over a century in the future, because the world has been run by the Great World Computer for that long.

An article in the
Radio Times
at the time of broadcast stated that the year is “3000 AD”, and almost every other fan chronology used to follow that lead, although the first edition of
The Making of Doctor Who
said that the Doctor travels “three thousand years” into the future after
The Abominable Snowmen
, making the date 4935 AD.
The Dark Path
and
Legacy
both allude to the date of this story as being 3000 AD (p63 and p89 respectively). Earlier versions of
Ahistory
did the same. The blurb for the Region 1 VHS of the story said it was “AD 3000”.

In
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
, the Doctor talks of “the Ice Age about the year five thousand” - possibly even a reference to this story, if Robert Holmes was using
The Making of Doctor Who
as a reference.

Timelink
and
About Time
both conclude that this is the ice age mentioned in
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
. This does certainly seem to be a neater solution than proposing two ice ages in quick succession - particularly when there are a fair few stories set around 3000 on an Earth which doesn’t seem to be affected by an ice age. Occam’s Razor doesn’t always work on fictional timelines, and can be wielded too liberally, but it seems sensible to invoke it here.

One peculiarity is that the Martians have only been buried for “centuries”, although it is also made clear that they have been buried since the First Ice Age, when mastodons roamed the Earth. (
About Time
states that mastodons became extinct five million years ago, but scientists disagree, estimating it was more like 10,000 BC.)
The Terrestrial Index
and
Legacy
(p90) both suggest that the Ice Age began as a result of “solar flares” (presumably in an attempt to link it with Earth’s evacuation in
The Ark in Space
), but that’s specifically ruled out as a cause in the story.

One problem is that later stories (starting with
The Curse of Peladon
) would establish the Martians as a significant presence in the future, which would make the humans’ ignorance of them in this story notable - mankind has apparently forgotten about the Martians who were near neighbours, and fellow members of the Galactic Federation in the Peladon stories (and who they fought against in books such as
Transit
and
The Dying Days
).

The Second Ice Age

When base leader Clent explains the historical background to
The Ice Warriors
, he implies that the Ice Age began a century ago, but people are still being evacuated from England during the story, suggesting that glaciation is a more recent phenomenon. It would seem that although the global temperature drop is a direct result of the destruction of plant life, its consequences weren’t felt overnight.

The present scientific consensus, of course, is that destroying the forests would cause global
warming
because of the resulting rise in carbon dioxide levels. However, this didn’t gain widespread awareness until the 1970s; when
The Ice Warriors
was produced in the 1960s, the idea that the Earth might undergo global cooling was given more credence.