B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (329 page)

[
1767
]
The Sound of Drums

[
1768
]
Last of the Time Lords.
The number of Toclafane is given by the Master in
The Sound of Drums
.

[
1769
]
Timewyrm: Revelation

[
1770
]
The Cradle of the Snake
- provided we take the title literally.

[
1771
] Dating
The Infinity Doctors
(PDA #17) - The date is given (p137). This is “within a few decades of Event Two” (p130).

[
1772
]
The Dark Flame

[
1773
]
Sometime Never

[
1774
]
Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day

[
1775
] Dating
The Judgement of Isskar
and
The Chaos Pool
(BF #117, 119) - Chaos is held in stasis “sixty-six minutes” from the end of the universe. Details on the Key were first given in
The Ribos Operation
. The fifth Doctor knows that Romana has returned to Gallifrey (in accordance with
Goth Opera
); she’s not yet President, but she might already be a High Council member.

[
1776
] Dating
Graceless: The End
(
Graceless
#1.3) - Events happen on the planet Chaos, following
The Chaos Pool
.

[
1777
] Dating
Sometime Never
(EDA #67) - The scene in the Vortex Palace ends with the end of the universe.

[
1778
] “Agent Provocateur”

[
1779
]
Timewyrm: Apocalypse

[
1780
]
The Infinity Doctors

[
1781
] “Hunger from the Ends of Time!”

[
1782
]
FP: Of the City of the Saved
, with additional detail given in
FP: The Book of the War
.

[
1783
] The prologue to
FP: Warlords of Utopia
, published at the end of
FP: Of the City of the Saved...

[
1784
] Dating
FP: Of the City of the Saved...
(
FP
novel #2) - According to
FP: The Book of the War
(p33), the City exists after the end of the current universe, and before the beginning of the next one. The short story collection
FP: A Romance in Twelve Parts
contains scattered accounts from the Civil War that breaks out following
Of the City of the Saved
, citing that casualties at one point exceed 4,000,000,000,000.

[
1785
]
Millennial Rites

[
1786
] “The Stockbridge Child”

Cracks in Time

The Cracks in Time seen throughout Series 5 have three primary functions…

1. Erase individuals who are exposed to the Cracks’ time energy from history. As the Doctor tells Amy (
Flesh and Stone
): “If the [Crack in Time] catches up with you, you’ll never have been born. It will erase every moment of your existence. You will never have lived at all.”

2. Consume/erase nodes of history. This seems to explain why, in
Victory of the Daleks
, Amy doesn’t remember the Dalek invasion of 2009 (
The Stolen Earth
). In
Flesh and Stone
, the Doctor implies that the same fate befell the Cyber King (
The Next Doctor
).

3. Act as “magic doorways”, i.e. enable alien races to cross from Point A to Point B in space/time (
The Vampires of Venice
,
The Pandorica Opens
).

Why the Cracks function as “magic doorways” and also “erase things from history” is never said – their abilities change from story to story, per Steven Moffat regarding
Doctor Who
as a fable. The most candid, if unsatisfying, explanation is to say that the Cracks function as magic doorways “just because they do”.

However,
do
the Cracks in Time erase individuals from history entirely? Despite the Doctor’s insistence about this, all the evidence says otherwise. When the Cracks “erase someone from history”, that person’s absence does not create a new timeline - Amy not only keeps existing when the Cracks consume her parents (pre-
The Eleventh Hour
), the alleged “historical deletion” of her lifetime best friend and fiancé causes no long-term personality changes beyond her no longer being sad, as she can’t remember that a Silurian shot him dead (
Cold Blood
). Nor does Rory’s “erasure” seem to affect River – which it should, as he’s her father.

Granted, Amy is unique because she grew up with a Crack in her bedroom, but the same principle applies to four of Father Octavian’s Clerics being “erased” (
Flesh and Stone
). If the Clerics “never lived at all”, then as each one is dematerialised, another should instantly appear. Octavian started the mission with twenty Clerics, so if four were retroactively “never born”, it shouldn’t create a timeline where he only took sixteen instead.

More noticeably, when the Doctor is “erased” (
The Big Bang
), Earth in 2010 still exists. Considering how many times he has saved the planet, deleting the Doctor from history should, almost without fail, result in a 2010 where Earth is under alien domination or totally destroyed (see
Pyramids of Mars
, et al). Similarly, Captain Jack’s Torchwood team and Sarah Jane’s adeptness at fighting aliens would never have happened without the Doctor, so every menace they defeated in their own series would be back on the table.

What must actually happen when the Cracks consume somebody is that said person’s (to coin a term) “temporal opacity” must get lowered to zero. The effects of their lives remain, but they’re so “temporally transparent” that nobody can acknowledge said effects. When Amy “remembers” the Doctor back into existence (
The Big Bang
), it’s likely that her “seeing” his existence and acknowledging him as real restores his temporal opacity to normal. This supports the continued (and otherwise nonsensical) claim that, “If something can be remembered, it can be brought back…”

A final question: Is the universe that the Doctor “restarts” in
The Big Bang
a different continuity from the previous one? The answer would seem to be “no”… the whole point of the universe being rebooted is that everything comes back as it was before, not “everything comes back, save for the huge tracks of history that the Cracks destroyed”. In Series 6, the only thing suggesting that history has changed is in
A Good Man Goes to War
, when the Doctor develops a convoluted theory to specify that Amy and Rory conceived River in the TARDIS on their wedding night. But this comes from a being who claims to not really understand human sexuality (“[Sex] is all human-y, private stuff… They don’t put up a balloon, or anything”), and might just be crafting a tortured alternate explanation. Rather than attributing the timing of River’s conception to a massive overwrite of universal history, Occam’s Razor suggests that she could have “started” at any point in Amy and Rory’s TARDIS travels because they were feeling saucy and didn’t have a prophylactic handy.

A Brief History of the Daleks

The history of the Daleks would be convoluted even if they weren’t time travellers. What follows is an attempt to boil Dalek history down to the basics. Speculation is in italics, and most of the working in the footnotes is to be found in the main timeline - see especially the articles Are There Two Dalek Histories?, The Neutronic War, The Dalek Emperors, The Middle Period of Dalek History, The Alliance, Last Contact, The Dalek Wars, Was Skaro Destroyed?, The Davros Era, The Great Catastrophe, Who Started the Last Great Time War? and The Last Great Time War.

The Thousand Years War between the Thals and Kaleds on Skaro devastated the planet. The Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist Davros, but the fourth Doctor believed he had set their development back a thousand years.
 [1]

A thousand years passed. There were again two races on Skaro - the Thals and the Daleks (or Dals), squat blue-skinned warriors
who had evolved from the Kaled survivors
. We don’t see the Thals at this time, but their rivals the Dals occupied futuristic cities and had an advanced civilisation.
 [2]

A neutron bomb exploded, instantly devastating Skaro. Forests were petrified, and animal life mutated into exotic monsters. The Dals and Thals also mutated
.
 [3]

A mutated Dal, a creature like that created by Davros’ experiments (
perhaps even a survivor from those experiments
), crawled into a war machine designed by Yarvelling, almost identical to Davros’ ancient design (
and so clearly influenced by it
), and became the first Dalek. He became the Emperor Dalek and casings were soon constructed for other Dalek mutants. Within months, the Daleks had built the Dalek City, and soon after that they developed space travel. A social hierarchy emerged, with the feared Black Dalek in charge of military production on Skaro and the Red Dalek in charge of space projects. The Emperor Dalek led the fleet of Dalek saucers in the first conquests. They encountered the Mechanoids.
It was the late eighteenth century on Earth.

No more than five centuries passed. During this time, the Daleks didn’t encounter the human race or learn of the Earth, and they never met the Doctor. They paid little attention to Skaro itself and didn’t encounter the Thals.
 [4]

Quite what they do during these centuries is unclear. They might have a war with the Mechanoids, but it’s never mentioned. We have no account of them meeting any other
Doctor Who monsters, but that is also possible - the Sontaran-Rutan war is underway across the galaxy, for example. At this time the Daleks are building up a powerbase, and developing advanced weapons, but are far from being the all-conquering race we’ll see later.

The only thing we know from this period is that a Dalek ship crashed on Vulcan in the early nineteenth century.
 [5]

Dalek survivors from the Last Great Time War attacked the Earth a number of times in the early twenty-first century, most notably in 2007, when they fought the Battle of Canary Wharf against the Cybermen, and in 2009, when they conquered the planet in a blitzkrieg, then moved the entire planet across the universe.
 [6]

In 2012, a Dalek from the future was unable to detect any Dalek transmissions.
 [7]
In the mid-twenty-second century, the Daleks learned of Earth and humanity.
 [8]

Around 2157, the Daleks attacked the human race - their powerful space fleet cut Earth off from the space lanes, and then a relatively small force invaded the Solar System. They attacked humanity on Earth and the Mars colony. Earth was occupied for ten years.
 [9]

Thirty years later, the Daleks invaded Earth again, only to suffer another defeat.
 [10]

The Daleks were defeated, but retained their ambition to conquer Earth.
 [11]
Around this time, the Daleks internalised their power sources, removing their greatest vulnerability - now they ran on psychokinetic power, not static electricity.
 [12]

For the Daleks, their defeat had great significance for another reason - this was the very first time, from their point of view, that they encountered the Doctor. Soon after the Dalek Invasion, the Daleks developed time travel and sent an assassination group in their time craft to exterminate him.
 [13]