Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
Introduction
This book seeks to place every event referred to in
Doctor Who
into a consistent timeline. Yet this is “a” history of the
Doctor Who
universe, not the “definitive” or “official” version.
Doctor Who
has had hundreds of creators, all pulling in slightly different directions, all with their own vision of what
Doctor Who
was about. Without that diversity, the
Doctor Who
universe would no doubt be more internally consistent, but it would also be a much smaller and less interesting place. Nowadays, fans are part of the creative process. Ultimately, we control the heritage of the show that we love. The authors of
Ahistory
hope people will enjoy this book, and we know that they will challenge it.
A total adherence to continuity has always been rather less important to the successive
Doctor Who
production teams than the main order of business: writing exciting stories, telling good jokes and scaring small children with big monsters. This, as most people will tell you, is just how it should be.
Doctor Who
has always been created using a method known as “making it up as they went along”. The series glories in its invention and throwaway lines. When the TV series was first in production, no-one was keeping the sort of detailed notes that would prevent canonical “mistakes”, and even the same writer could contradict their earlier work. It’s doubtful the writer of
The Mysterious Planet
had a single passing thought about how the story fit in with
The Sun Makers
... even though they were both authored by Robert Holmes.
Now, with dozens of new books, audios, comic strips, short stories and a new TV series, not to mention spin-offs, it is almost certainly impossible to keep track of every new
Doctor Who
story, let alone put them all in a coherent - never mind consistent - framework. References can contradict other references in the same story, let alone ones in stories written forty years later for a different medium by someone who wasn’t even born the year the original writer died.
It is, in any case, impossible to come up with a consistent view of history according to
Doctor Who
. Strictly speaking, the Brigadier retires three years before the first UNIT story is set. The Daleks and Atlantis are both utterly destroyed, once and for all, several times that we know about. Characters “remember” scenes, or sometimes entire stories, that they weren’t present to witness, and show remarkable lack of knowledge of real world events or events in
Doctor Who
that happened after the story first came out.
“Continuity” has always been flexible, even on the fundamentals of the show’s mythology -
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
(1964),
The War Games
(1969),
Genesis of the Daleks
(1975) and
The Deadly Assassin
(1976) all shamelessly threw out the show’s established history in the name of a good story. Their versions of events (the Daleks are galactic conquerors; the Doctor is a Time Lord who stole his TARDIS and fled his home planet; the Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist, Davros; Gallifreyan society is far from perfect and Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations) are now taken to be the “truth”. The previous versions (the Daleks are confined to one city; the Doctor invented the “ship” and his granddaughter named it before their exile; the Daleks are descendants of the squat humanoid Dals, mutated by radiation; the Time Lords are godlike and immortal barring accidents) have quietly been forgotten.
However, it would be unfortunate to write a book so vague that it becomes useless. Firm decisions have to be made about where stories are placed, so this book contains abundant footnotes that lay out the evidence pertaining to each story, and to explain each story’s placement in this chronology.
In some cases, this is simply a matter of reporting an exact date spoken by one of the characters in the story (
Black Orchid
, for example). In others, no firm date is given. In those cases, we attempt to look at internal evidence given on screen, then evidence from the production team at the time (from the script, say, or from contemporary publicity material), then branch out to cross-referencing it with other stories, noting where other people who’ve come up with
Doctor Who
chronologies have placed it. What we’re attempting to do is accurately list all the evidence given for dating the stories and other references in as an objective way as possible, then weigh it to reach a conclusion.
For a good example of this process at its most complicated, look for
The Seeds of Death
or
The Wheel in Space
. You may not agree with the years we’ve set, it might make your blood boil, but you’ll see how we’ve reached our answer.
This book is one attempt, then, to retroactively create a consistent framework for the history of the
Doctor Who
universe. It is essentially a game, not a scientific endeavour to discover “the right answer”.
All games have to follow a consistent set of rules, and as we attempt to fit all the pieces of information we are given, we have to lay some groundwork and prioritise. If a line of dialogue from a story broadcast in 1983 flatly contradicts what was said in one from 1968, which is “right”? Some people would suggest that the newer story “got it wrong”, that the later production team didn’t pay enough attention to what came before. Others might argue that the new information “corrects” what we were told before. In practice, most fans are inconsistent, choosing the facts that best support their arguments or preferences.
The Discontinuity Guide
(1995) has some very healthy advice regarding continuity: “Take what you want and ignore what you don’t. Future continuity cops will just have to adapt to your version”.
Basic Principles
For the purposes of this book, we have worked from the following assumptions:
• Every
Doctor Who
story takes place in the same universe, unless explicitly stated otherwise. The same individual fought the Daleks with Jo on Spiridon (on TV), Beep the Meep with Sharon (in the
Doctor Who Magazine
comics), the Ice Warriors with Benny in London (in the Virgin novels), became Zagreus in the Antiverse (in the audios), blew up Gallifrey to prevent Faction Paradox taking over the universe (in the BBC Books novels), saved Rose from the Autons and married River Song (on TV, again).
For legal, marketing or artistic reasons, it should be noted that some of the people making
Doctor Who
have occasionally stated that they don’t feel this to be the case. However there are innumerable cross references (say, Romana being president of Gallifrey in both the books and the audios) and in-jokes that suggest very strongly that, for example, the eighth Doctor of the books is the same individual as the eighth Doctor of the Big Finish audios - or at the very least, they’ve both got almost-identical histories.
• The universe has one, true “established history”. Nothing (short of a being with godlike powers) can significantly change the course of history with any degree of permanency within that universe. The Mars attacked by the Fendahl is the Mars of the Ice Warriors.
• We have noted where each date we have assigned comes from. Usually it is from dialogue (in which case, it’s quoted), but often it comes from behind-the-scenes sources such as scripts, publicity material and the like. It is up to the individual reader whether a date from a BBC Press release or draft script is as “valid” as one given on screen.
• In many cases, no date was ever given for a story. In such instances, we pick a year and explain our reasons. Often, we will assign a date that is consistent with information given in other stories. (So, it’s suggested that the Cyber War mentioned in
Revenge of the Cybermen
must take place after
The Tomb of the Cybermen
, and probably after
Earthshock
because of what is said in those other stories.) These dates are marked as arbitrary and the reasoning behind them is explained in the footnotes.
• Where a date isn’t established on screen, we have also included the dates suggested by others who have compiled timelines or listed dates given in the series. Several similar works to this have been attempted, and we have listed the most relevant in the Bibliography.
• It’s been assumed that historical events take place at the same time and for the same reasons as they did in “real history”, unless specifically contradicted by the television series. Unless given reason to think otherwise, we assume that the Doctor is telling the truth about meeting historical figures, and that his historical analysis is correct. (It has, however, been established that the Doctor is fallible and / or an incorrigible name-dropper.) When there’s a reference in our footnotes to “science”, “scientists”, “history” or “historians”, unless stated otherwise it means scholars and academics from the real world, not the
Doctor Who
universe (they are usually invoked when
Doctor Who
’s version of science or events strays a distance from ours).
• Information given is usually taken literally and at face value, unless there’s strong reason to think that the person giving it is lying or mistaken. Clearly, if an expert like the Doctor is talking about something he knows a great deal about, we can probably trust the information more than some bystander’s vague remark.
•
Ahistory
’s version of Earth’s future history is generally one of steady progress, and as such stories featuring similar themes and concepts tend to be lumped together - say, intergalactic travel, isolated colonies, humanoid robots and so on. If the technology, transportation or weaponry seen in story A is more advanced than in story B, then we might suggest that story A is set in the future of story B. We also assume that throughout future centuries, humans age at the same rate (unless told otherwise), so their life spans don’t alter too dramatically, etc. A “lifetime” in the year 4000 is still about one hundred years.
• All dates, again unless specifically stated otherwise, work from our Gregorian calendar, and all are “AD”. It is assumed that the system of leap years will remain the same in the future. For convenience, all documents use our system of dating, even those of alien civilisations. The “present” of the narrative is now, so if an event happened “two hundred years ago”, it happened in the early nineteenth century. On a number of occasions we are told that a specific date takes place on the wrong day: in
The War Machines
, 16th July, 1966, is a Monday, but it really occurred on a Saturday.
• We assume that a “year” is an Earth year of 365 days, even when an alien is speaking, unless this is specifically contradicted. This also applies to terms such as “Space Year” (
Genesis of the Daleks
), “light year” (which is used as a unit of time in
The Savages
and possibly
Terror of the Autons
) and “cycle” (e.g.
Zamper
).
• If an event is said to take place “fifty years ago”, we take it to mean exactly fifty years ago, unless a more precise date is given elsewhere or it refers to a known historical event. If an event occurs in the distant past or the far future, we tend to round up:
Image of the Fendahl
is set in about 1977, the Fifth Planet was destroyed “twelve million years” before. So, we say this happened in “12,000,000 BC”, not “11,998,023 BC”. When an event takes place an undefined number of “centuries”, “millennia” or “millions of years” before or after a story, we arbitrarily set a date.
• A “generation” is assumed to be twenty-five years, as per the Doctor’s definition in
Four to Doomsday
. A “couple” of years is always two years, a “few” is less than “several” which is less than “many”, with “some” taken to be an arbitrary or unknown number. A “billion” is generally the American and modern British unit (a thousand million) rather than the old British definition (a million million).
• Characters are in their native time zone unless explicitly stated otherwise. Usually, when a
Doctor Who
monster or villain has a time machine, it’s central to the plot. On television, the Cybermen only explicitly have time travel in
Attack of the Cybermen
, for example, and they’ve stolen the time machine in question. It clearly can’t be “taken for granted” that they can go back in history. The Sontarans have a (primitive) time machine in
The Time Warrior
, and are clearly operating on a scale that means they can defy the Time Lords in
The Invasion of Time
and
The Two Doctors
, but there’s no evidence they routinely travel in time. The only one of the Doctor’s (non-Time Lord) foes with a mastery of time travel are the Daleks - they develop time travel in
The Chase
, and definitely use it in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
,
The Evil of the Daleks
,
Day of the Daleks
,
Resurrection of the Daleks
,
Remembrance of the Daleks
,
Dalek
,
Army of Ghosts
,
Doomsday
,
Daleks in Manhattan, Evolution of the Daleks
,
The Stolen Earth
,
Journey’s End
and
Victory of the Daleks
. Even so, in the remaining stories, we’ve resisted assuming that the Daleks are time travellers.