Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
2001 (November) - “The Fallen”
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The dead were walking in West Norwood in London, and seven people had disappeared. The eighth Doctor and Izzy discovered Grace Holloway investigating with MI6, which was secretly run by Leighton Woodrow.
Grace had recovered the Master’s DNA from her encounter with him. Working with the scientist Donald Stark, she hoped to unlock the secrets of regeneration - she thought the eighth Doctor had been hinting she
should
do so by mentioning he was half-human, and telling her to hold back death. However, Grace’s sample wasn’t Time Lord DNA as she had believed. Stark was transformed into a snake creature - a morphant from Skaro like the Master before him. The Doctor destroyed the Stark monster, even as Woodrow decided to blame the explosion on Arab terrorists. As the Doctor left, Woodrow found one of his men... killed by the Master’s tissue compression eliminator.
Donna Noble’s mother gifted her with Tesco’s brand of unisex perfume,
Odeur Delaware
, at Christmas 2001. Donna used it to treat bites and stings - and, in future, sprayed it into the eyes of a hostile female Sycorax.
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2002
Mickey Smith’s mother had been unable to cope with raising him, and his father - Jeremiah Smith, who formerly worked at the key-cutters on Clifton Parade - went to Spain and never returned. Mickey was raised by his blind gran, but she died after tripping and falling down the stairs.
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The “Great Drought of ‘02” affected the UK.
[928]
The main Xhinn fleet was due to arrive on Earth in 2002.
[929]
The Council of Eight arranged for a drug overdose to kill Sam Jones, a former companion of the Doctor, who had become an ecocampaigner.
[930]
The eighth Doctor found another part of Octan’s skeleton in New York, 2002.
[931]
Zero, the orange, gelatinous child of a Vortex Dweller, came through the Rift and wound up in a cell at the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff.
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The fertiliser Bloom was developed, but it was viral and spread uncontrollably. It was banned before 2010.
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c 2002 - The Ratings War
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The tyrannical Beep the Meep escaped from his imprisonment in a
Lassie
film, and used blackstar radiation to mesmerise executives at a TV network. Under Beep’s direction, the network enjoyed success with shows such as
Appealing Animals in Distress
and
Hospital Street
, the first ever 24-hour soap opera.
Beep sought to brainwash the public through subliminal messages jointly seeded into the final episode of
Audience Shares
, and the debut of
Beep and Friends
. The sixth Doctor crushed this scheme, and exposed Beep’s murderous tendencies on national television. Authorities apprehended the raving Meep.
2002 - The Forge: Project: Valhalla
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Nimrod recruited Cassie Schofield, who had become savage during her self-imposed exile, as an agent of the Forge.
2002 (6th June) - Tales from the Vault
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The fourth Doctor and Romana checked an art gallery to see if the Doctor had left himself any messages in the corners of paintings, and learned that one of the great lost art treasures of the universe - the
Quistador Molari
- was on sale at a London auction house. The painting had caused more suffering than any other work in history, including everything by Tracey Emin, because it would depict the future death of anyone who looked at it, driving them mad. The Doctor took the painting away to destroy it, but as he didn’t dare look at the item, Sergeant Ruth Matheson of UNIT substituted a fake beforehand. The genuine item wound up in Unit’s Vault, and was classified as an Omega 10 artifact, only to be used when all alternatives had failed.
2002 (7th June) - Benny: Secret Origins
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The android Robyn and a temporal projection of Bernice Summerfield encountered their arch-nemesis, Samuel Frost. He procured the Right and Left Hands of God - powerful artifacts that granted great power to anyone attaching them to a handless statue of Arincias, one of the lost gods of Atlantis.
Sarah Jane Smith Series 1
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Sarah Jane Smith was now crafting exposes for Planet 3 Broadcasting. The Crimson Chapter tested Sarah to see if she was the herald cited in
The Book of Tomorrows
, and so provided backing to the former members of Think Tank and their leader, Hilda Winters. The ex-Think Tank members arranged for Sarah to be fired when accusations she levelled against Halter Corp, a Scottish fishery, were thought to be based upon false evidence. Her reputation in tatters, Sarah began living under various aliases.
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2002 - SJS: Comeback
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Six months after the Planet 3 broadcast that had hobbled her career, Sarah Jane continued trying to clear her name. Her associates included a computer hacker named Natalie Redfern and a young do-gooder named Josh Townsend. Sarah’s investigations took her to Cloots Coombe, where the local Squire had been feeding people to the monster that lived in the town well. Josh set fire to the Rechauffer labs, destroying the facility and incinerating the well-mutant.
Josh was actually a member of the White Chapter, and had inveigled himself into Sarah’s life to protect her.
2002 - SJS: The Tao Connection
Sarah, Natallie and Josh looked into the death of an 18-year-old whose prematurely aged body was fished from the Thames. They linked the incident to Holtooth Hall, a retirement home where the lives of aged multi-millionaries were being extended by draughts of
chi
-enriched blood taken from young people, who consequently aged to death. The pop star Lotus, renowned as an ageless beauty, had withdrawn from public life after she had been expelled from Holtooth and started aging. Sarah and her allies ended the operation, and the billionaire Will Butley, who had survived for three hundred years, died when denied the draughts.
2002 - SJS: Test of Nerve
Hilda Winters’ group anonymously challenged Sarah Jane to stop a sarin-gas attack slated to occur in London in the next twenty-four hours. A former soldier, James Carver, threatened to unleash sarin pellets in the Underground unless the Prime Minister met his demands for compensation to British soldiers given unsafe vaccines as test subjects. Carver eventually backed down and killed himself. Sarah Jane’s old friend - Claudia Coster, an administrator in the Ministry of Intelligence - also died during these events.
2002 - SJS: Ghost Town
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Sarah Jane sold Lavinia’s property in Moreton Harwood, and moved into Claudia Coster’s old flat.
Dr Mikhail Berberova, a physics professor, had perfected a means of using low-frequency electromagnetic fields to affect people’s perceptions, causing them to think they were seeing ghosts. Nefarious parties seeking to disrupt an international peace conference in Romania used this technique to terrorize the delegates. Sarah and Josh exposed an expatriate Brit - Christian Ian Abbotly - as being behind the operation. The conference resumed after a hiatus.
2002 - SJS: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre
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Sarah Jane travelled to India to investigate illicit genetic research being done by a company named Scala, and came face-to-face with the ex-members of Think Tank, including Hilda Winters. Winters’ group planned to kill millions by contaminating a series of dams and reservoirs - the Parambikulam-Aliyar Project - with an engineered brucella virus. Sarah and her allies thwarted their plan, but Winters escaped. Scala lost its government contracts.
c 2002 - The Fearmonger
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Sherilyn Harper’s New Britannia Party was gaining political influence by preaching strong anti-immigration policies. She was subject to an assassination attempt at the hands of United Front terrorists. Serious riots started spreading as the population panicked, but Harper was made to unwittingly broadcast a confession that New Britannia was secretly funding the United Front. The situation may or may not have been whipped up by the Fearmonger, an energy being from Boslin II. The seventh Doctor and Ace had been tracking the Fearmonger and destroyed it. Beryllium laser guns were top secret in this era.
2002 - Rutans: In 2 Minds
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The Rutan Host didn’t deem Earth of strategic importance at present. The renegade Rutan brought to the UK summoned about two dozen other such rogues, intending that they should form a new Rutan Host aware of the benefits of individuality, and overthrow the current Host. The United Kingdom’s air defences registered the rogues’ ship as an unidentified craft and destroyed it.
c 2002 - Drift
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The fourth Doctor and Leela landed in New Hampshire and met soldiers from the elite White Shadow unit. They were looking to retrieve a crashed fighter that was testing the Stormcore, an alien device recovered thirty years earlier. Also, an ice monster was loose in the area. The Doctor realised the Stormcore had opened a portal into another dimension, and that the monster was not intelligent, but was inadvertently killing people while trying to make contact. The Doctor crystallised the monster and handed it over to the authorities.
2002 (late August) - Time Zero
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The reclusive billionaire Maxwell Curtis had learned that his body contained a microscopic remnant of the Big Bang, masquerading as an ordinary atom, which was in danger of collapsing and turning him into a black hole. He had founded the Naryshkin Institute in Siberia as a means of researching black hole phenomena.
Led by Control, a division of the American CIA suspected the Institute was conducting time travel experiments. Control’s agents constructed a temporal detector and identified Anji as a time traveller. They made her accompany them to Siberia.
In Siberia, the eighth Doctor found that Curtis’ black hole matter was distorting space-time in the region. This allowed the Doctor to free Fitz and George Williamson from the icy prison from which they had been trapped in 1894. Williamson existed in a ghostly state, as the universe couldn’t decide if he’d survived or not.
Curtis travelled down a time corridor into the past that Williamson’s pseudo-existence had generated, hoping to reach Time Zero and spare Earth by unleashing his black hole matter there. The Doctor realised that if the black hole within Curtis erupted before time began, it would destroy the universe. The Doctor convinced Williamson to go back with him to 1894 and avert Williamson getting trapped in the ice, which nullified the time corridor’s existence. Curtis travelled back no further than 1894, and died in a comparatively minor explosion.
Curtis’ black hole mass attracted light from a far distant o-region to Earth. The o-region light contained something organic, which lodged itself on Earth’s past and would manifest in the late nineteenth century as a fire elemental.
Trix, a disguise artist who sometimes worked for Sabbath, took the opportunity to stow herself aboard the TARDIS.
2002 (November) - Unnatural History
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A dimensional scar, the after-effect of the singularity that befell Earth on New Year’s Eve, 2000, appeared in San Francisco. The eighth Doctor investigated the anomaly, but his companion Samantha Jones was lost to it. He sought out Sam’s original self, a dark-haired drug user, to assist. The Doctor also recruited Professor Joyce, a resident of Berkeley, to craft a dimensional stabiliser. Fitz and the dark-haired Sam became lovers.
Griffen the Unnaturalist, an agent of a secret Society that catalogued all aliens, arrived at this time to collect specimens for his catalogue. Dark-haired Sam sacrificed herself to the anomaly to restore blonde-haired Sam, who helped the Doctor to unleash the Unnaturalist’s extra-dimensional specimen case. The freed specimens drove the Unnaturalist into the dimensional scar, and the case sealed it permanently.
The Doctor later realised that blonde Sam’s timeline came about because she touched his biodata within the scar, meaning that she paradoxically facilitated her own creation.
On 30th November, 2002, the gunman Murdock killed five people... although Ace’s interference in history reduced this total to three. This was about as far in the future as she could travel using her time hopper.
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The Day the World Turned Dayglo
, Hollywood’s take on the Jex-Canavitchi war, was released in late 2002. Reporter Gabrielle Graddige approached the Brigadier in January 2003 for the true story.
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