B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (14 page)

BF - The Big Finish audio adventures

DL -
The Darksmith Legacy

DWM -
Doctor Who
Magazine
(also known for a time as
Doctor Who
Monthly
)

DWW -
Doctor Who
Weekly
(as the magazine was initially called until issue #44)

FP -
Faction Paradox

EDA - Eighth Doctor Adventures (the ongoing novels published by the BBC)

IRIS - The Iris Wildthyme adventures

KC -
Kaldor City

K9 - The
K9
TV show

J&L - Big Finish’s
Jago & Litefoot
audio adventures

MA - Missing Adventures (the past Doctor novels published by Virgin)

NA - New Adventures (the ongoing novels published by Virgin, chiefly featuring the seventh Doctor)

NSA - New Series Adventures (featuring the ninth, tenth and eleventh Doctors)

PDA - Past Doctor Adventure (the past Doctor novels published by the BBC)

SJA -
The Sarah Jane Adventures

SJS - Big Finish’s
Sarah Jane Smith
audio series

TEL - Telos novellas

TimeH -
Time Hunter

TV - The TV series

TW -
Torchwood

TWM -
Torchwood: The Official Magazine

In the text of the book, the following marker appears to indicate when the action of specific stories take place:

c 2005 - The Repetition of the Cliche

The title is exactly as it appeared on screen or on the cover. For the Hartnell stories without an overall title given on screen, we have used the titles that appear on the BBC’s product (
An Unearthly Child
,
The Daleks
,
The Edge of Destruction
, etc.).

The letter before the date, the “code”, indicates how accurately we know the date. If there is no code, then that date is precisely established in the story itself (e.g.
The Daleks’ Master Plan
is set in the year 4000 exactly).

• “c” means that the story is set circa that year (e.g.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
is set “c 2167”)

• “?” indicates a guess, and the reasons for it are given in the footnotes (e.g. we don’t know what year
Destiny of the Daleks
is set in, but it must be “centuries” after
The Daleks’ Master Plan
, so it’s here set it in “? 4600”).

• “&” means that the story is dated relative another story that we lack a date for (e.g.: we know that
Resurrection of the Daleks
is set “ninety years” after Destiny of the Daleks, so
Resurrection of the Daleks
is set in “& 4690”). If one story moves, the linked one also has to.

• “u” means that the story featured UNIT. There is, to put it mildly, some discussion about exactly when the UNIT stories are set. For the purposes of this guidebook, see the introduction to the UNIT Section.

• “=” indicates action that takes place in a parallel universe or a divergent timestream (such as
Inferno
or
Battlefield
). Often, the Doctor succeeds in restoring the correct timeline or erasing an aberrant deviation of history - those cases are indicated by brackets - “(=)”. As this information technically isn’t part of history, it’s set apart by boxes with dashed lines.

• “@” is a story set during the eighth Doctor’s period living on Earth from 1888 (starting with
The Ancestor Cell
) to 2001 (
Escape Velocity
). During this period, he was without a working TARDIS or his memories.

• “w” refers to an event that took place during the future War timeline (a.k.a. the War in Heaven, not to be confused with the Last Great Time War featured in New
Who
) in the eighth Doctor books, and which continued in the
Faction Paradox
series. Events in
The Ancestor Cell
annulled this timeline, but remnants of it “still happened” in the real
Doctor Who
timeline, just as
Day of the Daleks
“still happened” even though the future it depicted was averted.

We’ve attempted to weed out references that just aren’t very telling, relevant or interesting. Clearly, there’s a balance to be had, as half the fun of a book like this is in listing trivia and strange juxtapositions, but a timeline could easily go to absurd extremes. If a novel set in 1980 said that a minor character was 65, lived in a turn-of-the-century terraced house and bought the Beatles album
Rubber Soul
when it first came out, then it could generate entries for c 1900, 1915 and 1965. We would only list these if they were relevant to the story or made for particularly interesting reading.

We haven’t listed birthdates of characters, except the Doctor’s companions or other major recurring figures, again unless it represents an important story point.

 Pre-History

Before our universe, others existed with different physical laws. The universe immediately prior to our own had its own Time Lords, and as their universe reached the point of collapse, they shunted themselves into a parallel universe and discovered that they now possessed almost infinite power.
 [1]

Rassilon speculated that the beings Raag, Nah and Rok had created and destroyed many universes.
 [2]
Before the creation of the universe, the Disciples of the Light rose up against the Beast and chained him in the Pit. It was theorised that the Beast would go on to inspire archetypes of evil on many planets, including Earth, Draconia, Skaro (where it was rendered as the Kaled god of war), Damos, Veltino and Vel Consadine.
 [3]
Abaddon, a grey-skinned creature that apparently hailed from the same race as the Beast, and its opposite number, the blue-skinned Pwccm, were respectively champions of the Light and the Dark - capricious beings of pure halogen that warred against one another, and in time would use the Cardiff Rift to traverse dimensions.
 [4]

The third Doctor once almost accidentally sent the TARDIS into the void before the universe started.
 [5]

The Entropy Sirens were born and “danced” before the first hydrogen atoms combined. Their ability to live in our reality was greatly diminished as nucleo-synthesis silenced the universe’s scream of creation.
 [6]

The second Doctor tricked the Vist into travelling back to the start of the universe... where they fell off the edge of it, tumbled into the universe that existed beforehand, and became trapped in a formless, timeless dimension.
 [7]

The Dawn of Time

The universe was created in a huge explosion known as the Big Bang. As this was the very first thing to happen, scientists sometimes refer to it as “Event One”.

“Among the adherents of Scientific Mythology [q.v.] the element (Hydrogen) is widely believed to be the basic constituent out of which the Galaxy was first formed [see EVENT ONE] and evidence in support of this hypothesis includes its supposed appearance in spectroscopic analysis of massive star bodies.”
 [8]

The Time Lords of Gallifrey monitored the Big Bang, and precisely determined the date of Event One.
 [9]
The Doctor claimed to have been an eye-witness at the origins of the universe.
 [10]

“The dawn of time. The beginning of all beginnings. Two forces only: Good and Evil. Then chaos. Time is born: matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces
shatter
as the Universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow,
somehow
, the evil force survives. An intelligence. Pure
evil
.”

The evil force retained its sentience and spread its influence throughout time and space. It became the entity that the Vikings would call Fenric.
 [11]

One ship managed to travel to the dawn of creation, albeit by accident. Terminus was a vast spaceship built by an infinitely advanced, ancient race capable of time travel. The ship developed a fault, and the pilot was forced to eject some of its unstable fuel into the void before making a time jump. The explosion that resulted was the Big Bang. Terminus was thrown billions of years into the future, where it came to settle in the exact centre of the universe.
 [12]
The universe was created when the time-travelling starship
Vipod Mor
arrived at this point and exploded.
 [13]

The Urbankan Monarch believed that if his ship could travel faster than light, it would move backwards in time to the Big Bang and beyond. Monarch believed that he was God and that he would meet himself at the creation of the Universe.
 [14]

Timeless
 [15]

The eighth Doctor piloted the TARDIS back to before the Big Bang, hoping to avoid a myriad of parallel realities by entering the correct history from the very start. Chloe, a small girl from a devastated planet, arrived onhand. Jamais, her time travelling dog, aided the overstrained TARDIS in reaching London, 2003. The Doctor’s party re-visited this era when Sabbath and Kalicum, an agent of the Council of Eight, attempted to seed an intelligence gestated within a heap of diamonds into the start of history. The Doctor failed, and the intelligence became part of the fabric of the universe.

The diamonds allowed the Council of Eight to map out events throughout the whole of history.
 [16]

Insect-like “forces of chaos” fed on the debris of the Big Bang, just as they would feed on the collapse of the universe.
 [17]
Eleven physical dimensions existed at first, quickly collapsing down to the five dimensions familiar to us. The other dimensions came to exist only at the subatomic level.
 [18]
Beings named the Quoth evolved inside atoms and were the size of quarks.
 [19]
The Sidhe came to exist in all eleven dimensions.
 [20]
The remaining six dimensions became the Six-Fold Realm, and each of the six Guardians represented one such dimension.
 [21]

As the universe was formed, an eight-dimensional “radiating blackness” infused space and time. Eventually, the Unity of the Scourge evolved in this darkness.
 [22]
The Weeping Angels, also sometimes called the Lonely Assassins, were as old as the universe or very nearly. They were quite nice where they hailed from, but developed into quantum-locked hunters who turned to stone if seen.
 [23]
The “weeping angels of old” were known to Rassilon.
 [24]

The first few chaotic microseconds of the universe saw extreme temperatures and the forging of bizarre elements that would be unable to exist later. This was the Leptonic Era, and one of the bizarre elements created was Helium 2.
 [25]

Time and Space as we understand them began as these bizarre elements reacted with each other and cooled.

The Shadow, an agent of the Black Guardian, claimed to have been waiting since eternity began in the hopes of obtaining the Key to Time.
 [26]
The Master attempted to kill the newly-regenerated fifth Doctor by sending him backwards in time to a hydrogen inrush early in the universe’s history.
 [27]
Matter coalesced, elements formed.
 [28]

The Epoch claimed to be from the dawn of time, and that they would meet Bernice Summerfield there.
 [29]

“The Dark Time, the Time of Chaos”

The Time Lords from the pre-universe entered our universe, and discovered that they had undreamt-of powers. They became known as the Great Old Ones: Hastur the Unspeakable became Fenric; Yog-Sothoth, also known as the Intelligence, began billennia of conquests; the Lloigor, or Animus, dominated Vortis; Shub-Niggurath conquered Polymos and colonised it with her offspring, the Nestene Consciousness; Dagon was worshipped by the Sea Devils.