B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (28 page)

[
244
]
Love and War

[
245
]
The War Games

[
246
] “The Stockbridge Horror”

[
247
] “Ground Zero”

[
248
] “Hundreds of thousands of years” before
The Year of Intelligent Tigers.

[
249
]
The Ice Warriors
. Arden states that the Ice Warrior Varga comes from ice dating from “prehistoric times, before the first Ice Age”. Arden’s team have discovered the remains of mastodons and fossils in the ice before this time. In
Legacy
, the Doctor states that Varga “crashed on Earth millions of years ago”.
Timelink
favoured that Varga’s ship fell to Earth in “10,000 BC”
; About Time
, acknowledging the vagueness of the evidence, said it was some undetermined point between “1,000,000 BC” and “8,000 BC”.

[
250
] According to Benny in
The Dying Days
.

[
251
]
An Unearthly Child, Ghost Light.

The First Ice Age

According to
Doctor Who
, the Ice Age was a single event around one hundred thousand years ago. In reality, there were waves of ice ages that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years as the ice advanced and retreated. We may now be living in an interglacial period.
An Unearthly Child
seems to take place at the end of the Ice Age: the caveman Za speaks of “the great cold” - although this might simply mean a particularly harsh winter. Similarly, the butler Nimrod talks of “ice floods” and “mammoths” in
Ghost Light
, and he’s one of the last generation of Neanderthals. In
The Daemons
, the Doctor says that Azal arrived on Earth “to help
homo sapiens
take out Neanderthal man”, and Miss Hawthorne immediately states that this was “one hundred thousand years” ago.

[
252
]
Last of the Titans

[
253
]
Ghost Light

[
254
]
The Daemons, Ghost Light
. Science tells us that the Ichthyosaurs actually died out at the time of the dinosaurs. In
Timewyrm: Genesys
, Enkidu is one of the last Neanderthals. In reality, Neanderthals only evolved about one hundred thousand years ago and survived for about sixty thousand years, until the Cro-Magnon Period.

[
255
] Dating
An Unearthly Child
(1.1) and
The Eight Doctors
(EDA #1) - Ian confirms in
The Sensorites
that the story is set “in prehistoric times”. (
An Unearthly Child
itself never explicitly states that it’s set on Earth, rather than another primitive planet.) Now that we know that the production team called the first televised story
100,000 BC
at the time it was made (the title appears on a press release dated 1st November, 1963), dating the story has become a lot less problematical. Anthony Coburn’s original synopsis of the story also gives the date as “100,000 BC”.

The first edition of
The Making of Doctor Who
placed the story in “33,000 BC” (which is more historically accurate), but the second edition corrected this to “100,000 BC”.
The Programme Guide
said “500,000 BC”,
The Terrestrial Index
settled on “c100,000 BC”.
The Doctor Who File
suggested “200,000 BC”.
The TARDIS Special
claimed a date of “50,000 BC”,
The Discontinuity Guide
“500,000 BC - 30,000 BC”.
Timelink
says 100,000 BC.
About Time
leaned toward a date of “not much earlier than 40,000 BC”.

[
256
] Dating
TW: The Men Who Sold the World
(
TW
novel #18) - The year is given.

[
257
]
Time and Relative

[
258
] “A hundred thousand years” before
Snowglobe 7
.

[
259
] “The Vanity Box”. Events on the asteroid take place in
The Wishing Beast
.

[
260
]
Dreamtime

[
261
] More than a hundred thousand years before
The Sandman
.

[
262
] “A hundred thousand years of conflict” before
Heroes of Sontar.

[
263
]
City of Death
,
Image of the Fendahl
,
The Daemons
.

[
264
]
Autumn Mist

[
265
] “Seventy thousand years” before
The Crystal Bucephalus
(p34). The fungoids on Mechanus in
The Chase
were named “Gubbage Cones” in the script but not on screen.

[
266
]
The Quantum Archangel

[
267
]
Four to Doomsday

Monarch’s Journey

There is a great deal of confusion about the dates of Monarch’s visits to Earth, as recorded in
Four to Doomsday.
The story is set in 1981. The Greek named Bigon says he was abducted “one hundred generations ago [c.500 BC], and this is confirmed by Monarch’s aide Enlightenment - she goes on to say that the visit to ancient Greece was the last time the Urbankans had visited Earth. Bigon says that the ship last left Urbanka “1250 years ago”, that the initial journey to Earth took “20,000 years” and that “Monarch has doubled the speed of the ship on every subsequent visit.”

This is complicated, but the maths do work. The speed only doubles every time the ship arrives at
Earth
, perhaps because of some kind of slingshot effect. Monarch’s ship left Urbanka for the first time in 55,519 BC, it arrived at Earth twenty thousand years later (35,519 BC), the speed doubled so the ship arrived back at Urbanka ten thousand years later (25,519 BC), it returned to Earth (15,519 BC), the speed doubled and the ship travelled back to Urbanka (arriving 10,519 BC). Monarch returned to Earth (in 5519 BC), the speed doubled once again and the ship arrived back at Urbanka (in 3019 BC). The ship made its final visit to Earth around 519 BC, and now the trip back to Urbanka only took 1250 years. The ship left Urbanka (731 AD) and reached Earth in 1981.

However, this solution leaves a number of historical problems - see the individual entries.

[
268
]
TW: Miracle Day
. The advent of money occurred a lot later than this, though.

[
269
] “Fifty thousand years” before the 2008 portion of
TW:
“Rift War”.

[
270
] Fifty thousand years before
Benny: The Infernal Nexus
.

[
271
] Peri has just turned down an opportunity to visit the caves with her mother at the beginning of
Planet of Fire.
Although filmed on Lanzarote and named as such in the story, in real life Lanzarote was nowhere near any ancient Greek trading routes.

[
272
]
Four to Doomsday
. Bigon states that Kurkurtji was taken “thirty thousand years” ago. Examples of Australian Aboriginal art that are at least twenty-five thousand years old survive
.

[
273
]
Trading Futures

[
274
] Dating
Only Human
(NSA #5) - The Doctor and Jack calculate the precise date.

[
275
] According to the Doctor in
Only Human
, which doesn’t take into account the two survivors he met in
Ghost Light
and
Timewyrm: Genesys
.

[
276
] Thirty thousand years before
The Song of the Megaptera
.

[
277
] “Twenty-five thousand years” before
First Frontier.
Yuggoth is another reference to H.P. Lovecraft (it’s his name for the planet Pluto).

[
278
] “Twenty-five thousand years” before
The Land of the Dead
.

[
279
]
The Seeds of Doom

[
280
]
Return to the Web Planet
. “Pwodoruk” is the name the Optera give to the Animus, evidently taking after this legend.

[
281
] “Thirty thousand years” before “A Fairytale Life”.

[
282
] “Eighteen thousand years” before
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.

[
283
]
Four to Doomsday
. Bigon claims that Villagra is a “Mayan”. Although the Doctor boasts of his historical knowledge, he then suggests that the Mayans flourished “eight thousand years ago”, but the civilisation really dated from c.300 AD - c.900 AD. The Urbankans, though, don’t visit Earth after 500 BC. It would appear that Villagra must come from an ancient, unknown pre-Mayan civilisation.

[
284
] “A dozen millennia” before
The King of Terror.

[
285
]
The Tomorrow Windows
(p256).

[
286
] “Eleven thousand years” before Nyssa’s time, according to
Cold Fusion
.

[
287
] “Ten thousand years” before
Invasion of the Cat-People
.

[
288
] “Ten thousand years” before
King of Terror
.

[
289
] “Many thousands of years” before
Superior Beings.

[
290
]
The Veiled Leopard

[
291
]
City of Death
. Scaroth says that he “turned the first wheel”. Archaeologists think that mankind discovered the wheel around 8000 BC.

[
292
]
Day of the Moon

[
293
]
The Waters of Mars
. A deleted scene said that the Martians left Mars because they could not beat the monsters from that story, the Flood. Nonetheless, because the scene
was
omitted, it’s unclear within the fiction if the Flood was frozen after the Martian ecology went into decline (
The Judgement of Isskar
), or in one of Mars’ polar regions beforehand.

[
294
]
The Waters of Mars

[
295
]
Wishing Well
. This could have been at any time, but here it’s assumed that the Doctor and Martha visited when the castles were at their height, rather than in ruins.