B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (324 page)

[
1624
]
The Forgotten Army

[
1625
]
The Ark

The Segments of Time

The Commander in
The Ark
states “Nero, the Trojan Wars, the Daleks... all that happened in the First Segment of Time.” References in that story to the Tenth and Twenty-Seventh Segments are noted later in this book
. The Well-Mannered War
is set in the Fifty-Eighth.

It’s unclear whether a Segment is measured purely mathematically. A “century” has to mean “a hundred years”. If a Segment is a fixed period of time, then as
The Ark
is set ten million years in the future, this might suggest fifty-seven equal segments of around 175,000 years.

Equally, the term might mark a specific era with distinct cultural or even physical features (like, say, “Victorian” or “Ice Age”). What would mark the beginning or end of a Segment? Would the boundary be formally defined and obvious (like say that of “the tenth Olympiad”, or “the Leptonic Era”), even if it was open to a degree of interpretation (we can speak of “the Second World War”, even though the exact moment it started and ended depends on which country you’re from and how you define terms)?

Timelink
offers the theory that as Zentos refers to “the Fifty-Seventh Segment of Earth life” and the Commander says “The Earth also is dying, we have left it for the last time”, that Earth has been “left” before, and each Segment ends with the abandonment of Earth. It’s neat and, as noted elsewhere in this book, Earth is certainly totally evacuated more than once. However,
Bad Wolf
and
The Parting of the Ways
have the Daleks active after the first abandonment of Earth, and, if the Commander is right, they were only part of the history of the First Segment.

[
1626
]
The Parting of the Ways
. The Controller says the Daleks have been there for “hundreds and hundreds of years”, the Doctor says “generations”, and the Emperor Dalek says “centuries passed”.

[
1627
] Dating “War of the Words” (
DWM
#51) - The story is set after the twentieth century, because parliamentary records from that period are stored here. The head librarian robot has just had his two thousand year service, suggesting the facility has been around for millennia. Beyond that, no date is specified, so this is completely arbitrary.

[
1628
] Dating
Home Truths
(BF CC #3.5) - It’s “a thousand years” before the linking sequences of
Home Truths
,
The Drowned World
and
The Guardian of the Solar System
.

[
1629
] The background to
DWM
’s Crimson Hand storyarc, given in “Mortal Beloved”, “The Age of Ice”, “The Crimson Hand” and “Hotel Historia”. Majenta’s “relative age” is given as “eighty-one Earth years” in “The Age of Ice” (which may or may not include the time she’s spent TARDIS-travelling), so under the dating scheme in this chronology, she would have been born circa 199,919.

Majenta Pryce

The Crimson Hand storyarc running through the
Doctor Who Magazine
comic (
DWM
#394, 400-420) is remarkably circumspect when it comes to identifying the home era of the super-criminal Majenta Pryce, a companion of the tenth Doctor. We know that Majenta can travel in time, as she’s operating a time-travel holiday hotel when the Doctor first meets her (in the early twenty-first century, “Hotel Historia”). We also know that the Intersol agents who incarcerate her in the future at Thinktwice prison (“Thinktwice”) have time-travel capabilities.

Does Majenta originate from the modern day or the future, though? Is the time travel tech in play indicative of her society? Does the Crimson Hand also have time technology? We’re never told within the story itself - just as it’s not expressly said whether or not the storyarc’s finale (“The Crimson Hand”,
DWM
#416-420) takes place in the present or the future. The Intersol agents “time-lock” the TARDIS to prevent it escaping when the story begins, but it’s not stated if the Intersol ship then time-jumps before Majenta gets free, rejoins the Crimson Hand and conquers a vast sector of space to establish the Crimson Age. Admittedly, if the Crimson Age
was
contemporary, it would be nothing short of miraculous that the Hand’s sweeping and tyrannical empire seems far removed from Earth and in no way affects it, but that’s the best evidence that can be cited for Majenta and the Hand being future-based.

Author Dan McDaid had privately decided that Majenta, the Crimson Hand, the Thinktwice prison and Intersol all originated from the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire - his intention being that the grubbiness of the Thinktwice facility nicely emulated the moral and social decay seen in
The Long Game
. “Intersol”, McDaid commented over email, “have acquired time travel from somewhere (probably misappropriated from a Time Agent), so they’re able to pursue their targets across time and space.” He added, “[The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire] is also Majenta’s ‘home’ era... but you don’t have to take any of this as gospel, and feel free to monkey about with it if you need to.”

With the actual story evidence being so vague, it seems best to follow McDaid’s lead and presume that Majenta and the Hand hail from in or near the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. It also seems fair to think that time travel in this era is limited to parties such as Intersol, because widespread time tech would radically alter the equation when the Daleks launch an all-out attack on Earth (
The Parting of the Ways
).

[
1630
] “The Age of Ice” and “The Crimson Hand”, although there doesn’t appear to be a point in the story when this could have occurred.

[
1631
] Dating “Thinktwice” (
DWM
#400-402) - The warden mentions his intention to spread use of the Knowsall machine through “The entire human empire!” The “cosmic bailiffs” who bring Majenta to Thinktwice presumably belong to Intersol - the justice organisation (“The Crimson Hand”) that has access to time travel technology, but whose members aren’t necessarily part of humanity.

[
1632
] Dating “The Crimson Hand” (
DWM
#416-420) - This resolves
DWM
’s ongoing Crimson Hand storyarc; see the Majenta Pryce sidebar.

[
1633
] Dating
The Long Game
(X1.7) - The Doctor gives the date. It’s established in
Bad Wolf
and
The Parting of the Ways
that the Jagrafess was a tool of the Daleks.

[
1634
]
Bad Wolf

[
1635
] “Twenty years” before
Bad Wolf
, according to the
Big Brother
contestant Lynda Moss.

[
1636
] Dating
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways
(X1.12-1.13) - The Doctor says in
Bad Wolf
that “it’s the year two-zero-zero-one-zero-zero”, and the opening caption says it is “one hundred years” after
The Long Game
. Lynda says the Game Station has ten thousand channels, although the Doctor’s
Big Brother
game is broadcast on Channel 44,000. Lucifer is (almost certainly) the planet featured in
Lucifer Rising
. It’s unclear whether Rose used her power to restore anyone or anything other than Captain Jack - it’s not stated that she, for example, reset the devastated Earth. Jack’s journey to the nineteenth century is referenced in
Utopia
.

[
1637
] Jack in
TW: Miracle Day
, summarising the immortality that he exhibits throughout
Torchwood
and
Doctor Who
.

[
1638
] Dating “Mortal Beloved” (
DWM
#406-407) - It’s been “centuries” since Majenta Pryce abandoned Sparks. The application of tachyonics seen here is independent from the Argolis experiments seen in
The Leisure Hive
. Mazumas are a currency mentioned in the
DWM
comic (see The Mazuma Era); grotzis are a currency mentioned by Glitz (
The Trial of a Time Lord
,
Dragonfire
).

[
1639
] Dating
Home Truths
,
The Drowned World
and
The Cold Equations
(BF CC #3.5, 4.1, 5.12) - The linking material in this trilogy of audios featuring Sara Kingdom takes place on an island at Ely, and although the historical clues are fairly numerous, no actual date is given.
Cold Equations
all-but names the Cahlians as being responsible for the very same sleeping sickness that afflicts Earth in
The Drowned World
and
The Guardian of the Solar System
. Given that Simon Guerrier wrote all four audios, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

The claim in
Cold Equations
that the continents of Earth are “all different shapes” brings to mind the devastation seen in
The Parting of the Ways
, and suggests - but doesn’t confirm - that the sharp decline of Earth in the Kingdom trilogy is the result of the devastation of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. That Empire is so advanced that it might well have facilitated the creation of the wish-granting house - or the house might result from the plethora of alien tech that accumulates on Earth over the millennia in numerous
Doctor Who
stories.
The Drowned World
establishes that humanity’s encounters with the Daleks are now the stuff of legend, suggesting that it’s not the immediate aftermath of
The Parting of the Ways
but rather some time later, and that humanity has in large measure forgotten (assuming they even had time to register what was happening before the Dalek onslaught) the cause of its current plight.

For benefit of non-UK residents, the Lion of Knidos is a giant stone lion on display in the British Museum, London.

[
1640
] Dating
The Guardian of the Solar System
(BF CC #5.1) - The Sara Kingdom audio trilogy concludes ten years after the end of
The Drowned World
.

[
1641
]
The Five Companions

[
1642
]
The Forgotten Army

[
1643
] Dating
Night of the Humans
(NSA #38) - The Doctor says (p19), “To be precise, it’s 14 March 250,339. And it’s six minutes past one in the afternoon”, based upon the atomic clock he retrieves from the Pioneer 10 probe. The day and year are confirmed in the Sittuun situation reports (pgs 7-9), which seem to use the Julian calendar. The existence of the Lux Academy (doubtless referencing the family prominent in
Silence in the Library
) suggests that Earth has greatly recovered from the devastation the Daleks wrought in
The Parting of the Ways
. Somewhat uniquely, the Sittuun’s natural language isn’t translatable through the TARDIS’ systems just because... it just isn’t.

[
1644
] ‘“Fifteen years” before
The Eyeless
. There is plenty of evidence that this was an incident during The Last Great Time War. The Doctor already knows of the Fortress, its Weapon and who built them. He also knows that both sides in the war are dead, and that one side had “footholds in different galaxies”. The Eyeless probe the Doctor’s mind, and see he was somehow involved with the firing of the Weapon. A number of Dalek stories have established that Skaro is in the Seventh galaxy;
The Daleks
: “The Destroyers” says it’s in the eighth. On the other hand, the Doctor says that “pretty much whoever your enemy is”, you would destroy yourself by using the Weapon against them, but The War in Heaven offers an obvious candidate for an Enemy for which that would not be the case. Possibly, the Weapon was built for the War in Heaven but used in the Last Great Time War.