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  • 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.

  • Sometimes, stories occur with the sort of impact that means it seems odd that they weren’t mentioned in an earlier story. For instance, no-one from The Power of the Daleks and The Moonbase (both shown in 1966) recalls the Daleks and Cybermen fighting in Doomsday (shown in 2006). For that matter, when the Doctor and his companions refer to their past adventures on TV, they rarely mention the events of the Missing Adventures, Past Doctor novels, comic strips or Big Finish audios. (There are exceptions, however, usually when a writer picks up a throwaway line in a TV episode.) In Doctor Who itself, this may point to some deep truth about the nature of time - that events don’t become part of the “Web of Time” until we see the Doctor as part of them... or it may be simply that it was impossible for the people making Doctor Who in the sixties to know about stories authored by their successors - many of whom hadn’t even been born then.

  • And, in a related note, few people making The Tenth Planet (in 1966, depicting the distant space year 1986) would have imagined anyone in the early twenty-first century worrying how to reconcile the quasi-futuristic world they imagined with the historical reality. Whenever the UNIT stories are set, it was “the twentieth century”, and that’s history now. Some of the early New Adventures took place in a “near future” setting, which is now the present day for the eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory. We’ve therefore accepted the dates given, rather than said that - for example - as we still haven’t put a man on Mars, The Ambassadors of Death is still set in our future. There’s clearly a sensible reason why the “present day” stories made now look like our present day, not The Tenth Planet: The Next Generation. The in-story explanation / fudge would seem to be that most Doctor Who stories take place in isolated locations, and that there are agencies like UNIT, C19 and Torchwood tasked with keeping alien incursions covered up. This paradigm has broken down over time, however, given the sheer number of public events involving aliens in the new series, The Sarah Jane Adventures and (to a lesser degree) Torchwood.

  • There are still errors of omission, as when a later story fails to acknowledge an earlier one (often in other media) that seems relevant. No-one in The Christmas Invasion, for example, notes that it’s odd Britain is making a big deal about sending an unmanned probe to Mars, when there were manned UK missions there in the seventies (in The Ambassadors of Death) and the nineties (The Dying Days). As with Sarah in School Reunion remembering The Hand of Fear but not The Five Doctors, there’s got to be an appeal to clarity in storytelling. With so many Doctor Who stories in existence, it’s almost impossible to tell a new one that doesn’t explicitly contradict an earlier story, let alone implicitly. The reason no-one, say, remarks that the second Doctor looks like Salamander except in The Enemy of the World is the same reason that no-one ever says Rose looks like the girl who married Chris Evans - it gets in the way of the story, and doesn’t help it along.

  The Stories

  This book restricts itself to events described in the BBC television series Doctor Who, and its original full-length fiction, audio plays and comics; the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood, K9 and their full-length fiction, audio plays and comics; and any spin-off books, audios, comics and direct-to-video/DVD films involving characters that originated in the above, and were used with permission by their rights holders (see Section No. 4 below). To be included in this Third Edition of Ahistory, a story had to be released before 31st December, 2011.

  This is not an attempt to enter the debate about which stories are “canon” (although we have been compelled to make such determinations at times), it is simply an attempt to limit the length and scale of this book. There are two types of information in this book - evidence given in TV stories, and anything provided in another format - and these are distinguished by different typefaces.

  1. The Television Series. Included are the episodes and on-screen credits of the BBC television series Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child (1963) to The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (2011), the K9 and Company pilot episode (1981), Torchwood (2006-2011), The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011), the K9 TV series (2009-2010), and extended or unbroadcast versions that have since been commercially released or broadcast anywhere in the world - there are few cases of “extended” material contradicting the original story.

  Priority is given to sources closest to the finished product or the production team of the time the story was made. In descending order of authority are the following: the programme as broadcast; the official series websites; official guidebooks made in support of the series (Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia, etc.), the Radio Times and other contemporary BBC publicity material (which was often written by the producer or script editor); the camera script; the novelisation of a story by the original author or an author working closely from the camera script; contemporary interviews with members of the production team; televised trailers; rehearsal and draft scripts; novelisations by people other than the original author; storylines and writers’ guides (which often contradict on-screen information); interviews with members of the production team after the story was broadcast; and finally any other material, such as fan speculation.

  Scenes cut from broadcast were considered if they were incorporated back into a story at a later time (as with those in The Curse of Fenric VHS and DVD). Not included is information from unreleased material that exists, is in release but was kept separate from the story (for instance, the extra scenes on the Ghost Light DVD) or that no longer exists (such as with Terror of the Autons, Terror of the Zygons and The Hand of Fear). Neither does the first version of An Unearthly Child to be filmed (the so-called “pilot episode”) count, nor “In character” appearances by the Doctor interacting with the real world on other programmes (e.g.: on Animal Magic, Children in Need, Blue Peter etc.).

  2. The Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood books, audios and webcasts. This present volume encompasses the Doctor Who New and Missing Adventures published by Virgin (1991-1997), the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures (1997-2005), the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures (1997-2005), the BBC’s New Series Adventures (up through The Silent Stars Go By, 2011), the Torchwood novels (up through TW: The Men Who Sold the World, 2011), all of the Telos novellas (2001-2004), the four K9 children’s books (1980), and a number of one-off novels: Harry Sullivan’s War, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma and Who Killed Kennedy.

  The audios covered include The Pescatons, Slipback, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space; the BBC fourth Doctor mini-series (Hornets’ Nest, Demon Quest and Serpent Cre
st); and the extensive Big Finish Doctor Who audio range... its monthly series (up to Army of Death, #155), the Companion Chronicles (up to The First Wave, #6.5), the eighth Doctor audios initially broadcast on BBC7 (up to To the Death, #4.10) and various promotional audios (up to The Five Companions).

  The Big Finish Lost Stories, which adapt unmade TV scripts for audio, have been included (up through The Children of Seth, #3.3) because Big Finish, while having no formal policy regarding the Lost Stories’ canonicity, isn’t averse to the Lost Stories being cross-referenced in obviously canonical adventures and - very tellingly - considers Raine Creevy (from the audio adaptations of the unmade Season 27 stories) as “real” as any Big Finish companion. Without an express directive to keep the Lost Stories in a separate continuity, the cross-pollination with the established Doctor Who audios will only increase over time, so it seemed fair to include them.

  The BBC webcasts Real Time, Shada and Death Comes to Time (the last one somewhat controversially) are also included, as well as the webcast Torchwood story Web of Lies.

  A handful of stories were available in another form - Shakedown and Downtime were originally direct-to-video spin-offs, some Big Finish stories like Minuet in Hell and The Mutant Phase are (often radically different) adaptations of stories made by Audio Visuals. Ahistory deals with the “official” versions, as opposed to the fan-produced ones.

  This volume covers two stories that appear in two different versions, because they were told in two media that fall within the scope of the book and were adapted for different Doctors: Shada and Human Nature. Those have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Doctor Who fans have long had different versions of the same story in different media - the first Dalek story, for example, was televised, extensively altered for the novelisation, changed again for the movie version and adapted into a comic strip.

  We haven’t included in-character appearances in nonfiction books (e.g: the Doctor Who Discovers... and Doctor Who Quiz Book of series), and Make Your Own Adventure/ Find Your Fate-style books where it’s impossible to determine the actual story. It was tempting, though.

  3. The Doctor Who comics, including the strip that has been running in Doctor Who Weekly / Monthly / Magazine since 1979 (up through “The Child of Time”, DWM #438-441), along with all original backup strips from that publication, and the ones from the various Specials and Yearbooks. With a book like this, drawing a line between what should and shouldn’t be included is never as simple as it might appear. Including every comic strip would include ones from the Annuals, for example. This book doesn’t include the text stories that Doctor Who Magazine has included at various points during its run.

  There’s a relatively straightforward distinction between the DWM comic strip and other Doctor Who comic strips: while it’s the work of many writers, artists and editors, it also has a strong internal continuity and sense of identity. This book, in all previous editions, has confined itself to “long form” Doctor Who and there’s a case to be made that the DWM strip represents one “ongoing story” that’s run for over a quarter of a century. The Doctor Who Magazine strip has now run for longer than the original TV series, and most fans must have encountered it at some point.

  That said, this book excludes DWM strips that are clearly parodies that aren’t meant to be considered within the continuity of the strip. The same logic applies to spoofs like Dimensions in Time and The Curse of Fatal Death. For the record, the affected strips are “Follow that TARDIS!”, “The Last Word” and “TV Action”.

  DWM has reprinted a number of strips from other publications over the years. We have tended to include these. The main beneficiary of this is The Daleks strip from the sixties comic TV Century 21 (and DWM’s sequel to it from issues #249-254).

  It’s certainly arguable that the DWM strip exists in a separate continuity, with its own companions, internal continuity, vision of Gallifrey and even an ethos that made it feel quite unlike the TV eras of its Doctors. This certainly seemed to be the case early on. However, this distinction has broken down over the years - the comic strip companion Frobisher appeared in a book (Mission: Impractical) and two audios (The Holy Terror, The Maltese Penguin); the village of Stockbridge (from the fifth Doctor DWM comics) has featured in various audios starting with Circular Time; the audio The Company of Friends incorporated characters from different book and comic ranges; and for a number of years the strip and the New Adventures novels were quite elaborately linked. In the new TV series, we’ve met someone serving kronkburgers (in The Long Game, first mentioned in “The Iron Legion”) and the Doctor even quoted Abslom Daak in Bad Wolf.

  The strip tends to “track” the ongoing story (the television series in the seventies and eighties, the New Adventures in the early nineties) - so the Doctor regenerates, without explanation within the strip and on occasion during a story arc. Companions from the television series and books come and go. Costume changes and similar details (like the design of the console room) do the same. It’s broadly possible to work out when the strip is set in the Doctor’s own life. So, the first Doctor Who Weekly strips with the fourth Doctor mention he’s dropped off Romana, and he changes from his Season 17 to Season 18 costume - so it slots in neatly between the two seasons. There are places where this process throws up some anomalies, which have been noted.

  Also included are the Doctor Who comics produced by IDW for the American market; the Radio Times comics featuring the eighth Doctor; the comics that first appeared in Torchwood: The Official Magazine; and the Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures webcomics.

  4) Spin-off series featuring characters that originally appeared in Doctor Who (whatever the format), and were used elsewhere with permission by their respective rights holders.

  This needs some explaining... Doctor Who is a very unusual property in that, generally speaking, the BBC retained ownership of anything created by salaried employees, but freelance scriptwriters working on the TV show in the 60s, 70s and 80s (and the novelists working on the books in the 90s) typically wound up owning the rights to any characters they created. Infamously, this has meant that writer Terry Nation (and his estate) kept ownership of the name “Dalek” and the conceptual property therein, but the BBC retained the rights to the likeness of the Daleks, which were created by staff designer Raymond Cusick.

  This is very counter-intuitive to how other series work - a world where Star Trek is so divided (say, with one person owning the Klingons, another owning the Horta and another owning Spock, while Paramount continues to retain ownership of Captain Kirk and the Enterprise) would be unthinkable. Nonetheless, over the years, the rights holders to iconic Doctor Who characters and monsters have licensed them for use elsewhere, and - unless given reason to think otherwise - their use in a non-Doctor Who story seems as valid as any BBC-sanctioned story.

  The spin-offs included in this volume are:

  • The Bernice Summerfield novels, audios and novella collections, featuring the Doctor’s companion who was first seen in the New Adventure Love and War (1992). Benny was the lead of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels published from 1997 to 1999; Big Finish took over the license afterward, and has produced Benny audios, novels, short story anthologies, novella collections and one animated story. The first five Benny audios were excluded, as they were adaptations of New Adventures novels.

  • BBV audios and films featuring licensed characters such as the Sontarans, the Rutans and the Zygons.

  • Big Finish spin-off series (Cyberman; Dalek Empire; Gallifrey; Graceless; I, Davros; Jago & Litefoot; Sarah Jane Smith; and UNIT).

  • Faction Paradox books, audios and a comic; featuring characters and concepts first seen in the EDA Alien Bodies (1997).

  • Iris Wildthyme audios and (as of 2011) one novel; a character seen in the original fiction of Paul Magrs, and who first appeared in Doctor Who in the Short Trips story “Old Flames” and the EDA The Scarlet Empress.

  • Kaldor City audios, spun off from The Robots of Death and the P
DA Corpse Marker (1999).

  • Minister of Chance - undatable audios featuring the lead from the webcast Death Comes to Time (2001-2002).

  • Miranda comic, from the character seen in the EDA Father Time (2001).

  • Reeltime Pictures direct-to-VHS/DVD films, featuring the Sontarans, the Draconians, etc.

  • Time Hunter novellas, featuring characters from the Telos novella The Cabinet of Light (2003), and also involving the Fendahl and the Daemons.

  Despite this volume’s efforts to be inclusive whenever possible, there are also some significant omissions:

  • Comic strips released prior to the advent of the Doctor Who Magazine strip, including the TV Comic and Countdown strips. There are some profound canonicity concerns with these strips, plus there simply wasn’t the room to include them.

  • Short stories, whether they first appeared in annuals, Doctor Who Magazine, the Decalog and Short Trips anthologies or any of the innumerable other places they have cropped up.

  There are a few exceptions to this... anthologies were included if they were a rare exception in a full-length story range (say, the Story of Martha anthology published with the New Series Adventures novels). Also, information from the Bernice Summerfield and Iris Wildthyme short story anthologies were included if they were so interwoven into continuity elsewhere that omitting them would have been confusing. The prime examples of this are the Benny anthologies Life During Wartime and Present Danger, as well as the occasional nugget taken from the Iris Wildthyme short story collections published by Obverse. Similarly, information from Faction Paradox: The Book of the War (itself a guidebook) was included if it directly pertained to characters or events prominently featured in other Faction Paradox stories (for instance, the background of Cousin Octavia, the lead character in FP: Warring States).