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  • Short stories from the Doctor Who Annuals.

  • The Big Finish stageplay adaptations (The Curse of the Daleks, The Seven Keys to Doomsday, The Ultimate Adventure) were excluded out of canonicity concerns. It was tempting to make an exception for The Ultimate Adventure and its sequel audio, Beyond the Ultimate Adventure, as they are more compatible with the established timeline, but both were finally omitted - even in a book as large as this - for reasons of space.

  • Unlicensed “cover series” with actors playing thinly veiled counterparts of their Doctor Who characters, such as Sylvester McCoy starring as “the Professor” in the BBV audios.

  • Proposed stories that were never made, including the sixth Doctor story The Ultimate Evil (abandoned after the Season 22 hiatus and, unlike many of its contemporaries, never adapted for audio) and Campaign (a Past Doctor novel that was commissioned but never released by the BBC; it was later privately published).

  • The 2003 Scream of the Shalka webcast, which debuted Richard E. Grant as the ninth Doctor and was then superseded with the advent of the new series. This story was previously included in Ahistory, but has been excluded because the sheer preponderance of material establishing the Eccleston version as the ninth Doctor means that almost nobody at time of writing (not even the Scream of the Shalka’s creators) accepts the Grant Doctor as canon.

  • Stories that were explicitly marketed as being apocryphal, such as Big Finish’s Unbound series featuring different actors playing the Doctor.

  On the whole, the television series takes priority over what is said in the other media, and where a detail or reference in one of the books, audios or comics appears to contradict what was established on television, it’s been noted as much and an attempt made to rationalise the “mistake” away.

  The New Adventures and Missing Adventures built up a broadly consistent “future history” of the universe. This was, in part, based on the “History of Mankind” in Jean-Marc Lofficier’s The Terrestrial Index (1991), which mixes information from the series with facts from the novelisations and the author’s own speculation. Many authors, though, have contradicted or ignored Lofficier’s version of events. For the purposes of this book, The Terrestrial Index itself is non-canonical, and it’s been noted, but ultimately ignored, whenever a New Adventure recounts information solely using Lofficier as reference.

  Writers’ guides, discussion documents and the authors’ original submissions and storylines provide useful information; we have, when possible, referenced these.

  Key

  The following abbreviations are used in the text:

  BENNY - A Bernice Summerfield book or audio

  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.

  Other Great Old Ones included Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, the Gods of Ragnarok, Gog, Magog, Malefescent and Tor-Gasukk. Across the universe, the earliest civilisations worshipped the Great Old Ones. [30] Not even the Time Lords knew much about them. [31]

  The Celestial Toymaker was from the old times, “a spirit of mischief from the infancy of the universe”. He was a hyper-dimensional being with a whole fragment of reality to himself, but had to obey the rules laid down during the “childhood” of the universe. [32] The Toymaker survived a catastrophe that destroyed his home universe. He carried a part of that universe within him, and so was exempt from the natural laws of our universe. As the Toymaker’s universe receded from our own, it pushed back his personal time and extended his life. The Toymaker would live for millions of years - at first he helped life to prosper for hundreds if not of millennia, and created ships, cities, continents and entire planets. He then grew bored, destroyed what he had created... and found destruction as tedious as creation. To distract himself from the endlessness of existence, he amused himself with the chance and uncertainty found in games. [33]

  The beings known as the Ancient Lights had existed before the Big Bang, and controlled many of the other beings in the earlier universe in accordance with the laws of astrology. They discovered they had great powers in the new universe, and influenced the development of astrology on many worlds. The Zodiac on Earth would have twelve signs; on Ventiplex, thirteen; on Draconia, seven. [34]

  Six almost-omnipotent beings, the Guardians, existed from the beginning of time. They were the White Guardian of Order and the Black Guardian of Chaos; the Red Guardian of Justice; the Crystal Guardian of Thought and Dreams; the twins, the Azure Guardians of Mortality and Imagination; and the Gold Guardian of Life. They formed the upper pantheon of the Great Old Ones. [35]

  Each segment of the Key to Time, which was forged near the end of the universe, represented a particular Guardian. [36]

  The universe was able to constantly regenerate itself when the Cosmic Balance between Law and Chaos was maintained. Miggea was the Queen of Seirot - in the great fight between Law and Chaos, when the Archangels of Law fought the Archangels of Chaos, she represented Law. The Doctor remarked that the battle was “a bit Miltonian... only without all that religion”. This was the Battle for the Balance, but Miggea’s pursuit of Law was ruthless to the point of being evil. [37]

  Shug-Niggurath died giving birth, causing the whole planet Polymos to absorb its offspring, the Nestene Consciousness. The Nestene Consciousness went on to colonise many planets, including Cramodar, Plovak 6 and the Reverent Pentiarchs of Loorn. [38]

&
nbsp; The Chronovores existed outside the space-time continuum, consuming flaws in its structure. They weren’t constrained by the laws of physics. [39]

  The first of our universe’s native entities - such as the Mandragora Helix, the Eternals and the grey man’s race - sprang into being. [40] The Mandragora Helix was old even when this universe was born. [41] It claimed to have escaped the Dark Times, and to have created a new home in a nebula, in the heart of “beautiful chaos”. [42]

  The Time Lords would come to worship some of the more powerful Eternals, such as Death, Pain, Vain Beauty, Life and Time. Certain Time Lords entered a mysterious arrangement to serve as the “champion” of one or more of these Eternals. [43]

  Sentient micro-organisms named Meme-Spawn were said to have originated at the dawn of time. They drifted through galaxies for millennia on end, absorbing every spoken language they encountered. [44]

  Over the first few billion years, the first stars were born. Planets and galaxies formed. [45]

  The oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight, was “doctor who?” [46]

  ? - The Pandorica Opens [47]

  Planet One, the oldest planet in the universe, had a cliff of pure diamond with fifty-foot letters from the dawn of time - the very first words to be recorded. The words read “Hello Sweetie”, and had been placed there, along with a set of space-time co-ordinates, by River Song. The eleventh Doctor and Amy found the message and, as instructed, travel to Stonehenge in 102 AD.

  Xaos was the oldest planet in the known galaxy. [48]

  ? - “The Life Bringer” [49]

  The fourth Doctor freed Prometheus, a member of a hyper-advanced race resembling the Greek gods. From their vast city, they were co-ordinating the re-engineering of the lifeless galaxy, moving black holes and stars. Prometheus had been imprisoned for releasing the “life spores” before Zeus was satisfied that they would grow into “perfect peaceful loving creatures”. The Doctor helped Prometheus escape with a sample of imperfect life spores, and Prometheus headed for another planet to spread them once more. The Doctor was unsure whether he was watching the distant past or the distant future.