Theory talk:Timeline - Seventh Doctor

Page ignores primary sources
As has been pointed out at Forum:Timeline pages, these timeline pages violate T:SOURCES, are awash with speculation and are, in my opinion, totally worthless. Still, just to put it on the record:

This particular page ignores the primary source of DWMS Winter 1993, which explains the intended timeline of events between the DWM comic stories and the Virgin New Adventures. These deliberately intersected, beginning with TV: Fellow Travellers. This story was intended to follow on directly from the final Timewyrm novel. The two ranges were intertwined thereafter until Uninvited Guest, which preceded PROSE: Theatre of War. Ground Zero was a deliberate break with the Virgin continuity, and then the much later The Last Word was, as the title suggested, both the final DWM Seventh Doctor story, and the final narrative connection between DWM and the NAs.

This article, far from emphasising the producers' intended chronology, obscures and even occasionally contradicts it. Anyone wishing to actually read this era of the Seventh Doctor's timeline in the order intended by its publishers wouldn't be able to use our page to do so.

This is yet another reason why I think these timeline pages should be scrapped. If they can't even show us the chronology intended by the publishers what possible good is it?

For future reference, DWM's chronology goes like this:


 * TV Survival
 * immediately followed by the Timewyrm novels
 * immediately followed by Fellow Travellers
 * COMIC: The Mark of Mandragora (obviously preceded by what we're calling the "separate" stories of the two prequels)
 * COMIC: Under Pressure
 * COMIC: Party Animals
 * COMIC: The Chameleon Factor
 * COMIC: Seaside Rendezvous
 * COMIC: The Good Soldier
 * COMIC: A Glitch in Time
 * COMIC: Evening's Empire
 * COMIC: The Grief
 * ''Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
 * Cat's Cradle: Warhead (with COMIC: Ravens taking place within Warhead)
 * Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark
 * COMIC: ''Metamorphosis
 * COMIC: Memorial
 * ''Nightshade
 * COMIC: Cat Litter
 * ''Love and War
 * ''Transit
 * COMIC: ''Pureblood
 * COMIC: ''Flashback (comic story)
 * COMIC: ''Emperor of the Daleks!
 * The Highest Science
 * The Pit
 * ''Deceit
 * ''Lucifer Rising
 * COMIC: ''Final Genesis
 * ''White Darkness
 * ''Shadowmind
 * ''Birthright (novel)
 * ''Iceberg (novel)
 * COMIC: Time & Time Again
 * ''Cuckoo (comic story)
 * Blood Heat
 * ''The Dimension Riders
 * ''The Left-Handed Hummingbird
 * ''Conundrum (novel)
 * ''No Future
 * ''Tragedy Day
 * COMIC: ''Uninvited Guest
 * ''Legacy
 * Theatre of War

''The Last Word hadn't been written at the time this list was compiled, since it's from the much later colour era of DWM strips.

But there are a number of interesting things which are pointed out by this list, when comparing it to ours. No doubt the biggest is that we assume — probably because the Doctor Who Reference Guide does — that the Seventh Doctor DWM stories prior to Fellow Travellers happen between Survival and ''Fellow Travellers.

That is, we've got the whole run between A Cold Day in Hell and roughly Doctor Conkerer, including the COMIC stories, happening in publication order. However, DWMS Winter 1993 quite clearly tells us that were wrong. Their non-Ace, non-Benny stories are actually set before the Seventh Doctor's DWM debut in A Cold Day in Hell.

This is a fairly fundamental flaw that makes the current timeline a nonsense, really. This error has an even greater impact, because we've added in various stories that were written after these, meaning that a hell of of this timeline page is completely unreliable.

I'd fix it, but I hate a) timeline pages and b) the Seventh Doctor wayyyyy too much to bother.

20:14: Wed 14 Dec 2011