There's quite a bit that goes in that gap. "The Day of the Doctor" goes there. Titan's tenth Doctor comics are set there. (Personally, I also put the Majenta comic strips from Doctor Who Magazine there, but they may go earlier.) It's something of a busy span of time for the tenth Doctor, and he oddly keeps running into past and future selves -- "Day," Four Doctors, The Lost Dimension, Year Three (the twelfth Doctor shows up to give him some advice), and presumably Time Lord Victorious -- in the span of at most a few months. (Not that cover art proves anything, but the tenth Doctor on the cover to Steve Cole's novel is taken from "The Day of the Doctor." You can tell by the haircut.) If that's the placement -- in the "Waters"/"End" gap -- then I wonder if Billie Piper's character in the project is actually as The Moment rather than Rose Tyler.
I find that surprising. I mean, there are some cases where there are few available gaps between serials so you have to cram a lot into the few there are, but there are implicitly some sizeable time gaps between the Tennant specials, so there should be plenty of room to slip in stories between "Journey's End," "The Next Doctor," "Planet of the Dead," and "The Waters of Mars."
Doesn't Day of the Doctor establish there's in fact a few years between Waters of Mars and TEOT? I recall the age the Tenth Doctor says he is in Day is two or three years younger than he says he is in TEOT. And before anyone gets started about the Doctor lies about his age, something which Day itself sort of confirms, I would point out that the RTD era was surprisingly consistent about the Doctor's age to the extent one can be consistent about the Doctor's age. Starting when the Ninth gave his age as 900 in Aliens of London, the Tenth gives his age in each subsequent season as being one year older than previously. They even took into account in the fourth season the fact that The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords spans an entire year and adjusted the age accordingly.
Even Dreamland is supposed to take place between Waters of Mars and End of Time according to its writer. So yeah, plenty of room for stories in that period, especially such that explore the latent idea present in Waters of Mars, namely the Time Lord Victorious thing. Which is, I might add, such a promising concept. I wonder if it'll pay off at all.
That said, next month they'll instead be reprinting TV Comic's 'The Night Walkers' from 1970 - aka the Second Doctor's real (at least for now) regeneration story!
Yes. The tenth Doctor tells the rabbit that he's 904, and in "The End of Time" he's 906, and the eleventh is 907 in "Flesh and Stone."
On the one hand, I get why Davies and Moffat -- both of whom wrote DW tie-in fiction before joining the revival series -- would want to leave room between the Doctor's screen adventures to make allowances for the tie-ins. And it makes things a little more plausible than in the old days where the stories ran into each other so continuously that each Doctor implicitly lived only a few years at most before regenerating (then again, he did lead a dangerous life). On the other hand, the implied or explicitly stated gaps are just so huge -- centuries in Eleven's case -- that it makes me feel a bit cheated that what we're seeing onscreen is such a minuscule fraction of the Doctor's adventures. I mean, we're supposed to believe that the onscreen companions are the most cherished, important people in the Doctor's life, people he has special bonds with, and yet apparently his time with them is quite fleeting in proportion to the unseen time he spends traveling alone or with different companions. Which is an extremely mixed message to send.
The off-screen gaps were really more of a Moffat thing. Up until the post season-4 specials, RTD's era was aggressively continuous; even when there gaps in the storyline, as between Rose and Martha, or Martha and Donna, the Doctor's age still progressed at a solid one-year-per-season, up until "The End of Time" gives us a relatively massive two-year jump with only one or two stories within it. I can see the argument for wanting a primacy for the on-screen stories, but I always felt that was outweighed by the fact that it meant the Ninth and Tenth Doctors were some of the shortest-lived incarnations, one and six years, respectively. Not that there not being room in the timeline is stopping anyone from telling more stories about them, but it still feels constraining. Most of the Doctors tended to have big off-screen jumps in age, though they also tended to drop the number far less than once every season or two.
Sure, the gaps weren't that great, but there were allusions to the Doctor and his companion having unseen adventures between episodes, and I think there was even at least one reference to an event from a tie-in novel. So as I said, the new series made an effort to leave space for the tie-ins in a way that the classic series never really did. Moffat did it enormously more so -- going to extremes was his trademark -- but RTD did it too. It's less about the Doctor and more about the companions. I'm fine with inserting unseen adventures with the companions we know, but it just feels contradictory for Moffat to say, on the one hand, that the Ponds or Clara were exceptionally special and important to the Doctor, yet on the other hand, that the total time he spent with them was no more than 1% of that incarnation's lifetime -- a tiny fraction of a percent if you throw in his centuries on Trenzalore. Besides, the continuity of companions in the classic series left no room for the Doctor to age more than a few years at most in several of his incarnations. Two, Three, and Five were constantly with human companions, who didn't show more than a few years of aging in their tenures with the Doctor -- which means those incarnations can't have lived much longer than the actors' tenures in real time, only a few years. Which is logical enough; given the exceptionally dangerous life the Doctor leads, it stands to reason that his average incarnation would have a much shorter life expectancy than a Time Lord who just hangs out in the Citadel gathering dust for countless millennia. And yet Moffat expects us to believe that the final incarnation of his original cycle somehow managed to live 900 years or more, with the majority of that spent under constant attack on Trenzalore? It just doesn't add up, probabilistically.
I can understand thea gument for the Tenth, and there's little to preclude that the Ninth Doctor had a ton of adventures before Rose. Indeed, unless you consider the mirror bit in that episode as fundamental proof that he's just regenerated, which I never did and certainly still don't. Even in that case, there's still possibility that the Ninth Doctor did have a ton of adventures inbetween his last scene in that episode. So I think the Ninth arrived as a pretty much experienced-in-that-incarnation Doctor.
While I like the large gaps in the eleventh Doctor's life -- I like to believe that the Doctor, in every life, has lots of adventures we never see -- I won't say that the gaps in that life aren't problematic. Because they are. There's two hundred years between periods of adventures with Amy and Rory, and then there's the "Time of the Doctor" problem. That episode spans nine hundred years, the Doctor sees Clara for about an hour over that span of time, and she should realistically, by the end, be a complete stranger to the Doctor, yet he never behaves like, from his perspective, his time with Clara spanned anything more than a compressed few weeks. (One of my issues with Moffat era, in general, is that his stories raise questions about the characters and the universe that it never bothers to answer.) The only conclusion I can draw is that the eleventh Doctor essentially imprinted on Amy and Clara in ways not unlike a duckling imprints on its mother (which the eleventh Doctor basically says in "The Power of Three"), which explains, as thin as it is, why the Doctor returns to them after hundreds of years. Given that "The Day of the Doctor" treats the ages the three Doctors state in a consistent and meaningful way, then seeing as the War Doctor regenerates when he's eight hundred and the tenth Doctor is 904, then the ninth Doctor has a century, give or take, before the events of "Rose." The ironic thing about that is that the ninth Doctor, who has the second-shortest on-screen tenure (leaving aside Jo Martin and the other cameo Doctors), has one of the longer lifespans.
True. Of the Doctors to have had been leads in the show (I include performed media on this, so the War Doctor and Eighth Doctor naturally count), he has the shortest run, and jury's still out for Jo Martin. As the actual longest-lived Doctor, I think its a bit silly since at the end of the day the 13th has all the years of the previous incarnations, so she is, right? THAT SAID, I do enjoy thinking how long has each incarnation lived through. For my money, the Second and Tenth Doctors have the shortest span. The Tenth for reasons mentioned, but the Second I don't think has been around for a really long time. Jamie mentions that the events of The Invasion for him and the Doctor are just a few weeks after they last saw the Brigadier in The Web of Fear. So unless they had a myriad we never saw/heard of between then and The War Games, I doubt he has been around for a long while. Interestingly, the Seventh has been implied to be one of the longest-lived ones, also, mainly due to his appearence being startkly different in the TV Movie. It is implied in the audios, but never explicit, that he's really old and weary by this time, and is indeed slowly preparing for the possibility of regenerating. An interesting viewpoint. Also, the Eighth seems to be a long-lived one, too, given how his interpretation of the incarnation has slowly but steadily become a little more dissilusioned and rougher around the edges. The Sixth Doctor also spent centuries while trying to find a cure for Charley in one of the audios, which is certainly interesting. Bottom line, the Twelfth Doctor is the longest lived.
Big Finish have announced part of their contribution to Time Lord Victorious: a trilogy of McGann stories and two Short Trips featuring the Master. Oh, and...
I was really hoping for that Northener to be in that special Out Of Time trilogy, but I'll take what I can get.
Titan's comic book tie-in has been announced. The description raises some questions about when Time Lord Victorious takes place from the tenth Doctor's perspective, as Titan's editor seems to suggest that it's pre-"Waters of Mars."
Sounds like those comics are the prologue to the whole piece, and Ten's seeing the aftereffects of something that hasn't happened to him yet. When it does (the first novel), the effects ripple backwards and impact the lives of Eight (Big Finish) and Nine (DWM comic? Maybe Big Finish?), leading to the three Doctors colliding (second novel) and the reset button being hit at the end.