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A while ago I had a stupid idea: cram as much information about the Doctor Who universe as possible into a single chart. I thought it would be interesting to visually compare and contrast the service records of Doctors, companions, adversaries and the like. It became quite a big job.

The first problem was what scale to use – the largest page size available for layout was about 5.4m wide, but with 755 episodes to include it was still going to be a squeeze. I allocated 1mm for every five minutes of screen time, so a standard 25 minute episode would get half a centimeter. Not an enormous amount of resolution, but enough to illustrate the basics. The final chart is 5.08m by 4.27m, although it could certainly be shrunk down for printing, perhaps to about 2m wide, and retain enough detail.

Stumbling block number 2: there’s no canon for the Doctor Who universe – nobody in charge has ever set anything in stone and the nature of a series about time travel puts a rather large spanner into attempts to say what did or didn’t “officially” happen. Better minds than I have argued the case against a definite Whoniverse, so I just decided to carve off an identifiable chunk to study: the live-action televised bits (minus a few odds and ends).

Next, I went for a “what seems to make most sense” approach with regards to the names of certain stories and characters (Susan’s surname almost certainly isn’t “Foreman”, right?). And on the subject of companions, I have my own idea of who is and who isn’t.

The chart takes the form of a timeline, with incarnations of the Doctor and companions presented in order of appearance. It indicates whether the Doctor is in the past, the contemporary present or the future (although certain stories make for quite limited accuracy in some cases, and I’ve broadly ignored the terrifying horrors of the UNIT dating controversy), and features the recurring adversaries of the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master.

It demonstrates that, as a companion, you have a 9.4% chance of ending up dead (not too bad, considering), and that 14% of all episodes are missing from the archives. And it illustrates the gender gap in companioning:

The background was looking a trifle bare, but fortunately the Hubble Space Telescope produces some wonderful, extremely high-resolution images of the cosmos. The one I’ve used in the chart is a montage of the Orion Nebula, and is available in sizes up to 18,000 x 18,000 pixels; thanks to NASA and the ESA these images are copyright free and available for use.

Anyway, here it is: Doctor Who: A Relativity Matrix (v1.0) ♐
It’s a PDF, about 3.2MB, 5.08m x 4.27m – I’ve given up on getting Flickr to accept an enormous JPEG, and a lot of things seem to choke on converting it.

Obviously all Doctor Who related content is ™ and © to the BBC and various other parties – I’m not attempting to infringe on anyone’s property here!

Chart design is © 2010 by me, but it’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 3.0 license, so please copy, remix & share – let me know if you do anything with it.

Corrections, suggestions, complaints and arguments about Sara Kingdom are very welcome at the usual address: neil at notlikecalvin dot com
There will be updates and additions as the adventures continue.

(Tug o’ the forelock in the direction of David McCandless at informationisbeautiful.net, who produces far prettier stuff than I ever could; the basic section on timeframes in my chart is deliberately unspecific, steering well clear of his work on a (presumiably) more authoritative Doctor Who timeline.)