Last Contact

Last Contact was the event in which the enemy destined to destroy Gallifrey would become known and the War in Heaven would become inevitable. Larna told Ulysses, Mister Saldaamir, and Penelope Gate about Last Contact and the prophecy.

At date index 309456/4756.7RE/1213GRT/100447TL, a Matrix projection predicted that the Vore, who in the "first draft" of history had evolved to become an advanced, benevolent race, had become a swarming and aggressive force in the "redraft" caused by the destruction of the cicatrix. It predicted that in a possible final stand between the Time Lords and the Vore, fatalities would include 20-40% of the Time Lord population. As a result, the Supreme Council mandated that no Time Lord was to come within one parsec or one century of the Vore, since this was a potential Last Contact. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

The Eighth Doctor and the Klade were present during Last Contact; when they encountered each other again during the Klade's hunt for the Last One, it was in the Klade's past, but the Doctor did not remember it, either because of his memory loss or because it had not actually happened to him yet. (PROSE: Father Time) The Ship told Lolita that its pilot had gone into his future and identified the enemy, but later erased the information from his memory. (PROSE: Toy Story)

Behind the scenes

Last Contact was central to Lance Parkin's picture of the War in Heaven.

• In Parkin's short story Fishy Business from the charity anthology Perfect Timing 2, Danny the Fish noticed that Bernice Summerfield's timeline had been interrupted so she was romantically involved with the Eighth Doctor (as hinted at in Parkin's other stories The Infinity Doctors, Paydirt, and Iris Explains). Danny contacted Mister Saldaamir in San Francisco and told him that this might have indicated that the Doctor had made "contact." The timeline contamination scared Danny the Fish to the point of fleeing his residence.
• In Parkin's ultimately-rejected entry to The Book of the War about Mister Saldaamir, Saldaamir had seen the future and was worried about Last Contact.
• Last Contact occurred in Parkin's rejected BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures pitch Enemy of the Daleks. In the story, the Klade of the Needle were introduced as part of a massive intergalactic alliance that was dedicated to fighting the enemy and led by the Doctor's father from his laboratory in Berkeley (a reference to Daniel Joyce from Unnatural History, who was identified with Ulysses in Parkin's later book The Gallifrey Chronicles). When the Eighth Doctor accidentally sent the space-time coordinates of Dalek Space Command to the enemy, he established Last Contact and condemned the universe to death. The events of this story were referenced in Father Time.
• In Parkin's reference guide AHistory, which presupposed that the War in Heaven was the same as, or another facet of, the Last Great Time War, Last Contact was redefined as the First Doctor's first meeting with the Daleks as seen in The Daleks.