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 data from his memory. (PROSE: Toy Story)

Behind the scenes

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

• In Parkin's short story Fishy Business in the charity publication Perfect Timing 2, Danny the Fish noticed that Bernice Summerfield's timeline had been interrupted so that she was romantically involved with the Eighth Doctor; he 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 evacuating the premises.
• In Parkin's 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 Eighth Doctor novel pitch Enemy of the Daleks. In the story, the Klade 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 PROSE: Unnatural History). When the Eighth Doctor accidentally gave the enemy the space-time coordinates of Dalek Space Command, he accidentally established Last Contact and condemned the universe to death. The events of this story (or something like it) were referenced in PROSE: 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.