UNIT dating controversy

From Tardis Wiki, the free Doctor Who reference
Revision as of 03:14, 9 December 2012 by 50.138.227.67 (talk)
RealWorld.png

The UNIT dating controversy is a problem of retroactive continuity (retcon) which has attracted considerable interest from fans and professional Doctor Who writers alike. It has also been the subject of a 2 entertain DVD documentary, The UNIT Dating Conundrum, included in the special edition release of Day of the Daleks. It has even made its way back into DWU narratives. These have most prominently included a sly remark made by the Tenth Doctor in TV: The Sontaran Stratagem and on-screen graphics seen in TV: The Lost Boy —but writers in other media have occasionally referenced the controversy, or attempted to solve parts of it.

The essential problem

Though replete with additional nuance, the nub of the narrative problem is easy to grasp. Mawdryn Undead tells viewers that the Brigadier retired from UNIT in 1976. However, the events of The Invasion, the first story in which UNIT properly appears, occurred in 1979. Thus, the UNIT dating controversy is, broadly speaking, an attempt to understand how the Brigadier could have retired from UNIT before UNIT even existed.

Writer Ben Aaronovitch has notably opined that there is simply no way to retcon the problem.

There is nothing you can do about [Mawdryn Undead]. It's just stuffed. You just pretend it's taking place in an alternate universe . . .Ben Aaronovitch [The UNIT Dating Conundrum [src]]

Terrance Dicks has said he deliberately avoided giving dates during his time as script editor precisely so he could avoid these sorts of continuity headaches. Consequently, the biggest period of UNIT involvement, the Third Doctor's era, has only comparatively mild contributions to the dating controversy.

Digging deeper

No television story actually featuring UNIT gives a clear year. Day of the Daleks comes close. It implies at one point that Jo Grant had just said the year, but Terrance Dicks was keen to keep the dating deliberately vague. The problem, which arguably should be called "the Brigadier dating controversy", exists primarily because of two appearances of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart when he wasn't employed by UNIT.

The first was his debut story, The Web of Fear, when he was still a colonel in the regular British Army. Here, he meets the Second Doctor Jamie, Victoria and crucially, Professor Edward Travers. Victoria says that they met Travers in 1935 in the Himalayas, which they did in The Abominable Snowmen. It is further revealed that 1935 was "forty years ago", tacitly setting The Web of Fear in 1975. In a later adventure, called The Invasion, the Second Doctor again encounters the newly-minted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The Brigadier says their last meeting was "four years ago now", ostensibly putting The Invasion in 1979.

Viewers got no dialogue with a firm year for the whole of the Third Doctor's era. In Pyramids of Mars, however, Sarah Jane Smith claims to be "from 1980" several times and briefly revisits the year. Since she was the Third Doctor's final companion, and spent a good deal of time at UNIT, this has some implication for the theoretical date of UNIT stories set in seasons 11 - 13. It's not particularly clear what to make of the statement. One possibility given by The UNIT Dating Conundrum is that the entire lot of UNIT stories from Spearhead from Space to The Seeds of Doom (where the Brigadier is still in UNIT but away in Geneva) happens from 1979 to 1980. Another possibility is that she may just be speaking imprecisely. Whatever the case, her statement is not a clear violation of the continuity established by The Web of Fear.

What breaks UNIT dating is Mawdryn Undead. This story firmly and explicitly has the Brig retiring from UNIT in 1976, the year The Seeds of Doom came out. The Fifth Doctor confirms that "a year later" from the retirement is 1977, which offers viewers no wiggle room whatsoever. Because it's flatly impossible to have the Brigadier retiring before he's even become the Brigadier, a fundamental discrepancy indisputably exists in televised Doctor Who narratives.

Other dating problems

Other problems with the timeline exist.

  • Aside from the aforementioned problems with Mawdryn Undead, the story also tells viewers that Sgt Benton left UNIT in 1979. This only adds to the overall UNIT confusion, since viewers saw him being quite actively employed by UNIT in 1979, during the events of The Invasion. Since viewers also see Benton come back after The Invasion, it's even harder to swallow this Mawdryn Undead line.
  • At the time of the Third Doctor's regeneration in Planet of the Spiders/Robot, Sarah has a UNIT pass which reads "1974".
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures story Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? shows Sarah Jane Smith as a thirteen year old girl in 1964. That would imply that Sarah Jane met the Doctor in her early twenties (Elisabeth Sladen's real age at the time). Similarly, in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Sarah explicitly states her age as being twenty-three. Though not a part of the original televised "UNIT dating controversy", The Sarah Jane Adventures deepened the problem.
  • Jo says that 1926 is "about forty years" earlier than her own time. (TV: Carnival of Monsters) What exactly she means by "her own time" is ambiguous. If it means her present day, then the Third Doctor UNIT stories take place in the 1960s. On the other hand, if she's talking forty years from her birth, then her present day would be sixty-odd years later, since she's in her early twenties when with the Third Doctor. However, since she's only approximating — "about forty years" —it's difficult to draw any firm conclusions from her statement. The difficulties of her statement are made worse by the fact that one of her character traits is an ineptitude for math and science. She could have simply gotten her sums wrong.
  • In A Girl's Best Friend, Lavinia Smith tells Sarah Jane that the box containing K9 Mark III arrived in 1978. Other parts of the story specify that Sarah Jane has been back on Earth for some time and she was working on Earth when the package arrived. This would place the relevant UNIT stories in the mid-1970s at the very latest.
  • In the 2007 Sarah Jane Adventures story The Lost Boy, a page from Sarah Jane Smith's UNIT dossier is clearly legible on screen. In it the following sentence appears: "[UNIT] quickly expanded, making our presence felt in a golden period that spanned the sixties, the seventies, and, some would say, the eighties." This is part of theWEB: UNIT website started in 2005.

Contradictory clues

There are many other details that confuse the picture.

  • The Prime Minister in The Green Death is "Jeremy", meaning Jeremy Thorpe of the Liberal Party, which jokingly implies he was going to win the 1974 general election. (The Liberals were a minority party). This would set the story in late 1974 at the earliest, a year after the story aired.
  • The stories don't usually try to predict future fashions or technology, except when it is central to the plot. The result is that the stories look very strongly like the 1970s. An exception is The Invasion, where the fashions deliberately don't jibe with then-current fashions, suggesting a near-future setting for that particular story.
  • The road fund licence (tax) disk on the Doctor's roadster, Bessie, in Robot, is dated to expire in April 1975. All registration year letters on the number plates of fairly new cars in the programmes made in the early-to-mid 1970s are contemporaneous.
  • Two years before Sarah Jane Smith was travelling with the Fourth Doctor, Britain had a Space Defence Station for alien attacks and space freighters (implying they're taking the freight somewhere) that could reach Jupiter.
  • On the occasions that money is mentioned, most amounts given correspond to those in use at the time. 1970's Doctor Who and the Silurians features pre-decimal currency, whilst it costs 2 pence for a telephone call in 1976's The Seeds of Doom, even though in real life the United Kingdom adopted decimal currency in 1971 and was subject to significant inflation.
  • The BBC has a third channel, BBC3, in 1971's The Dæmons. In 1971 the BBC had only two channels (though they aspired to launch a third channel in subsequent years). (The actual BBC Three, a digital television channel, was launched in 2003.)
  • Battlefield (made in 1989) is set in an unspecified near future. The Brigadier has retired from teaching for a few years; he is not many years older than he was in Mawdryn Undead. He's now married, when he lived alone in Mawdryn. Major Husak is from Czechslovakia, rather than the Czech Republic or Slovakia, but there are also five pound coins and the Brigadier refers to "the King".
  • In The Sontaran Stratagem, the Doctor says he worked for UNIT in "the 1970s, or was it the 80s?", a reference to this controversy.
  • The Brigadier appears in TV: Enemy of the Bane, an episode dated as occurring around the year 2009 (based upon its setting within the recent Whoniverse); however the Brigadier is considerably aged for someone who, based on other evidence, would have been active in UNIT only twenty years earlier.

Off-screen evidence

Published books, contemporary interviews, publicity material and behind the scenes documents all point to uncertainty amongst the production team as well.

  • The Radio Times and an announcement at the start of the original transmission of the first episode of The Invasion state that the story takes place in 1975. Announcements and publicity material were normally produced by the series' production office, usually by the Script Editor.
  • In a pair of 1969 interviews, then-producer Derrick Sherwin and newly cast Doctor Jon Pertwee told the press that the series (and thus the UNIT stories) would be set in a near future time when things such as space stations would have become reality, with Pertwee confirming this would be in the 1980s.
  • The 1983 story Mawdryn Undead was originally written with a different former companion in mind and much has been made of how this generated the UNIT dating "mistake", though other early 1980s stories and the above mentioned guide support Mawdryn Undead's dating of the story.
  • The "official" in-universe UNIT website produced by the BBC for the 2005 series notes in its history section that UNIT was formed in 1968 in response to the "London Underground" incident (The Web of Fear), and in its news section that 25 January 2005 was the 35th anniversary of UNIT's involvement in "Project Waxwork" (the concluding episode of Spearhead from Space was broadcast on 24 January 1970). These would date the stories as being contemporaneous with their original broadcast. With a joking nod to the controversy over dating of the original stories, the site also notes that "[UNIT] quickly expanded, making our presence felt in a golden period that spanned the sixties, the seventies and, some would say, the eighties." This sentence became part of on-screen canon in 2007 when it was visible during a scene in The Lost Boy, an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • According to onscreen production notes for the DVD release of The Time Warrior, a line was struck from the script during Linx's interrogation of Sarah in which she would have explicitly stated her year of origin as 1974.
  • The UNIT Dating Conundrum documentary on the Day of the Daleks DVD release looked at the in-universe evidence for the dating of the UNIT stories. It drew the conclusion that there was no reasonable way to reconcile the statements from Mawdryn Undead to those in Third and Fourth Doctor UNIT stories.

Other media

Stories in other media have also offered dates for the UNIT stories but have had little success in producing a clear answer:

  • The novelisation Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters by Terrance Dicks, published in 1977, has the Third Doctor and Jo Grant visiting what they initially believe to be a vessel in the year 1926; Jo states that this was fifty years before her time. The first chapter establishes the story taking place immediately after the events of The Three Doctors, therefore putting that adventure in 1976 (unless Jo was rounding her numbers, which still places it in the 1970s).
  • The sequel, 1996's The Ghosts of N-Space, which is set again around the last Third Doctor stories, sees the sighting of a comet which appears every "157 years" and which was last seen in "1818", making the year 1975.
  • Novels in the Virgin New Adventures and the Virgin Missing Adventures line written in the 1990s took the editorial view that the television stories were set some time in or around the 1970s and left it to individual authors to decide on dates. This resulted in a number of contradictions. Events in The Invasion have been variously dated to the late 1960s, mid 1970s and late 1970s. Battlefield was assumed to take place in 1997.
  • Who Killed Kennedy, published in 1996, ties several televised stories to real-life 60s and 70s political events, like the electoral defeat of the Wilson government. In doing so, it has stories taking place a few months before they aired.
  • In the two-part Eighth Doctor Adventure Interference, also published in 1999, Sarah Jane Smith is uncertain whether her experiences with the Doctor and UNIT took place in the Seventies or the Eighties. At the end of the "What Happened on Earth" portion of the novel, she asks the Doctor about this, and he replies, "Temporal slippage. ... My fault, I'm afraid. I think it's currently the 1970s, but—" and is interrupted.
  • In the Big Finish Productions audio play The Coup, released in 2004, now-General Sir Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart states that UNIT has been fighting alien invasions for forty years, and that he "put down" a Silurian base thirty years before (he is likely rounding up). There is no indication as to which year The Coup takes place but the following The Longest Night says ICIS's Captain Andrea Winnington born in the 1980s; this would place it in the late 00s at the earliest.

Sources

Retrieved from "https://tardis.wiki/w/index.php?title=UNIT_dating_controversy&oldid=1288815"