Talk:UNIT

Intrusion Countermeasures Group

This article positively asserts a link between the group seen in "Remembrance" and the group seen in "The Web of Fear". Please provide the actual, narrative link between the two or rephrase. They might be similar, but they're not the same, as far as I can tell. I don't see anything in the story of "Remembrance" which suggests that Gilmore's group are in any sense tasked with hunting aliens or even strange phenomenon. He's utterly surprised at the notion that the Daleks are alien. The Doctor has to tell his people to look up in the sky for Dalek ships, something UNIT would have been doing as a matter of course (see "Spearhead in Space"). No, the presence of Gilmore's group in the area is never properly explained whatsoever. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:22, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Torchwood

This article would be much better served just leaving the Torchwood reference out of the mix. Calling Torchwood UNIT's predecessor is more than a little problematic. Never mind all the "wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey" issues involved with Torchwood being, from the Doctor's perspective, an antecedent of UNIT. It's hard enough to wrap your mind around how something created because of the 10th Doctor could precede something which the he first encountered in his 2nd incarnation.

No, the clearer issue is that we don't know when knowledge of Torchwood passed from Buckingham Palace to 10 Downing Street. There's just no way to tell when the government learned of the Royal Family's secret organization. Since the British contingent of UNIT derives from the government (at a minimum because the British government pays dues to the UN), the government would have to know about Torchwood to have in any way influenced UNIT. But, of course, the broader point is that the British government didn't form either organization. UNIT's mandate and authority came from the United Nations, and it's unlikely that the UN knew of Torchwood. If they did, they would surely have protested, as Torchwood's aims (especially as seen at Torchwood 1) were specifically counter to the UN Charter.

I have therefore removed the following language:

UNIT had a predecessor of sorts in the Torchwood Institute, a group founded in 1879 by Queen Victoria to protect the British Empire against uncanny threats to its citizenry. (DW: Tooth and Claw) Torchwood would remain even less of a public presence than UNIT.

The article could perhaps use a whole section, called UNIT and Torchwood, but to place this statement at the very top of the history section without a great deal more commentary is extremely misleading. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)