UNIT (and Other) Dating: This Time It’s Personal
A new year - new borderline-worrying UNIT dating spam! :D
As you will recall, in previous posts trying to make sense of the fearsomely complex UNIT Dating Conundrum it was established that:
Remembrance of the Daleks and An Unearthly Child definitely both took place in the fourth quarter of 1963.
July the 20th, 1966 was a really busy day for the Doctor and also establishes that the Whoniverse, for want of a better term, is much more scientifically and technologically advanced than “our” world was in the same time period. UNIT stories therefore don’t have to take place in the near future just because they contain then-futuristic elements. The Faceless Ones is also, bizarrely, technically a pseudo-historical.
Also, The Web of Fear most likely took place around the time of its actual production and broadcast at the end of 1967/beginning of 1968.
The Invasion took place roughly four years later, probably in the autumn of 1971 to give us enough time to fit everything else in before the Brigadier’s established retirement date in 1976. This and many of the following UNIT stories therefore do actually take place in the near future from the point of view of the time they were produced, just not as far forward as the production team probably intended (when they remembered). The technological edge isn’t the only difference between the Whoniverse and our own; by the time this version of 1971 rolls around the world political situation also seems very different from “our” history.
And now we push on, with Spearhead from Space, the dreaded Season 6b and good stuff like that!
First things first, though. In my earlier post about Web, one of the bits of evidence that I used to place that story not later than Britain’s adoption of decimal currency in February 1971 was the scene in the recon of that story’s Episode 3 on the DVD release where Driver Evans steals a bar of “Camfield’s Fairy Milk” chocolate with a price of “2d”, or two old pence, visible on the wrapper. However, it has since come to my attention that the shot of the chocolate bar doesn’t appear in the original telesnaps for this story and appears to be something inserted by the makers of the DVD recon as a tribute to legendary Who director Douglas Camfield. How this affects it “canonicity” or not I leave up to you to puzzle out, but it isn’t a crucial part of the argument as there is reason to believe from dialogue in …and the Silurians (which we will get to eventually, probably about June) that Whoniverse Britain adopted decimal currency at least a year later than it did in our reality, maybe even later than that. This may be due to the nationalist-chauvinist influence of a certain Institute whose members, one suspects, would be the sort to see the metric system as some fiendish attempt by Johnny Foreigner to compromise our Precious Britannic Bodily Fluids or somesuch.
6.a. Anyway, Spearhead; having defeated the Cybermen with UNIT in autumn 1971 (we think), the Doctor goes on to have various other adventures with Jamie and Zoe before running afoul of the Time Lords and getting exiled back to Earth with a new body and a broken TARDIS. But…Earth when?
b. Clearly after The Invasion because that was the first time he encountered UNIT and the Brigadier actually holding that rank and the Brig clearly also at that time didn’t know any Doctor other than Two. Also, in the Brig’s initial pitch to Liz Shaw (he needn’t have bothered - as soon as she saw the ‘tache she was sold):
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
LIZ: Really?
BRIGADIER: We were lucky enough to be able to stop them. There was a policy decision not to inform the public.
LIZ: Do you seriously expect me to believe that?
BRIGADIER: It's not my habit to tell lies, Miss Shaw.
LIZ: I'm sorry, but it is a fantastic story.
BRIGADIER: We were very lucky on both occasions. We had help from a scientist with a great experience of other life forms.
LIZ: Really? Who was this genius?
BRIGADIER: Well, it's all rather difficult to explain. We used to call him the Doctor.
As to an idea of how much time has passed for the Brig and compadres, we need to jump forward from the very first Three story to the very last, Planet of the Spiders, where the Brig comforts a very worried Sarah Jane Smith with the information that:
BRIGADIER: Oh, that's nothing. One time I didn't see him for months. And what's more, when he did turn up, he had a new face. Could have been a completely different man.
I think it’s a fair assumption that here the Brigadier is referring to the last time he saw Two (not counting The Three Doctors, of course, which we will come to shortly) and the first time he saw Three, and that from his point of view the gap therefore between The Invasion and Spearhead is probably less than a year (or he would have said “a year” - remember if anything he’s going to exaggerate the length of time in order to buck Sarah up as she is fretting that Three’s three week disappearance means he isn’t coming back), but longer than, say, a month or two (again allowing for the Brig possibly exaggerating slightly).
c. From which I think we can place Spearhead…hang on, what did you just say, Brigadier?
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
What?
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
So that’s The Invasion and Web, then...although…waitaminute…
UNIT didn’t exist yet at the time of Web - you were still with the Royal Scots Whatisnames wearing that sexy, sexy hat!
There’s a missing UNIT story!!
d. In all seriousness, you can sort of see what’s gone on here. Robert Holmes, writing Spearhead, probably to some sort of horrendous deadline, and in the manner of geniuses giving nary a flying flip for previously established continuity, knows that Lethbridge-Stewart has been in two previous Who stories and translates that into two alien invasions since UNIT was founded, even though that isn’t technically correct. I’m not sure what Terrance Dicks’s excuse is as script editor for letting that go, except that in the days before fans started running the asylum this kind of fine, dare I say nerdy, detail probably seemed irrelevant to grown-up television producing chaps making a show aimed at, in Holmes’s words, intelligent fourteen year olds. From the point of view of the fictional universe of the show, however…
There’s a missing UNIT story!!
e. And it has to be a Two story, because Three’s appearance in Spearhead, and indeed the very idea of the Doctor being able to change physically in this way, is certainly news to the Brig when he first sees him at the hospital. The “one time I didn't see him for months,” in Spiders therefore refers not to the gap between Spearhead and The Invasion but to the gap between Spearhead and the missing story, also implying that from the Brig’s standpoint the gap between The Invasion and the missing story (and also any of the Doctor’s off-planet jaunts once he starts taking them from Colony in Space up to Spiders) was shorter than the gap of “months” that took place “one time.”
f. So, a missing Doctor and UNIT story, featuring Two, which the Doctor himself doesn’t seem to reference at any point after the event (almost as if it were…wiped from his memory…?!) - are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep; “Season 6b”. Season 6b, of course, being the fanon suggested by Paul Cornell et al in The Discontinuity Guide, later pseudo-canonised in the BBC novels, to try and come up with an explanation for just what the heck was going on with the much older Two and Jamie (and Victoria?!) in The Two Doctors that didn’t involve observing that Bob Holmes gave nary a flying flip for previously established continuity (I don’t agree with everything Phil Sandifer writes in his TARDIS Eruditorum blog - for one thing, he’s wrong - dead wrong - in his entire assessment of the Three era - but I do sort of like his suggestion that the depiction of Two and Jamie in particular and The Two Doctors in general is Holmes sticking two fingers up in typically Holmesian fashion at the state of Who and the state of Who fanboyism as he found it in the mid-80s). Clearly, obviously, Two (and Jamie? And Victoria, even though she wasn’t even in The War Games??) had had his sentence of forced regeneration and exile to Earth temporarily suspended while he went around space and time doing dirty jobs for the Time Lords. Clearly.
g. As for why I think we might be talking about Season 6b and not just an unseen Two story taking place in some inter-story gap in Season 6, we have this exchange between the unaccompanied, visibly older, Two seen in The Three Doctors and UNIT stalwart Sgt Benton:
DOCTOR 2: Now don't tell me. Corporal Benton, isn't it?
BENTON: Sergeant Benton now.
…
DOCTOR 2: I haven't seen you since that nasty business with the Cybermen.
BENTON: It happened all those years ago (Which also indicates The Three Doctors is taking place quite some time after our date for The Invasion in late 1971)
So clearly at this point in his career as a Time Lord special agent, Two hasn’t had any dealings with UNIT (or more precisely Benton) since what we are meant to understand as a reference to The Invasion. I think it’s possible that this is early on in Season 6b, indeed that the Omega threat might itself be the reason for Two’s temporary reprieve (in which case his slight ageing might be a byproduct of some timey-wimey method of pulling him back out of that vortex he was in at the end of The War Games, like Five’s apparent ageing in Time Crash. Now, there are other possible explanations for his exchange with Benton: the missing story also involved Cybermen, perhaps stragglers from Tobias Vaughn’s failed plan; Benton didn’t take part in it, being on leave or temporarily rotated back to the regular Army from UNIT, but on balance I think Season 6b is the best explanation for Two’s unseen collision with the Brig and pals, because…Victoria??!
h. One of the strangest aspects of the already pretty impressively strange The Two Doctors is the notion that the physically much older Two and Jamie seen there are once again travelling with Victoria (who they have dropped off somewhere so that she can learn graphology?!), who parted ways with them way back at the end of Fury from the Deep. Clearly this takes place after that story, and also after The War Games, because Jamie is quite blasé about the notion of Time Lords, whereas before the Doctor’s capture and trial none of his companions (or viewers) knew where he came from or what his people called themselves. It also takes place after The Five Doctors, because the (again unaccompanied) and visibly slightly younger Two there knew that the Jamie and Zoe who appeared to him in the Death Zone were phantoms because their memories of him had been wiped following his sentencing. So it would seem that Two’s career during Season 6b fell into at least two distinct phases - an earlier one where he travelled alone, doing jobs for the Time Lords but perhaps with freedom to travel in between times, and a later one where he was teamed up again with Jamie and Victoria, which presumably lasted for quite some time from their point of view due to the obvious ageing they underwent during this time.
i. So how did this reunion take place? It seems likely that the Time Lords could have plucked Jamie and Victoria out of their own times and spaces as they pleased, or the Doctor could have been allowed to pick them up in his TARDIS. In the case of Victoria, one possibility presents itself: she was of course left on Earth, specifically southeast England, after Fury from the Deep, which took place…when? Given our past observations about the “futuristic” stylings of the Whoniverse compared to the same era of our own timeline, although there is some indication that Fury may be meant to be taking place in the near future compared to its time of production and broadcast in early 1968, in actuality this is not necessarily the case. Certainly, in our own history, the main era of North Seas gas (as opposed to oil) exploration and adoption, around which Fury’s plot revolves, was the mid-1960s to the early 1970s (at which point oil discovery and extraction became the main thing). If we assume Fury takes place sometime between 1968 and 1971, and that this is the era where the Doctor and Jamie part company with Victoria, it could be that they reunited with her only a couple of years later at most in the course of the missing UNIT story, and that then, regretting her initial decision to remain behind, she decided to start travelling with them again in their Season 6b adventures.
j. So, what can we deduce about the missing UNIT story? It took place “months” before Spearhead and perhaps rather less time after The Invasion. It featured the Brigadier, UNIT and a possibly older, wearier Second Doctor, possibly Jamie too, sent there on a mission by the Time Lords to deal with some threat to all space and time, although possibly not featuring Corporal/Sergeant Benton. It could have featured Cybermen. It could have seen Two and Jamie reunited with Victoria, who then accompanied them on their subsequent missions on behalf of the Time Lords. Based on nothing other than a sense of thematic cohesion and the notion I’ve seen bandied about that The Invasion was originally intended as a the final part in a Great Intelligence/Yeti/Travers trilogy that never came to pass due to Haisman and Lincoln’s falling out with the BBC, I’d quite like it to be a direct Web sequel (and Bells of St John prequel??). UNIT’s flying HQ and super-nails Assault Platoon (and hopefully not Captain Turner and Sergeant Walters) may well have gone for a burton in the course of the proceedings. If any of you write it before me…I’ll be…very upset. :D
Looks like somebody’s already thinking along those lines... :D
k. Okay, “months”, then, but in all that wittering about Season 6b you haven’t pinned down exactly when Spearhead is taking place or got very far with dating any of the other UNIT stories. Patience, patience my friends - that will come next time (or after my next chapter of Brig fic, more accurately), when we will have years, dates and all of that specified, because I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to put the main UNIT era into a solid timeline is to do most of it at once, possibly starting at the end and working back. Oh, and I’ll also explode Sarah Jane’s fibbing claims to be from 1980 while I’m at it. Stay tuned!
tl;dr: Spearhead from Space takes place “months” after an unseen missing UNIT story which takes place shortly after the late-1971-dated The Invasion. And Season 6b is real! And more on UNIT dating next time, where I will actually start specifying years, months etc. Don’t miss it!
This entry has also been posted at http://jjpor.dreamwidth.org/214838.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.
As you will recall, in previous posts trying to make sense of the fearsomely complex UNIT Dating Conundrum it was established that:
Remembrance of the Daleks and An Unearthly Child definitely both took place in the fourth quarter of 1963.
July the 20th, 1966 was a really busy day for the Doctor and also establishes that the Whoniverse, for want of a better term, is much more scientifically and technologically advanced than “our” world was in the same time period. UNIT stories therefore don’t have to take place in the near future just because they contain then-futuristic elements. The Faceless Ones is also, bizarrely, technically a pseudo-historical.
Also, The Web of Fear most likely took place around the time of its actual production and broadcast at the end of 1967/beginning of 1968.
The Invasion took place roughly four years later, probably in the autumn of 1971 to give us enough time to fit everything else in before the Brigadier’s established retirement date in 1976. This and many of the following UNIT stories therefore do actually take place in the near future from the point of view of the time they were produced, just not as far forward as the production team probably intended (when they remembered). The technological edge isn’t the only difference between the Whoniverse and our own; by the time this version of 1971 rolls around the world political situation also seems very different from “our” history.
And now we push on, with Spearhead from Space, the dreaded Season 6b and good stuff like that!
First things first, though. In my earlier post about Web, one of the bits of evidence that I used to place that story not later than Britain’s adoption of decimal currency in February 1971 was the scene in the recon of that story’s Episode 3 on the DVD release where Driver Evans steals a bar of “Camfield’s Fairy Milk” chocolate with a price of “2d”, or two old pence, visible on the wrapper. However, it has since come to my attention that the shot of the chocolate bar doesn’t appear in the original telesnaps for this story and appears to be something inserted by the makers of the DVD recon as a tribute to legendary Who director Douglas Camfield. How this affects it “canonicity” or not I leave up to you to puzzle out, but it isn’t a crucial part of the argument as there is reason to believe from dialogue in …and the Silurians (which we will get to eventually, probably about June) that Whoniverse Britain adopted decimal currency at least a year later than it did in our reality, maybe even later than that. This may be due to the nationalist-chauvinist influence of a certain Institute whose members, one suspects, would be the sort to see the metric system as some fiendish attempt by Johnny Foreigner to compromise our Precious Britannic Bodily Fluids or somesuch.
6.a. Anyway, Spearhead; having defeated the Cybermen with UNIT in autumn 1971 (we think), the Doctor goes on to have various other adventures with Jamie and Zoe before running afoul of the Time Lords and getting exiled back to Earth with a new body and a broken TARDIS. But…Earth when?
b. Clearly after The Invasion because that was the first time he encountered UNIT and the Brigadier actually holding that rank and the Brig clearly also at that time didn’t know any Doctor other than Two. Also, in the Brig’s initial pitch to Liz Shaw (he needn’t have bothered - as soon as she saw the ‘tache she was sold):
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
LIZ: Really?
BRIGADIER: We were lucky enough to be able to stop them. There was a policy decision not to inform the public.
LIZ: Do you seriously expect me to believe that?
BRIGADIER: It's not my habit to tell lies, Miss Shaw.
LIZ: I'm sorry, but it is a fantastic story.
BRIGADIER: We were very lucky on both occasions. We had help from a scientist with a great experience of other life forms.
LIZ: Really? Who was this genius?
BRIGADIER: Well, it's all rather difficult to explain. We used to call him the Doctor.
As to an idea of how much time has passed for the Brig and compadres, we need to jump forward from the very first Three story to the very last, Planet of the Spiders, where the Brig comforts a very worried Sarah Jane Smith with the information that:
BRIGADIER: Oh, that's nothing. One time I didn't see him for months. And what's more, when he did turn up, he had a new face. Could have been a completely different man.
I think it’s a fair assumption that here the Brigadier is referring to the last time he saw Two (not counting The Three Doctors, of course, which we will come to shortly) and the first time he saw Three, and that from his point of view the gap therefore between The Invasion and Spearhead is probably less than a year (or he would have said “a year” - remember if anything he’s going to exaggerate the length of time in order to buck Sarah up as she is fretting that Three’s three week disappearance means he isn’t coming back), but longer than, say, a month or two (again allowing for the Brig possibly exaggerating slightly).
c. From which I think we can place Spearhead…hang on, what did you just say, Brigadier?
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
What?
BRIGADIER: Since UNIT was formed, there've been two attempts to invade this planet.
So that’s The Invasion and Web, then...although…waitaminute…
UNIT didn’t exist yet at the time of Web - you were still with the Royal Scots Whatisnames wearing that sexy, sexy hat!
There’s a missing UNIT story!!
d. In all seriousness, you can sort of see what’s gone on here. Robert Holmes, writing Spearhead, probably to some sort of horrendous deadline, and in the manner of geniuses giving nary a flying flip for previously established continuity, knows that Lethbridge-Stewart has been in two previous Who stories and translates that into two alien invasions since UNIT was founded, even though that isn’t technically correct. I’m not sure what Terrance Dicks’s excuse is as script editor for letting that go, except that in the days before fans started running the asylum this kind of fine, dare I say nerdy, detail probably seemed irrelevant to grown-up television producing chaps making a show aimed at, in Holmes’s words, intelligent fourteen year olds. From the point of view of the fictional universe of the show, however…
There’s a missing UNIT story!!
e. And it has to be a Two story, because Three’s appearance in Spearhead, and indeed the very idea of the Doctor being able to change physically in this way, is certainly news to the Brig when he first sees him at the hospital. The “one time I didn't see him for months,” in Spiders therefore refers not to the gap between Spearhead and The Invasion but to the gap between Spearhead and the missing story, also implying that from the Brig’s standpoint the gap between The Invasion and the missing story (and also any of the Doctor’s off-planet jaunts once he starts taking them from Colony in Space up to Spiders) was shorter than the gap of “months” that took place “one time.”
f. So, a missing Doctor and UNIT story, featuring Two, which the Doctor himself doesn’t seem to reference at any point after the event (almost as if it were…wiped from his memory…?!) - are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep; “Season 6b”. Season 6b, of course, being the fanon suggested by Paul Cornell et al in The Discontinuity Guide, later pseudo-canonised in the BBC novels, to try and come up with an explanation for just what the heck was going on with the much older Two and Jamie (and Victoria?!) in The Two Doctors that didn’t involve observing that Bob Holmes gave nary a flying flip for previously established continuity (I don’t agree with everything Phil Sandifer writes in his TARDIS Eruditorum blog - for one thing, he’s wrong - dead wrong - in his entire assessment of the Three era - but I do sort of like his suggestion that the depiction of Two and Jamie in particular and The Two Doctors in general is Holmes sticking two fingers up in typically Holmesian fashion at the state of Who and the state of Who fanboyism as he found it in the mid-80s). Clearly, obviously, Two (and Jamie? And Victoria, even though she wasn’t even in The War Games??) had had his sentence of forced regeneration and exile to Earth temporarily suspended while he went around space and time doing dirty jobs for the Time Lords. Clearly.
g. As for why I think we might be talking about Season 6b and not just an unseen Two story taking place in some inter-story gap in Season 6, we have this exchange between the unaccompanied, visibly older, Two seen in The Three Doctors and UNIT stalwart Sgt Benton:
DOCTOR 2: Now don't tell me. Corporal Benton, isn't it?
BENTON: Sergeant Benton now.
…
DOCTOR 2: I haven't seen you since that nasty business with the Cybermen.
BENTON: It happened all those years ago (Which also indicates The Three Doctors is taking place quite some time after our date for The Invasion in late 1971)
So clearly at this point in his career as a Time Lord special agent, Two hasn’t had any dealings with UNIT (or more precisely Benton) since what we are meant to understand as a reference to The Invasion. I think it’s possible that this is early on in Season 6b, indeed that the Omega threat might itself be the reason for Two’s temporary reprieve (in which case his slight ageing might be a byproduct of some timey-wimey method of pulling him back out of that vortex he was in at the end of The War Games, like Five’s apparent ageing in Time Crash. Now, there are other possible explanations for his exchange with Benton: the missing story also involved Cybermen, perhaps stragglers from Tobias Vaughn’s failed plan; Benton didn’t take part in it, being on leave or temporarily rotated back to the regular Army from UNIT, but on balance I think Season 6b is the best explanation for Two’s unseen collision with the Brig and pals, because…Victoria??!
h. One of the strangest aspects of the already pretty impressively strange The Two Doctors is the notion that the physically much older Two and Jamie seen there are once again travelling with Victoria (who they have dropped off somewhere so that she can learn graphology?!), who parted ways with them way back at the end of Fury from the Deep. Clearly this takes place after that story, and also after The War Games, because Jamie is quite blasé about the notion of Time Lords, whereas before the Doctor’s capture and trial none of his companions (or viewers) knew where he came from or what his people called themselves. It also takes place after The Five Doctors, because the (again unaccompanied) and visibly slightly younger Two there knew that the Jamie and Zoe who appeared to him in the Death Zone were phantoms because their memories of him had been wiped following his sentencing. So it would seem that Two’s career during Season 6b fell into at least two distinct phases - an earlier one where he travelled alone, doing jobs for the Time Lords but perhaps with freedom to travel in between times, and a later one where he was teamed up again with Jamie and Victoria, which presumably lasted for quite some time from their point of view due to the obvious ageing they underwent during this time.
i. So how did this reunion take place? It seems likely that the Time Lords could have plucked Jamie and Victoria out of their own times and spaces as they pleased, or the Doctor could have been allowed to pick them up in his TARDIS. In the case of Victoria, one possibility presents itself: she was of course left on Earth, specifically southeast England, after Fury from the Deep, which took place…when? Given our past observations about the “futuristic” stylings of the Whoniverse compared to the same era of our own timeline, although there is some indication that Fury may be meant to be taking place in the near future compared to its time of production and broadcast in early 1968, in actuality this is not necessarily the case. Certainly, in our own history, the main era of North Seas gas (as opposed to oil) exploration and adoption, around which Fury’s plot revolves, was the mid-1960s to the early 1970s (at which point oil discovery and extraction became the main thing). If we assume Fury takes place sometime between 1968 and 1971, and that this is the era where the Doctor and Jamie part company with Victoria, it could be that they reunited with her only a couple of years later at most in the course of the missing UNIT story, and that then, regretting her initial decision to remain behind, she decided to start travelling with them again in their Season 6b adventures.
j. So, what can we deduce about the missing UNIT story? It took place “months” before Spearhead and perhaps rather less time after The Invasion. It featured the Brigadier, UNIT and a possibly older, wearier Second Doctor, possibly Jamie too, sent there on a mission by the Time Lords to deal with some threat to all space and time, although possibly not featuring Corporal/Sergeant Benton. It could have featured Cybermen. It could have seen Two and Jamie reunited with Victoria, who then accompanied them on their subsequent missions on behalf of the Time Lords. Based on nothing other than a sense of thematic cohesion and the notion I’ve seen bandied about that The Invasion was originally intended as a the final part in a Great Intelligence/Yeti/Travers trilogy that never came to pass due to Haisman and Lincoln’s falling out with the BBC, I’d quite like it to be a direct Web sequel (and Bells of St John prequel??). UNIT’s flying HQ and super-nails Assault Platoon (and hopefully not Captain Turner and Sergeant Walters) may well have gone for a burton in the course of the proceedings. If any of you write it before me…I’ll be…very upset. :D
Looks like somebody’s already thinking along those lines... :D
k. Okay, “months”, then, but in all that wittering about Season 6b you haven’t pinned down exactly when Spearhead is taking place or got very far with dating any of the other UNIT stories. Patience, patience my friends - that will come next time (or after my next chapter of Brig fic, more accurately), when we will have years, dates and all of that specified, because I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to put the main UNIT era into a solid timeline is to do most of it at once, possibly starting at the end and working back. Oh, and I’ll also explode Sarah Jane’s fibbing claims to be from 1980 while I’m at it. Stay tuned!
tl;dr: Spearhead from Space takes place “months” after an unseen missing UNIT story which takes place shortly after the late-1971-dated The Invasion. And Season 6b is real! And more on UNIT dating next time, where I will actually start specifying years, months etc. Don’t miss it!
This entry has also been posted at http://jjpor.dreamwidth.org/214838.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.