UNIT dating controversy

The UNIT dating controversy is a problem of retroactive continuity (retcon) which has attracted considerable interest from both fans and professional Doctor Who writers alike. It has also been the subject of a 2 entertain DVD documentary, The UNIT Dating Conundrum, a part of 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 DW: The Sontaran Stratagem, and on-screen graphics seen in SJA: 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

Terrance Dicks, meanwhile, 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, by implying 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 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 "40 years ago", meaning that The Web of Fear is set in 1975. In a later adventure, called The Invasion, the Second Doctor again encounters the newly-minted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and the two former allies say that it's been "four years" since they've seen each other. Hence, The Invasion is ostensibly set 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". 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 Terror of the Zygons 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 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 within the televised Doctor Who narratives.

Minor 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 and her friend Andrea Yates as teenagers attending school (not college) in 1964 when she was 13. 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 23. Though not a part of the original televised "UNIT dating controversy", The Sarah Jane Adventures thus deepened the problem.
 * Jo says that 1926 is "about forty years" earlier than her own time. (DW: 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 40 years from her birth, then her present day would be 60-odd years later, since she's in her early 20s when with the Third Doctor. However, since she's only approximating — "about forty years" —it's difficult to draw any firm conclusions for 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 easily 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 that 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 readable on screen, upon which 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." (WEB: UNIT website)

Contradictory clues
In addition, there are many other contradictory details that confuse the picture.


 * Some stories feature calendars, but these can contradict one another. The Green Death features two such references, one which says the story is set in February in a leap year when 29 February falls on a Sunday (1972 is the only one in the 1960s-1990s), but another says April. It is possible that an old calendar might have been left on the wall and ignored, from a couple of months or even years previously.


 * Where politics are concerned, the stories offer a very different picture from the time when they were transmitted. The British Prime Minister is called "Jeremy" in 1973's The Green Death (intended to be Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe who never attained that position) and is a woman in 1975's Terror of the Zygons (four years before Margaret Thatcher attained the position, although according to the BBC's website the prime minister referenced is one Shirley Williams, suggesting in the Whoniverse Thatcher wasn't the first female prime minister). The United Nations is more interventionist than its 1970s real-life counterpart, whilst the Cold War at times is on the verge of turning into World War III in some of the earlier stories, but by Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Robot the Cold War is over. Mao Tse-Tung is implied to be alive at the time of 1971's The Mind of Evil, or is at least referred to by Fu Peng as "our Chairman". In real life he died in 1976, which would date the story before that.


 * Usually, the stories don't attempt 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. A rare 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 first true UNIT story).


 * In the 1970 serial The Ambassadors of Death, Sergeant Benton comments that the distress signal SOS was done away with "years ago."


 * 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.


 * On the occasions that money is mentioned, most amounts given correspond to those in use at the time, such as 1970's Doctor Who and the Silurians featuring 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 technology displayed on occasion is significantly more advanced than reality. The United Kingdom has a fully functional space programme that is able to send missions to Mars and Jupiter. Of course, cyber-technology recovered after The Invasion, plus the five years of International Electromatics' retrofitting of alien technology to consumer electronic goods mentioned in that story, could well have accelerated progress beyond that of our contemporary Earth. Laser guns are in development in 1974's Robot and then used by UNIT in The Seeds of Doom. Many of the science establishments seen are engaged in extremely advanced research. Sarah Jane Smith and Jo Grant both seemed to believe that interstellar travel was close to being developed (Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Colony in Space respectively) but by the time of Aliens of London the British are then new to aliens and by The Christmas Invasion London and UNIT have sent off their first space probe to Mars. It's possible that this was the first Mars probe sent by the British Rocket Group


 * The BBC has a third channel, BBC3, in 1971's The Dæmons. In 1971, the BBC had only two channels (though had aspirations to launch a third channel in subsequent years). The actual BBC Three, a digital television channel, was only launched in 2003.


 * 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 SJA: 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 a degree of uncertainty amongst the production team as well.


 * A document prepared during the making of The Invasion by director Douglas Camfield states that he assumed the story was set in 1976.


 * 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 (which did not exist in reality at the time of the interview) would have become reality, with Pertwee confirming this would be in the 1980s.


 * A recorded but unused line in 1971's The Claws of Axos discusses comets due in the period 1969-1975, strongly pointing to an early 1970s setting for the story. By this time Sherwin had moved on as Producer.


 * The 1972 book The Making of Doctor Who, written by then-script editor Terrance Dicks and regular writer Malcolm Hulke, dates the 1970 story Spearhead from Space to 1970. However the second edition of 1976 (rewritten by Dicks alone, after he had stepped down as Script Editor) does not specify any date.


 * The 1974 Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils which Malcolm Hulke based on his own The Sea Devils, refers to North Sea oil starting to be exploited in 1978, indicating an early 1980s setting for the story.


 * The 1981 Writers' Guide for the proposed series of K9 and Company stated that Sarah's travels with the Doctor (i.e. from The Time Warrior to The Hand of Fear) took place between 1973 and 1976.


 * 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 fan 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 1993 radio play The Paradise of Death by early 1970s producer Barry Letts is set at the time of the later Third Doctor stories and appears to have a 1990s setting, most notably references to Virtual Reality. (In the 1994 novelised version, however, Letts limits these references.)


 * 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 down 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.


 * Who Killed Kennedy 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.


 * It is stated in the Eighth Doctor Adventure Revolution Man by Paul Leonard, when Sam Jones was released from prison in 1967, there was a document containing the Brigadier's initials and the UNIT call sign, although both the Eighth Doctor and Sam knew that the Brigadier was still Colonel and UNIT didn't yet exist.


 * The BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel The Face of the Enemy, by David A. McIntee, suggests that Mawdryn Undead may take place in a parallel universe where the Brigadier retired in 1976.


 * In the Big Finish Productions audio play The Coup, 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. Of course, these could be approximations, and there is no indication as to which year The Coup takes place.


 * The novelisation Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters by Terrance Dicks 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).


 * The IDW Publishing comic The Forgotten shows the Third Doctor during his exile on Earth, dated 1972.

What's so special about the slight future?

 * The Claws of Axos shows a videophone conversation between Mr Chinn (presumably a high level Ministry of Defence Civil Servant) and the British Defence Minister. They are not members of "UNIT" and are apparently using standard government technology. This is a strong argument, though not conclusive proof, that this time-line is set at least a few years ahead of "1971"