More UNIT (and Other) Dating
Oct. 26th, 2014 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jjporSo, more supremely fanw*nky thoughts on UNIT dating, pulled together in the course of writing this Brig fic I’ve got on the go.
As at least one commenter on the previous post, and various people over the years, including the likes of Ben Aaronovitch, have astutely observed, if they hadn’t stuffed it up royally in explicitly setting Mawdryn Undead in 1977/1983 and stating that the Brigadier left UNIT in 1976, then there wouldn’t be a UNIT dating controversy at all. We could just take the comments in The Web of Fear at face value and assume that the main UNIT stories all took place in the then-futuristic mid-late 1970s, running into the even more then-futuristic early 80s, when the cars, clothes, money, hairstyles and social attitudes just happened to resemble those of a decade or so earlier.
On that basis, we could simply say, as the new series has at numerous points, that “time can be rewritten” and that Mawdryn Undead all took place in some weird parallel reality, possibly deliberately created by the Black Guardian to trap the Doctor. Except that on the one hand that seems like a slippery sort of solution to the issue, and on the other you’d expect the Doctor himself to notice and comment on something like that if that was indeed what was going on.
Also, where’s the fun in it? ;)
3. a. You want dates? Here’s a date for you: July the 20th, 1966. This is explicitly stated in dialogue to be the day when the climax of The Faceless Ones and, perhaps more importantly for our current purposes, the climax of The War Machines (which is in many ways the prototype for later UNIT stories, even more so than The Web of Fear, which is in essence a classic Two “base under siege” story) both take place (Ben and Polly part company with the Doctor on the same day that they start travelling with him, objectively speaking). Busy day for the Doctor!
b. This is important because it establishes that the 1966 of the Whoniverse, for want of a better term, is much more technologically advanced than “our” 1966, certainly in the fields of information technology, artificial intelligence and big robot-y things of death, and judging by the presence of WOTAN at the Post Office Tower, Britain seems to be a world leader in those fields. Knowing what we know now, after watching the new series, one can’t help but speculate that a certain Institute with an interest in salvaged extra-terrestrial technology may have had a part to play in this, no doubt through its long-standing links to British captains of industry and other bastions of the Establishment.
c. This might also explain where all the shot-up Dalek remains littering Shoreditch in the aftermath of Remembrance may have got to.
d. Having established this, it naturally follows that regardless of what the writers and producers may have intended, the UNIT stories, given that they exist in the same more technically advanced universe as WOTAN, don’t have to take place in the near future purely in order to incorporate things like International Electromatics, the Inferno Project, British Mars Probes, BOSS or BBC Three television.
e. Hmm, WOTAN is named after a character from Wagnerian opera – and BOSS seems to be a Wagner fan. Coincidence (you know, apart from being a less than subtle allusion to possibly Wagner’s most famous real life fan)?
f. The dating also technically makes The Faceless Ones, which was originally broadcast in April 1967, a “pseudo-historical” (!).
g. And nobody mentions the World Cup once! You can bet your life that if NuWho ever did a story set in 1966 they’d never shut up about it. In fact, the Doctor would probably end up refereeing the final and making sure England won, on account of the West German team having been replaced by Autons or something along those lines.
4. a. Okay, now we get into actual UNIT, or more properly pre-UNIT, dating, with The Web of Fear.
b. When doesn’t the Web of Fear take place? The Post Office Tower, WOTAN’s old haunt, is mentioned in dialogue, so it’s at least later than 1965 when the tower was officially opened by then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It’s hard to tell, but it looks as though Driver Evans is wearing the cap badge of the Royal Corps of Transport, which was formed in 1965 and lasted until 1993. Now, visual evidence is always a bit dodgy in Doctor Who due to things like the changing book cover between An Unearthly Child and Remembrance, but in this case it serves to corroborate the dialogue about the PO Tower and place the story at some point after 1965.
c. It’s also worth noting that in the bit where Evans attempts to loot the chocolate vending machine in the one of the Tube stations, the bar of “Camfield’s Fairy Milk” that he manages to steal has a price of “2d” on the wrapper, or twopence in that complicated pre-decimal British currency both Susan and Ace had trouble wrapping their heads around (and dolt that I am it had never occurred to me in numerous viewings of both stories that Ace’s grumbling about pennies, shillings and half crowns is clearly meant to be a reference to Susan’s earlier classroom embarrassment). In “our” world, Britain officially switched from “old money” to decimal currency on 15 February 1971 and most shops and other businesses showed dual prices in both currencies on their products for some time both before and after the switch. This would probably place Web as happening no later than mid-1970.
d. There’s no guarantee, though, that this happened at precisely the same time in the Whoniverse, where after all the Prime Ministers are different, and it must be noted that the taxi driver in …and the Silurians (which almost certainly must take place after “our” decimalisation date even if we accept Web as taking place about the same time it was actually broadcast) asks for his fare in “old money”.
e. Then again, there are the film posters on display in the London Underground, which are clearly for the Sidney Poitier/Rod Steiger Oscar-winner In the Heat of the Night, in spite of the title being changed to “Block-Busters” in the interests of avoiding product placement on the BBC. There is some discussion of this here: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night. This film was released in the United States in August 1967; I’ve had some difficulty establishing the date it opened in the UK but it apparently was released in Ireland in November ’67 and I would think probably came out in the UK around the same time, certainly by the time production began on Web in December of that year. So, another bit of evidence (again, admittedly, visual and therefore dodgy) that places this story sometime between 1965 and 1970, specifically in late 1967 or early 1968, around the time the story was actually produced and later broadcast.
f. But of course nothing is ever that simple when it comes to UNIT dating. The intention of the production team and writers was that the story was taking place in the near future, and this is backed up by dialogue in the actual story:
Anne Travers: And you met him, when was it you said? In 1935? In Tibet?
Victoria: Yes.
Which provides a date for The Abominable Snowmen; I don’t think that the specific year was ever stated in the earlier story, but that is pretty unambiguous. I guess it’s possible Victoria, who at times doesn’t seem up to speed with the whole time travel thing, might get 1925 or even 1945 mixed up with 1935, but I very much doubt that Anne, who seems a very capable character, would make a mistake like that, especially not when discussing a pivotal event in her own father’s life. But how do we square this with Professor Travers’s own claim:
Victoria: Wait a minute, Jamie! I'm Victoria Waterfield. And that's Jamie McCrimmon!
Anne: Father?
Travers: But it can't be. Why, that's over forty years ago.
Over forty years ago would obviously place the story after 1975, which if we accept we can’t just handwave Mawdryn Undead away (as tempting as that notion is), is about the time the Brigadier, who isn’t even a Brigadier yet, should be retiring…
e. The solution, however, may come from the unlikely direction of all-singing, all-dancing, all-anti-Semitic caricature Julius Silverstein (seriously, the characterisation of Silverstein and the politics on display in The Dominators really make you wonder about Haisman and Lincoln, and by extension the producers for letting it get past them):
Silverstein: Huh! For thirty years it stands here in my museum, and now he tells me it is dangerous.
And:
Silverstein: Oh, I understand. I buy the Yeti off you thirty years ago, and now it is valuable.
Note that when people say “thirty years ago” they don’t have to mean precisely thirty years. It could be 28 years, could be 33; it’s a ballpark figure.
f. It may be a somewhat weaselly solution, but I propose Professor Travers simply misspoke when he claimed it was forty years, or perhaps was a bit “confused”. This is borne out by his general “absent-minded scientist” demeanour, which may actually go further than that:
Anne: Father, look, perhaps you've made a mistake. You've put the sphere away somewhere in your laboratory and forgotten it. You've done it before, you know.
Travers: No, I've looked everywhere.
Anne: Well, let's go home and look again, shall we? You know what you're like.
I think Travers actually sold the deactivated Yeti to Silverstein soon after his return from the 1935 expedition to Tibet, which was about thirty years before the events of Web.
g. Bear in mind, as well, that if Professor Travers was about the same age in 1935 as Jack Watling was when he played him in The Abominable Snowmen, he would have been in his mid-eighties forty years later. He doesn’t really seem that old (he’s actually remarkably well preserved for somebody in his mid-seventies as well).
tl:dr: On the basis of all of the above evidence, and in the spirit of “the death of the author” and all that jazz, I propose that while it’s impossible to say for certain, the preponderance of information we do have suggests that The Web of Fear takes place in either late 1967 or early 1968 at around the time of its real life production and broadcast.
And I went on rather longer than I intended to there. Next time (I know you can’t wait! ;D) we’ll consider The Invasion and Spearhead from Space and wade right into the stinking morass that is actual UNIT dating…
Dun dun dun!
As at least one commenter on the previous post, and various people over the years, including the likes of Ben Aaronovitch, have astutely observed, if they hadn’t stuffed it up royally in explicitly setting Mawdryn Undead in 1977/1983 and stating that the Brigadier left UNIT in 1976, then there wouldn’t be a UNIT dating controversy at all. We could just take the comments in The Web of Fear at face value and assume that the main UNIT stories all took place in the then-futuristic mid-late 1970s, running into the even more then-futuristic early 80s, when the cars, clothes, money, hairstyles and social attitudes just happened to resemble those of a decade or so earlier.
On that basis, we could simply say, as the new series has at numerous points, that “time can be rewritten” and that Mawdryn Undead all took place in some weird parallel reality, possibly deliberately created by the Black Guardian to trap the Doctor. Except that on the one hand that seems like a slippery sort of solution to the issue, and on the other you’d expect the Doctor himself to notice and comment on something like that if that was indeed what was going on.
Also, where’s the fun in it? ;)
3. a. You want dates? Here’s a date for you: July the 20th, 1966. This is explicitly stated in dialogue to be the day when the climax of The Faceless Ones and, perhaps more importantly for our current purposes, the climax of The War Machines (which is in many ways the prototype for later UNIT stories, even more so than The Web of Fear, which is in essence a classic Two “base under siege” story) both take place (Ben and Polly part company with the Doctor on the same day that they start travelling with him, objectively speaking). Busy day for the Doctor!
b. This is important because it establishes that the 1966 of the Whoniverse, for want of a better term, is much more technologically advanced than “our” 1966, certainly in the fields of information technology, artificial intelligence and big robot-y things of death, and judging by the presence of WOTAN at the Post Office Tower, Britain seems to be a world leader in those fields. Knowing what we know now, after watching the new series, one can’t help but speculate that a certain Institute with an interest in salvaged extra-terrestrial technology may have had a part to play in this, no doubt through its long-standing links to British captains of industry and other bastions of the Establishment.
c. This might also explain where all the shot-up Dalek remains littering Shoreditch in the aftermath of Remembrance may have got to.
d. Having established this, it naturally follows that regardless of what the writers and producers may have intended, the UNIT stories, given that they exist in the same more technically advanced universe as WOTAN, don’t have to take place in the near future purely in order to incorporate things like International Electromatics, the Inferno Project, British Mars Probes, BOSS or BBC Three television.
e. Hmm, WOTAN is named after a character from Wagnerian opera – and BOSS seems to be a Wagner fan. Coincidence (you know, apart from being a less than subtle allusion to possibly Wagner’s most famous real life fan)?
f. The dating also technically makes The Faceless Ones, which was originally broadcast in April 1967, a “pseudo-historical” (!).
g. And nobody mentions the World Cup once! You can bet your life that if NuWho ever did a story set in 1966 they’d never shut up about it. In fact, the Doctor would probably end up refereeing the final and making sure England won, on account of the West German team having been replaced by Autons or something along those lines.
4. a. Okay, now we get into actual UNIT, or more properly pre-UNIT, dating, with The Web of Fear.
b. When doesn’t the Web of Fear take place? The Post Office Tower, WOTAN’s old haunt, is mentioned in dialogue, so it’s at least later than 1965 when the tower was officially opened by then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It’s hard to tell, but it looks as though Driver Evans is wearing the cap badge of the Royal Corps of Transport, which was formed in 1965 and lasted until 1993. Now, visual evidence is always a bit dodgy in Doctor Who due to things like the changing book cover between An Unearthly Child and Remembrance, but in this case it serves to corroborate the dialogue about the PO Tower and place the story at some point after 1965.
c. It’s also worth noting that in the bit where Evans attempts to loot the chocolate vending machine in the one of the Tube stations, the bar of “Camfield’s Fairy Milk” that he manages to steal has a price of “2d” on the wrapper, or twopence in that complicated pre-decimal British currency both Susan and Ace had trouble wrapping their heads around (and dolt that I am it had never occurred to me in numerous viewings of both stories that Ace’s grumbling about pennies, shillings and half crowns is clearly meant to be a reference to Susan’s earlier classroom embarrassment). In “our” world, Britain officially switched from “old money” to decimal currency on 15 February 1971 and most shops and other businesses showed dual prices in both currencies on their products for some time both before and after the switch. This would probably place Web as happening no later than mid-1970.
d. There’s no guarantee, though, that this happened at precisely the same time in the Whoniverse, where after all the Prime Ministers are different, and it must be noted that the taxi driver in …and the Silurians (which almost certainly must take place after “our” decimalisation date even if we accept Web as taking place about the same time it was actually broadcast) asks for his fare in “old money”.
e. Then again, there are the film posters on display in the London Underground, which are clearly for the Sidney Poitier/Rod Steiger Oscar-winner In the Heat of the Night, in spite of the title being changed to “Block-Busters” in the interests of avoiding product placement on the BBC. There is some discussion of this here: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night. This film was released in the United States in August 1967; I’ve had some difficulty establishing the date it opened in the UK but it apparently was released in Ireland in November ’67 and I would think probably came out in the UK around the same time, certainly by the time production began on Web in December of that year. So, another bit of evidence (again, admittedly, visual and therefore dodgy) that places this story sometime between 1965 and 1970, specifically in late 1967 or early 1968, around the time the story was actually produced and later broadcast.
f. But of course nothing is ever that simple when it comes to UNIT dating. The intention of the production team and writers was that the story was taking place in the near future, and this is backed up by dialogue in the actual story:
Anne Travers: And you met him, when was it you said? In 1935? In Tibet?
Victoria: Yes.
Which provides a date for The Abominable Snowmen; I don’t think that the specific year was ever stated in the earlier story, but that is pretty unambiguous. I guess it’s possible Victoria, who at times doesn’t seem up to speed with the whole time travel thing, might get 1925 or even 1945 mixed up with 1935, but I very much doubt that Anne, who seems a very capable character, would make a mistake like that, especially not when discussing a pivotal event in her own father’s life. But how do we square this with Professor Travers’s own claim:
Victoria: Wait a minute, Jamie! I'm Victoria Waterfield. And that's Jamie McCrimmon!
Anne: Father?
Travers: But it can't be. Why, that's over forty years ago.
Over forty years ago would obviously place the story after 1975, which if we accept we can’t just handwave Mawdryn Undead away (as tempting as that notion is), is about the time the Brigadier, who isn’t even a Brigadier yet, should be retiring…
e. The solution, however, may come from the unlikely direction of all-singing, all-dancing, all-anti-Semitic caricature Julius Silverstein (seriously, the characterisation of Silverstein and the politics on display in The Dominators really make you wonder about Haisman and Lincoln, and by extension the producers for letting it get past them):
Silverstein: Huh! For thirty years it stands here in my museum, and now he tells me it is dangerous.
And:
Silverstein: Oh, I understand. I buy the Yeti off you thirty years ago, and now it is valuable.
Note that when people say “thirty years ago” they don’t have to mean precisely thirty years. It could be 28 years, could be 33; it’s a ballpark figure.
f. It may be a somewhat weaselly solution, but I propose Professor Travers simply misspoke when he claimed it was forty years, or perhaps was a bit “confused”. This is borne out by his general “absent-minded scientist” demeanour, which may actually go further than that:
Anne: Father, look, perhaps you've made a mistake. You've put the sphere away somewhere in your laboratory and forgotten it. You've done it before, you know.
Travers: No, I've looked everywhere.
Anne: Well, let's go home and look again, shall we? You know what you're like.
I think Travers actually sold the deactivated Yeti to Silverstein soon after his return from the 1935 expedition to Tibet, which was about thirty years before the events of Web.
g. Bear in mind, as well, that if Professor Travers was about the same age in 1935 as Jack Watling was when he played him in The Abominable Snowmen, he would have been in his mid-eighties forty years later. He doesn’t really seem that old (he’s actually remarkably well preserved for somebody in his mid-seventies as well).
tl:dr: On the basis of all of the above evidence, and in the spirit of “the death of the author” and all that jazz, I propose that while it’s impossible to say for certain, the preponderance of information we do have suggests that The Web of Fear takes place in either late 1967 or early 1968 at around the time of its real life production and broadcast.
And I went on rather longer than I intended to there. Next time (I know you can’t wait! ;D) we’ll consider The Invasion and Spearhead from Space and wade right into the stinking morass that is actual UNIT dating…
Dun dun dun!
