"No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!"

Title: Escaping the Web
Part Eight: St. James's Park
Rating: Teen (Gen)
Word count: 46,171 so far
Warnings: Some violence
Summary: The horror infesting the London Underground has been defeated, and now it's time for Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart to pick up the pieces and build for the future. If he can, that is, with the shadowy agents of a certain Institute doing their best to interfere...
Characters: Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Other characters
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its many associated characters and copyrights do not, of course, belong to me!

Eventually, the next part! In which Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart makes some new acquaintances, goes for a drive around London and sees the sights, has a lie down and watches some television. A good day all round...?

Finished - at last! My entry for the dw_guestfest Whoniverse Minor Characters Ficathon! It turned out a bit longer than I was planning. I believe it is still, possibly, the 10th of April in some timezones...

Author: jjpor
Title: Focal Point
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 16,447
Prompt/Chosen character: Isobel Watkins from The Invasion. Sort of.
Notes/Warnings: A fairly strange idea for a fic that came to me when I was working on my other early-period UNIT fic and musing about UNIT dating etc. Once thought, though, I couldn't un-think it. I quote dialogue from the Who story The Invasion fairly liberally at some points, and also lyrics from the song Teddy Bears' Picnic, of all things. None of this belongs to me! With bloody violence, swearing, drug references, oodles of 1960s period misogyny and sexism and unpleasant stuff like that. Canon who characters bent wildly out of shape. OCs wandering into frame. You know, for the kids.
Summary: Isobel is in two minds about her involvement with the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie...

Link: At Teaspoon | At AO3

Title: Escaping the Web
Part Six: Green Park
Rating: Teen (Gen)
Word count: 30,101 so far
Warnings: Some violence
Summary: The horror infesting the London Underground has been defeated, and now it's time for Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart to pick up the pieces and build for the future. If he can, that is, with the shadowy agents of a certain Institute doing their best to interfere...
Characters: Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Other characters
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its many associated characters and copyrights do not, of course, belong to me!

In which the Colonel and the Air Commodore continue to discuss the state of the world, including some Brig biographical details based solely on my own wild speculations and quite a few fanw*nky references to various Who stories - see if you can spot them all. :D I'm trying to at least acknowledge the Counter-Measures audios here, but not sweating any potential "canon" contradictions, if that makes any sense.

And my my, yes, it looks like there might be another UNIT Dating post coming your way soon... I know you're all looking forward to it. ;D

Title: Escaping the Web
Part Five: Hyde Park Corner
Rating: Teen (Gen)
Word count: 24,849 so far
Warnings: Some violence
Summary: The horror infesting the London Underground has been defeated, and now it's time for Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart to pick up the pieces and build for the future. If he can, that is, with the shadowy agents of a certain Institute doing their best to interfere...
Characters: Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Other characters
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its many associated characters and copyrights do not, of course, belong to me!

After another lengthy delay in getting these chapters posted, the Colonel continues his slow immersion into the secret world, meeting another character from classic Who and incidentally demonstrating that whatever aspersions Three may have cast at him he's far better at soldiering than he is at marriage...

And those of you who've been following my ramblings will know what this means - another chapter up, I can allow myself another UNIT dating post! :D

So, 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? ;)

( It gets worse! )

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!

50th Anniversary Fanwork-a-thon-a-thon, Round Two: Ten

(Secondary prompt: UNIT)

Even as the first round continues, it's time already for kicking off the second in the series of monthly fanwork-a-thons counting down to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Please, if you have an interest in Doctor Who fanwork, take the time to look at the signup posts on the Who @ 50 comm...and perhaps even sign up! It's Ten and/or UNIT this month, two themes that I hope will attract a lot of interest.

The Livejournal Version

The Dreamwidth Version

All are welcome!



And an observation: I've been very pleased, and indeed pleasantly surprised, by the amount of interest generated by the fanwork-a-thon and by the Who @ 50 comm in general. One thing I've noticed, though, is that in spite of the general perception about the place that Livejournal is on the decline and Dreamwidth is the wave of the future, there has been far more activity on the LJ version of the comm. I wonder why this is; could I do more to promote the comm on Dreamwidth, or is the dynamic of comm-joining and participation different there in some way (I'll admit, as something of a Dreamwidth newbie myself I wouldn't really know)? Interesting, anyway.