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

Oh, you thought I’d maybe stopped with the pointless UNIT dating posts? You don’t have luck like that.

Previous parts can be found HERE and HERE. To cut a long story short – we (that is, I) had chiefly come to the conclusions that 1. The War Machines takes place in 1966, as helpfully exposited in the serial The Faceless Ones, that 2. the Whoniverse’s 1966 was somewhat more scientifically and technologically advanced than “our” 1966, possibly due to the machinations of a certain Institute, and that 3. the preponderance of evidence would tend to suggest that The Web of Fear takes place in either late 1967 or early 1968, around about the time of its real life recording and broadcast.

Thanks, too, to john_elliott, who in the comments to the previous post pointed out that the map of the London Underground that can be glimpsed in Web doesn't show the Victoria Line, which historically opened in March 1969 – yet further corroboration for the above dating!

So, having established that, let’s consider the first proper UNIT story…


5. a. That’s right - time for some Cybershenanigans with The Invasion.

b. To go stating the blinking obvious first, this clearly takes place after Web, because the Brig has stopped mucking around with the Royal Highland Fusiliers or whatever his previous outfit was and has got a (possibly double) promotion to the rank of Brigadier and his own top-top secret super-kewl intelligence taskforce (seriously, if anybody was interested I could put my 20th Century military history hat on and do a post just as w*nky as this one about the Brigadier’s likely pre-Web career in the British Army, explaining some of the wild – and novels-canon-non-compliant – assertions made in my current Brig-fic on Teaspoon). He also recognises Two and Jamie when they show up. It might seem like a waste of time pointing this stuff out, but you can never be too careful with UNIT Dating…

c. UNIT even has a super-spiffy Man from UNCLE-style mobile headquarters contained in the cargo hold of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft! I can’t help thinking of the various office buildings and country houses they occupy in the Three era stories as a bit of a step down from that. As will be seen, however, there are some other reasons for thinking that UNIT got off to a good start and then declined in resources and capabilities all through the subsequent decade, probably mainly due to budget cuts and political disfavour. This is mainly important for our purposes, however, because this aircraft type, called the Hercules C1 in RAF service (and its pilot is a Wing Commander Robbins according to dialogue, implying it’s a British aircraft) did not enter operational service with the Royal Air Force until October 1967, setting another earliest possible date for this story. UNIT also have, by the standards of “our” late 60s-early 70s, extremely advanced and miniaturised communications equipment (some of it even manufactured by Tobias Vaughn’s International Electromatics!), again chiming in with the idea of greater technological advancement in the Whoniverse. They also have access to “hypersonic” jets to take Jimmy to Russia on the double, which I’m going to interpret as him catching a lift in the back seat of something like an SR-71 (but the British version!)

d. UNIT’s main men at this point, apart from the Brig, are Captain Jimmy Turner, who’s somewhat of a cool dude and sex-god in a way that poor bumbling Yatesy could never hope to be, and the dependable Sergeant Walters (although a certain fresh-faced young Corporal Benton is already making a name for himself) – neither Turner or Walters will ever be seen again after this story, which is not unusual for UNIT soldiers whose surnames are not Benton, Yates or Lethbridge-Stewart. Oh yeah, UNIT also has a super-hard Assault Platoon at this point, decked out in kewl black berets and everything and proper khaki kit as opposed to the beige jumpsuits, who seem pretty tasty judging by the beatdown they hand the Cybermen towards the end of the story. I say, they could have done with handy, well-equipped chaps like that in some of the crises they encountered during the Three era, couldn’t they? Gee, I hope Turner, Walters, the Assault Platoon and Wingco Robbins and his Hercules didn’t all meet horrible ends in that unscreened Season 6b UNIT story that definitely happened between Invasion and Spearhead (no, it totally did – as will be elaborated upon later).

e. The other standout character in this one (apart from Tobias Vaughn, of course, who is a complete dude, albeit an evil one), is Swinging 60s photographer and possible Zoe love interest Isobel, who is fantastic and should’ve been a companion. She also presents something of a problem as regards UNIT dating, because in her entire dress, attitude and general demeanour she absolutely screams 1968, when as we will shortly see this story couldn’t possibly take place in 1968. I guess we’ll just shiftily have to put that down to Whoniverse fashions, pop culture and social mores not being precisely in synch, chronologically, with their equivalents from “our” timeline. Not in every respect, anyway, because we know that some things do line up. Oh, and about a month before this story takes place, Professor Travers and Anne went to America for a year (so they didn’t get permanently “disappeared” by Torchwood after the Tube business…assuming Isobel isn’t the latest in a four-year relay of Torchwood agents lying in wait in their house for the Doctor to try and make contact with them…dun dun dunnn! Although if she is, she’s very, very good at keeping up her cover and we don’t associate that kind of competence with the Institute and its minions – and surely she would have taken the opportunity to either nab the Doctor or top him, one or the other? Unless Zoe “turned” her, in Le Carre-speak, using her futuristic feminine wiles… That would be a very Torchwood-esque outcome).

f. To get down to business (and why Isobel can’t really be a Swinging 60s photographer despite all evidence to the contrary), quoth the Brig: “ That's right, McCrimmon, in the underground. Must be four years ago now. ” Yes, this is the first Big Gap in the UNIT chronology (there will be others, as we will see). We can’t really ignore that, either, because unlike Professor Travers the Invasion-era Brig hasn’t lost the plot…yet. “Must be four years” doesn’t, of course, mean that it has to be exactly four years, but it must be around that long since the events of Web. Bearing in mind that our absolute end point for the main UNIT era (The Invasion – Seeds o’ Doom and all in between) is 1976, as established in Mawdryn, and that there are more gaps (almost a year between Terror of the Autons and Mind of Evil, for one, as I will argue later), then we really want The Invasion to take place as early as possible in order to fit everything else in. I therefore propose, based on our earlier tentative dating of Web, that The Invasion could well take place in the autumn of 1971, or about four years after our date for Web and about three years after its real life broadcast in Nov-Dec 1968.

g. So the entire rest of the UNIT era must take place in the space of five years, including gaps. Even allowing for the fact that the “real” events were probably more evenly spread out than the TV stories, which were broadcast over the space of the next seven years and a bit (no gaps between seasons, for instance), that still implies that the Brigadier and chums were very, very busy during the first half of the 1970s. No wonder he went a bit…funny in the end.

h. If The Invasion is taking place in late 1971, then according to Tobias Vaughn “Doctor, I've worked with the Cybermen for five years preparing this invasion…”. So the Cybermen have been active on Earth (or hiding behind the moon at any rate – wonder if they realised it was a huge egg?) since about…1966. Or the time of WOTAN and The War Machines. Coincidence? I wonder whether International Electromatics was one of the contractors on the whole WOTAN project (i.e. the attempted opening gambit in the planned Cyberinvasion)? Hmm…? According to the Brigadier, the UFO sightings which he has had fighter planes chasing after have been taking place “for well over a year now”, so the Cybermen started actually transporting their army (or the means to build one from whatever poor unfortunates Vaughn kidnapped for them, possibly) to Earth’s surface sometime during 1970.

i. By the way, given the massive clout IE seems to enjoy with the British government, and even the non-UNIT military, and given his technological edge, there’s little to no way that Vaughn isn’t Torchwooded-up to the gills. In fact, given the way British industry was in the real life late 1960s-early 70s, it’s quite likely that HM Govt (and through them Torchwood) either wholly or part owned IE, with Vaughn their appointee. It would be a little embarrassing for the Institute, one suspects, if it turned out that one of their agents or industrial contacts had used the alien technology or knowledge he had gained from them to aid and abet an invasion of Earth and planned mass-cyborgisation of the human species. Although, given the kind of ship Torchwood seem to run, it possibly wouldn’t be either the first or last time that something like that had happened to them.

j. Another blinking obvious point, but if the Cybermen invaded London in 1971, having been on or near Earth covertly since at least 1966, why did the events of The Tenth Planet, 15-20 years later, seem to come as surprise to the Earth authorities? The Cybertimeline, as others have observed, makes even less sense than Dalek history, unless you start factoring in time travel and alternative timelines and so forth. It’s hard not to subscribe, also, to the view outlined in the old David Banks Cybermen book that there were actually multiple groups of Cybermen spread across Mondas, Telos and the surrounding space, all working on their own unsuccessful plans for taking over Earth and its (human) resources over a timespan of at least a couple of centuries. A “Cyberviking Age”, if you will.

k. Some space age stuff too. UNIT-era Britain has very highly advanced “anti-missile missiles” capable of intercepting incoming spacecraft, sited at Henlow Downs (RAF Henlow in Bedfordshire?). In real life, these would probably be classed as anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), i.e. weapons with insanely high performance designed for shooting down incoming ballistic nuclear missiles. In “our” 1971, Britain had no such capability, partly because the British armed forces were flat stony broke throughout the 1960s-70s and couldn’t afford such shiny toys, and also because they were actually mostly banned by international disarmament treaties (on the rationale that if you think you have a chance of defending yourself against a nuclear war, you might be more likely to start one, one reason why the United States’ attempts at Missile Defence in the 2000s so concerned Russia and others). Our first indication that the international political scene in the Whoniverse’s 1971, and Britain’s standing within it, might be somewhat different to “our” timeline.

l. Another such indication is provided by the Brigadier’s subsequent decision to rope “the Russians” into defeating the Cyberinvasion, specifically by using their great big rocket to take out the Cybership near the moon. You could argue that UNIT, representing the United Nations of which the Soviet Union was a member, might expect such access, but the “no big deal” way in which the plan is proposed and carried out suggests rather cosier relations than were actually the case in “our” history, even in the era of early-70s détente. Jimmy is, after all, still a serving officer of the British Army, so you could forgive the Soviets, in a Cold War context, if they were a little leery of letting him into their top secret rocket base. This chimes with indications in some of the later UNIT stories that the Cold War doesn’t really exist in this era of the Whoniverse’s history, or if it does it’s mainly between the US and China and Britain doesn’t consider it any of her business, being much more respected, influential and aloof than was the case in our own corresponding period. More on that if and when we get to those stories – those nuclear codes in Robot, for instance.

m. On the subject of Russian rockets, this is an interesting discussion from a space cadet point of view:

Jimmy: That would need an orbital launch vehicle. We simply haven't got anything of that size.
The Brig: No, only the Americans and the Russians have.

We know from the new series that the US Project Apollo moonshots are going on pretty much as in “our” timeline, and the Soviets, while they never had anything quite as awesome as the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo moonwards (they did have a near-equivalent in their N1 rocket, but it kept blowing up during tests), had a couple of different launchers plenty powerful enough to send probes to the moon, which may have been more suitable for a mission like this than a monstrous skyscraper-sized Saturn V. What’s interesting, though, is its implication for the British Mars Probes that we will see more of in Season 7 – clearly if Britain lacked anything that could send a warhead to the moon, these must have been launched in pieces by smaller rockets and assembled in orbit before beginning their journey to Mars. Well, it’s the kind of detail that interests me…

tl:dr – I’m saying The Invasion takes place in the fourth quarter of 1971, or thereabouts.

Well, I didn’t get as far as Spearhead and a consideration of UNIT’s role in Season 6b (which totally happened!), but that’s enough of that for now. I’ve sort of told myself I can’t waste time posting about this stuff without completing a chapter of my Brig fic first, so I guess I’d better go and get cracking on that before we continue with these fascinating musings…