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

So, I went and watched this obscure arthouse film you've probably never heard of yesterday. And I finally made use of that Wordpress account I started ages ago to record some hopefully non-spoilery first impressions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I quite liked it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33543383

Honestly, this is my amazed face. I'm thinking about learning about the planets in junior school when I was about nine and being fascinated by the idea of Pluto, it being so distant and mysterious.

Well, it's technically not a planet anymore (no, sorry - it's not, fellow nostalgics, and the reasons for it not being a planet anymore are imho scientifically sound, so sorry), but that doesn't make it any less fascinating.

I've just been watching the live stream of the press conference from NASA and came away with my sense of wonder thoroughly rekindled.

And just think, for all the world today has a lot wrong with it and manages to be a near-constant disappointment: millions of people - at least - all around the world watching on their computers and other devices as close-up images of Pluto, for pity's sake, are unveiled. Who says we're not living in the future?

...while watching the 2008 X-Files movie (a.k.a. I Want to Believe a.k.a. The One With Billy Connolly In It) last night...

No, not "Yay, it's the Skin Man!" but only because I've seen it a couple of times before. That was certainly my main thought when I first viewed it.

And not how different it was to the first movie made a decade earlier, while being if anything even truer to the actual television series (especially some of those dark, nasty little stories in Season 4 or thereabouts), although that is a thought that has occurred to me before in relation to this film.

( Musings Follow )

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… )

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…

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!

Is it just me being a curmudgeon, or is it a bit early to be crowning Jamie Mathieson showrunner-in-waiting just because he wrote two good scripts in a row? Are people that eager to be rid of Moffat? (And before you scoff at my naivety, I do glance at Tumblr from time to time nowadays and know that yes, yes quite a lot of them are).

[trollishness]Anyway, isn't that Gatiss's job to refuse, given his close links to Der Moff?[/trollishness]

It also seems that Mathieson may have been tapped up by France (yes, the entire country).

( SPOILERIFFIC Thoughts Follow )

Well, everybody else on the flist seems either to have linked to it or aired their two penn'orth on it, and I am nothing if not easily led. Look, you probably know what it is by now, anyway, but in the interests of not getting shouted at on the internets I've put spoiler warnings all over it anyway, just in case.

Linking to the post I made about it on Who@50, not really to plug my comm, but just because typing it twice or copy and pasting it here seemed a bit of a waste of effort. ;)

IT'S HERE (WARNING FOR POSSIBLE EXTREME SPOILERS)

That was dead good, that.

There's a bit in what I may as well hold my hands up and admit is, somewhat inexplicably, one of my favourite films, The Hunt for Red October where Soviet submarine commander Captain Marko Ramius (played by pro-celebrity golfer/tax exile/domestic violence advocate Sean Connery) and his scumbag political commissar Putin (yes, really - this was at least a decade before Vladimir became famous in rl though, and if you're interested the character's played by that Peter Firth out of Spooks, who has played quite a few Soviets in his time) are having a cuppa tea. Only in glasses without any milk, because they're Russians, see. Well, actually Ramius seems to be the only Scots-Lithuanian in the entire Soviet submarine service, but that's neither here nor there.

( SPOILERY Witterings Continue... )