B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (112 page)

The Naxian warlord Mohanalee forced Iris Wildthyme and her husband, Sam Gold, to bring him back to the 1960s so he could implant Earth’s radio signals with Naxian brainwashing signals, and retroactively make Earth the centre of the Naxian Empire. Gold died while saving Iris’ life, and Mohanalee was killed also - enabling Iris to return, alone, to the future to retrieve her companion Panda.

1969 - Blink
 [115]

Detective Inspector Billy Shipton was transported to 1969 by the Weeping Angels. He met the tenth Doctor and Martha, who gave him a message for Sally Sparrow… he would have to live out nearly forty years to deliver it.

1969 (8th April) - The Impossible Astronaut
 [116]

The Silence continued to prepare and hardwire the young Melody Pond as an assassin to kill the Doctor. She was given an augmented NASA astronaut suit that contained a communications array - this enabled her to link up to the Oval Office phone, and she reported to President Nixon that she was scared of “the spaceman”. Nixon summoned the ex-FBI agent Canton Delaware III to investigate the call.

Arriving from 2011, the eleventh Doctor made the TARDIS exterior invisible and landed in the Oval Office as Nixon and Delaware listened to one of the mysterious phone calls. The Doctor offered his assistance, and that of his companions Amy, Rory and River Song. They quickly identified the caller’s location as an intersection in Florida, five miles from Cape Kennedy. The Doctor, his companions and Delaware went there, and discovered a disused warehouse containing alien technology... and some of the leaders of the Silence. Anyone who saw the Silence lost all memory of them once they looked away.

The Doctor and Amy found the little girl, who was wearing the same spacesuit as the person who had killed the Doctor in 2011. To prevent the Doctor’s death, Amy shot the spacesuited figure...

Young Melody Pond escaped. The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River spent the next three months investigating the pervasiveness of the Silence in this era. Canton Delaware pretended to be trying to apprehend them for the FBI while he constructed a cage made of dwarf star alloy - a way to guarantee that they weren’t being monitored.
 [117]
River Song was aware that the girl was her younger self, but pretended not to know.
 [118]

1969 (18th May) - Revolution Man
 [119]

The “Revolution Man” incidents greatly increased tensions between the US, the Soviet Union, China and India. Ed Hill’s psionic abilities spiralled out of control, threatening to destroy all life on Earth, and Fitz and the eighth Doctor killed Hill to prevent such a catastrophe. The Doctor consumed a portion of Om-Tsor, and used its reality-warping abilities to prevent the world governments from instigating a nuclear war.

1969 (July) - Day of the Moon
 [120]

Canton Delaware “captured” the eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory. They used the invisible TARDIS, which was located within the dwarf-star alloy cage, to reunite with River Song. Melody Pond tore her way out of her spacesuit and went into hiding; the Doctor’s party found that the spacesuit contained technology from twenty different species.

Delaware acquired video footage of one of the Silence. The Doctor went to Cape Kennedy and inserted a transmitter into the
Apollo 11
capsule; he was captured while doing so, but Nixon ordered his release. As the moon landing took place, the Doctor’s transmitter stripped Delaware’s video clip into all broadcasts of Neil Armstrong stepping foot onto the lunar surface. The clip showed a Silence saying:

“You should kill us all on sight.”

This acted as a subliminal order - humanity wouldn’t remember hearing it, but for a thousand generations, the Silence would be a hunted species, attacked by any person that saw them. The Doctor’s group said farewell to President Nixon, and the Doctor suggested that the Nixon should record everything said in the Oval Office so he could better know if the Silence was influencing him. The Doctor returned River to the future, and resumed his travels with Amy and Rory.

From their base on the moon, the Threshold watched Neil Armstrong land.
 [121]
The tenth Doctor and Martha watched the moon landing four times.
 [122]
Bernard and Paula took the Doctor to the Royal Planetary Society, where they shared a meal and watched the moon landing.
 [123]
The
Apollo 11
astronauts returned with samples of moon rock, one of which contained an alien bacteria.
 [124]

Iris Wildthyme helped Jacqueline Susann write
The Love Machine
.
 [125]
The trauma caused by Charles Manson and his followers provided sustenance to Huitzilin.
 [126]

UNIT

The Unit Era

Establishing when the UNIT stories take place is probably the most contentious
Doctor Who
continuity issue.

The UNIT stories are set in an undefined “end of the twentieth century” era that could more or less comfortably fit at any time between the mid-sixties and mid-nineties (but no further, as the Doctor is specifically exiled to “the twentieth century”).

Some
Doctor Who
fans have insisted on trying to pin down the dates more precisely, and some have even claimed to have “found the right answer”. But all of us face the problem that as successive production teams came and went, a mass of contradictory, ambiguous and circumstantial evidence built up. To come up with a consistent timeframe, this evidence must be prioritised, and some of it has to be rationalised away or ignored.

It is a matter of individual judgement which clues are important. The best chronologies are aware of the problem and admit they’re coming down on one side of the argument, while the worst blithely assert they alone have the right answer while not noticing they’ve missed half the evidence.

The Virgin version of
Ahistory
was wrong when it said there was no right answer. The problem is that there are several, mutually incompatible, right answers.

It happens that a number of firm, unambiguous dates are given in dialogue during the course of the series:

1.
The Web of Fear
(broadcast 1968) is the sequel to
The Abominable Snowmen
and features the first appearance of Lethbridge-Stewart. There, Victoria and Anne Travers establish that
The Abominable Snowmen
was set in “1935”. Earlier in the same story, Professor Travers had said that this was “over forty years ago”.
The Invasion
“must be four years” after that, according to the Brigadier.

Some chronologies have made heroic efforts to ignore or reinterpret this, with
About Time
’s “His mumbled ‘more than forty years ago’ is a spur-of-the-moment estimate, and it’s not unreasonable to assume he meant ‘more than thirty years ago’ ” being only the most recent example. This line of thought usually leads to forty four being added to 1935 to get 1967 or 1968, and liberal use of the phrase “rounding up”. But using conventional maths and English, the only possible reading of the lines is that
The Web of Fear
is set in or after 1975 and that
The Invasion
, the first story to feature UNIT, was broadcast in 1968 but was set no earlier than 1979.

2.
In
Pyramids of Mars
(broadcast 1975), the Doctor and Sarah both say that she is “from 1980”. Here, there’s a little room for interpretation, but not much. The most literal reading has to be that
The Time Warrior
, Sarah’s first story, is set in 1980. The only plausible alternative is that she’s been travelling with the Doctor for some years, and that she is referring to the date of
Terror of the Zygons
, her last visit to Earth in her timezone. Either way, it refers to a story featuring UNIT.

Anyone trying to contradict Sarah’s statement is suggesting that they know better than she does which
year
she comes from. It is difficult to believe that Sarah is rounding up, that she comes from the mid-seventies and simply means “I’m from around that time”. The year is specified so precisely, and it jarred when the story was broadcast in 1975, just as it would if anyone now claimed to be from 2020. This isn’t “vague” or “ambiguous”, as neither she or the Doctor say she’s “from around then” or “from the late nineteen-seventies/eighties” - they actually specify a year, and not the easy option of “1975”, which would have been a conveniently rounded-up figure that would have brought the threat to history closer to home for the viewing audience. And to cap it all, they then go to a devastated “1980”.

So, Sarah comes from 1980.

3.
K9 and Company
(the pilot of an unmade
K9
show) and
Mawdryn Undead
, two stories from the 1980s, are set the UNIT era in the years they were first broadcast.

K9 and Company
is set in late December 1981, and K9 has been crated up waiting for Sarah since 1978. The format document for the proposed spin-off series stated that Sarah was born in “1949” and that “she spent three years travelling in Space and Time (15.12.73-23.10.76)”. This story is “canon”, as Sarah and K9 appeared together in
The Five Doctors, School Reunion
and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
(starting with
SJA: Invasion of the Bane
). If we discount the dates for her travels given in the document (they don’t, after all, appear on screen), nothing contradicts the “1980” reference... but it means K9 was waiting for her
before
she met the Doctor. This needn’t be a problem, however - he clearly delivered Sarah to the wrong end of the country, so why not K9 a couple of years early? It might even explain why Sarah in
School Reunion
thinks the Doctor abandoned her after
The Hand of Fear
, rather than thanking him for the gift.

But
Mawdryn Undead
is impossible to rationalise away that easily. Broadcast in 1983, it states that the Brigadier retired a year before 1977, presumably after Season 13, which was broadcast in 1976. A host of references pin down the dating for
Mawdryn Undead
more precisely. There are two timezones, and these are unambiguously “1977” (where the Queen’s Silver Jubilee is being celebrated) and “1983”.

So, the Brigadier retired in 1976.

4.
Battlefield
is set “a few years” in Ace’s future - apparently in the mid-to-late 1990s. According to the story’s author, Ben Aaronovitch, it takes place in “1997”. Whatever the case, it is established once again that the UNIT stories are “a few years” in the future. The same writer’s
Remembrance of the Daleks
also provides upper and lower limits - UNIT is not around in 1963 when the story is set, but the Doctor rhetorically asks Ace (from the mid-eighties) about the events of
The Web of Fear
and
Terror of the Zygons
.

5.
The New Series and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
. Since its return in 2005, the new
Doctor Who
has reintroduced UNIT and Sarah Jane. In
The Sontaran Stratagem
, the Doctor makes a cheeky reference to the dating issue by stating that he worked with UNIT “in the seventies... or was it the eighties?”.

The Sarah Jane Adventures
, though, have consistently opted for a “year of broadcast” approach, on screen in stories such as
SJA: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?
, but particularly in the background features seen on the BBC website and the DVD extras. As with
The Sontaran Stratagem
, however,
The Sarah Jane Adventures
does joke around with the UNIT dating problem - in
SJA: The Lost Boy
, Sarah’s UNIT dossier reads: “... making our presence felt in a golden period that spanned the sixties, the seventies, and, some would say, the eighties.”

The current
Doctor Who
series opts to downplay or ignore many of the scientific advances we saw in the seventies UNIT stories that didn’t come to pass in the real world - for example,
The Christmas Invasion
has a pioneering British unmanned mission to Mars, and Sarah Jane explicitly says that no one has set foot on Mars, but
The Ambassadors of Death
showed a long-established UK manned Mars program.