Furthermore, when Recovery 7 is lost, we’re told that Recovery 8 isn’t due for service for “three months” - presumably following a schedule that allows it to rendezvous with Mars Probe 8. It seems unlikely that Recovery 8 would be prepped before Mars Probe 8 is launched, and it’s much more plausible that the planners expect Mars Probe 8 to return to Earth then. The Mars Probe 8 mission might have been aborted when contact was lost with Mars Probe 7, or it might have continued (as it’s not mentioned, we have no way of knowing). Whatever the case, it suggests that Mars Probe 8 was launched while Mars Probe 7 was underway and at least three months ago, given that it’s now three months away from Earth.
Either way, we know Mars Probe 7 wasn’t launched until Mars Probe 6 returned. So Mars Probe 6 launched at least thirty months before The Ambassadors of Death. We know that Dr Taltalian has been working at the Space Centre for “two years”, so the Mars programme has been around at least that long.
The Invasion states that only America and Russia can launch a moon mission, and The Ambassadors of Death is almost certainly set within a year of that. This means one of two things. Either the first Mars Probe was launched after The Invasion, or it’s a type of ship that can’t be retasked for a moon mission.
No evidence suggests that the history of space travel in the fifties and sixties in Doctor Who differs from the history we know. On the contrary, there’s evidence that it’s the same: Yuri Gagarin is named as the first man in space in The Seeds of Death, Ben (from 1966) is from a time before Lunar landings according to The Tenth Planet and Richard Lazarus mentions Armstrong in The Lazarus Experiment. The moon landing takes place in 1969 according to Blink.
[146] Dating Tales from the Vault (BF CC #6.1) - UNIT has only been in existence “for a few months”, and it’s “about fifty years” before 2011. The Doctor says that in a few months hence, the Bank of England will be printing the notes required for decimalisation.
[147] Dating The Left-Handed Hummingbird (NA #21) - The UNIT stories are set the year of broadcast. The last time Cristian Alvarez saw the Doctor was “January the thirtieth, 1969” (p8). The TARDIS arrives in that timezone on “December 20, 1968” (p122). “The Happening” takes place on “December 21” (p163).
[148] The Blue Tooth. The scoutship is clearly reconnoitring Earth in preparation for The Invasion.
[149] “Six months” before Spearhead from Space.
[150] Dating The Invasion (6.3) - It is the near future. According to the Brigadier in this story, the events of The Web of Fear “must be four years ago, now”, making it at least 1979. A surveillance photo has the caption “E091/5D/78”, the last two digits of which might (or might not) be the year.
There are advanced, voice-operated computers and “Public Video” videophones. UNIT has an IE computer, and use some IE components in their radios and radar. UNIT has compact TM45 radios with a range of 50 miles, while IE personnel have wrist-communicators. IE has an elaborate electronic security and surveillance system. There are electric cars and hypersonic jets.
There’s no suggestion that this is because IE has been given Cyber-technology - the computer in IE’s reception (which also answers the phones) uses ALGOL and blows up after failing to solve a simple formula, neither of which indicate that a superior alien technology is involved.
There are many communications satellites in orbit, and UNIT has the authority to fire nuclear rockets into space. “Only the Americans and the Russians” have rockets capable of reaching the moon - the Russians are just about to launch a manned orbital survey of the moon, and it would apparently only take “ten hours” to reach it. The IE guards and many UNIT troops wear futuristic uniforms, while Vaughn wears a collarless shirt. The Brigadier’s “anti-feminist” ideas are outdated.
The Doctor jokes that as it’s Britain and there are clouds in the sky, it must be “summertime”.
A casting document written by director Douglas Camfield suggested The Invasion was set “about the year 1976 AD”. The Radio Times in some regions said that the date was “about the year 1975”, and the continuity announcer echoed this at the beginning of the broadcast of episode one. In Dalek, the plaque below the Cybermen head reads “Extraterrestrial Cyborg Specimen, recovered from underground sewer, location London, United Kingdom, date 1975”... almost certainly a reference to this story. However, the Cybermen head is from the wrong era (it’s from Revenge of the Cybermen, not The Invasion) and the plaque isn’t readable on screen, so there are grounds to discount it. According to Iceberg, this story takes place “ten years” (p90) before The Tenth Planet (meaning 1976), in “the 70s” (p2). No Future suggested “1970”, (p2). Original Sin claims that this story was set in “the 1970s” (p281). Millennial Rites suggests that the UNIT era took place in “the nineteen eighties” (p15), with The Invasion a little over “twenty years ago” (meaning 1979). The 1979 date is repeated in The Face of the Enemy (p21).
[151] Iceberg
[152] Millennial Rites
[153] Original Sin
[154] Who Killed Kennedy
[155] No Future
[156] Return of the Living Dad. Who’s Who and What’s That is also mentioned in The Dying Days.
[157] Mars Probe 7 is launched fifteen and a half months before The Ambassadors of Death, and contact was lost “eight months” before The Ambassadors of Death.
[158] Dating Spearhead from Space (7.1) - There’s no firm evidence if this is near future or contemporary. The Brigadier tells Liz Shaw here that “in the last decade we have been sending probes deeper and deeper into space”, but that needn’t mean humanity’s first-ever space probe was launched exactly ten years ago.
The Brigadier states in Planet of the Spiders that “months” elapsed between The Invasion and Spearhead from Space (meaning 1979). The weather is “uncommonly warm”, suggesting it is autumn or winter. According to The Face of the Enemy (p21) it was “two years” before (meaning 1981). It was “five years ago” in No Future (meaning 1971). Who Killed Kennedy and The Scales of Injustice both state this story takes place in October, which is also the month the story was filmed.
[159] Terror of the Autons, also referred to in The Eye of the Giant. Mike Yates doesn’t appear on screen until Terror of the Autons. He apparently doesn’t remember Nestene Energy Units in The Scales of Injustice.
[160] Dominion
[161] Who Killed Kennedy is James Stevens’ account of the early UNIT years, and allocates firm dates for the stories, specifically:
Remembrance of the Daleks (November 1963)
The Web of Fear (August 1966)
The Invasion (spring 1969)
Spearhead from Space (October 1969)
Doctor Who and the Silurians (November 1969)
The Ambassadors of Death (December 1969)
Inferno (February 1970)
Terror of the Autons (April 1970)
The Mind of Evil (November 1970)
The Claws of Axos
The Daemons (May 1971)
Day of the Daleks (September 1971)
The Dying Days rather cheekily claimed that the government had insisted the dates be changed before allowing the book to be published.
[162] Business Unusual
[163] No Future, which clashes with the Doctor saying he was “unpaid” in Terror of the Autons. This was the “early seventies” in Return of the Living Dad.
[164] Old Soldiers
[165] Dating Doctor Who and the Silurians (7.2) - There’s conflicting dating evidence. A taxi driver asks for a fare of “10/6”, so this story appears to be set before the introduction of decimal currency in February 1971, but the cyclotron is a futuristic experimental machine that converts nuclear energy directly into electricity.
There’s no indication how long it’s been since Spearhead from Space, but the Doctor has settled in with UNIT and (recently) acquired Bessie. People are wearing winter clothes. The New Adventure Blood Heat states that this story is set in “1973”.
[166] The Scales of I
njustice. Okdel was named in Doctor Who and The Cave-Monsters, the novelisation of Doctor Who and the Silurians.
[167] Who Killed Kennedy. We see the Brigadier take the phone call in Doctor Who and the Silurians.
[168] The Hungry Earth
[169] Blood Heat
[170] The Scales of Injustice
[171] The Eye of the Giant, The Scales of Injustice.
[172] No Future, a reference to Blood Heat.
[173] Blood Heat
[174] Eternity Weeps
[175] The Scales of Injustice, a reference to the Audio Visuals story Endurance.
[176] The Devil Goblins from Neptune
[177] Who Killed Kennedy
[178] “Eighteen years” before Millennial Rites, so in 1981. It is stated that Inferno was “early on in her tenure” and Anne had responsibilities for the British Space Programme (p14). That would place the UNIT stories later than most other references, but this dating scheme is perfectly compatible with that in The Web of Fear, which is after all where Anne Travers first appeared. That was “twenty-five years ago” (so around 1974), meaning there were seven years between The Web of Fear and her appointment.
[179] Dating Old Soldiers (BF CC #2.3) - The story takes place “a few weeks” after The Silurians, but before The Ambassadors of Death.
[180] Dating Shadow of the Past (BF CC #4.9) - Once again, the story happens “a few weeks” after The Silurians, and before The Ambassadors of Death.
[181] Dating The Ambassadors of Death (7.3) - This story is very clearly set in the near future. Britain has an established programme of manned missions to Mars. Professor Cornish remarks that decontamination takes “under an hour... it used to take two days” (the time it took the lunar astronauts when the story was made). There are colour videophones and we see a machine capable of automatically displaying star charts. SOS messages were abandoned “years ago”.
Those advocating that the UNIT stories are set in the year of broadcast admit this story causes them problems. One argument (used in both Timelink and About Time) concedes that Mars missions weren’t possible in 1970, but that as we still haven’t landed a man on Mars, it doesn’t prove this story is set in the near future. It’s an odd train of logic to say that something too advanced for 1980 (or indeed the world of today) therefore indicates a 1970 setting.
Leaving that aside, when The Ambassadors of Death was made, it wasn’t science fantasy. NASA had just landed on the moon and had plans to put a man on Mars in the nineteen-eighties. This wasn’t just a hope as the technology to get to Mars existed, at least in prototype form, and only a lack of political will and funding prevented it. At that point, NASA was seriously projecting that half of American employees would be working in space by 2050.
At the time that The Ambassadors of Death was made, then, what was shown wasn’t possible - but it would be, for NASA, in about ten years. The most implausible aspect was that Britain could do the same - but there had been a British space programme up until the early sixties, and, again, it was lack of funding rather than lack of expertise that killed it off.
The Doctor is still bitter about the events of Doctor Who and the Silurians, so this story probably happens only shortly afterwards. The Brigadier says he has known the Doctor “several years, on and off”, so it’s that long since The Web of Fear.
[182] Who Killed Kennedy
[183] “During that General Carrington business” according to No Future.
[184] The Dying Days
[185] The Scales of Injustice
[186] Mars Probe 9 is referred to in Dancing the Code, and The Dying Days mentions Mars Probe 13.
The British Space Programme
Perhaps because they are acutely aware of the threat from outer space, the British government seems to have invested heavily in the space programme before and during the UNIT era. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, some very clever and important people are fooled into believing that a fleet of colony ships could be built and go on to reach another habitable planet, although Sarah knows that even the most advanced spaceship “would take hundreds of years” to do so, and it transpires the ships are fakes. In The Android Invasion, an experimental “space freighter” has been in service for at least two years. There’s no obvious evidence that the British are using alien technology that they’ve recovered from one of the alien incursions in the sixties to speed up their space programme. On the contrary, they’re using pretty basic rocket technology.
The Christmas Invasion features Britain sending an unmanned probe to Mars in late 2006, and portrays it as a pioneering effort.
[187] Business Unusual
[188] Dating Inferno (7.4) - This story seems to be set in the near future. The computer at the project uses perspex/crystalline memory blocks. Stahlman has a robot drill capable of boring down over twenty miles. A desk calendar in the parallel universe says it is “July 23rd”, and the story runs for five days - the countdown we see early in the story says there is “59:28:47” remaining before penetration.
The word “Primord” is not used in dialogue, but appears in the on-screen credits. The name “Eastchester” is only used in a scene cut from the original broadcast (but retained in foreign prints and the BBC Video and DVD release), when the Doctor listens to a radio broadcast in the parallel universe. Stahlman spells his name with two “n”s in the parallel universe. The Doctor claims this is the first attempt to penetrate the Earth’s crust, forgetting the attempt he’d seen in The Underwater Menace.
[189] Timewyrm: Revelation
[190] The Face of the Enemy
[191] The Scales of Injustice, Business Unusual.
[192] The Devil Goblins from Neptune. The Face of the Enemy says Ian is on a year-long exchange programme.
[193] Byzantium!
[194] Who Killed Kennedy
[195] “Seven or eight months” before Scales of Injustice, “twenty years” before Business Unusual.
[196] “The previous year”, “late last year” and “eight months” before The Devil Goblins from Neptune.
[197] The Christmas before The Scales of Injustice.
[198] The Devil Goblins from Neptune. The new members were presumably Billy Preston and Klaus Voormann.
The Beatles
Doctor Who has a terrible record for predicting the future, one that can best be summed up by noting that Battlefield predicted a near future with Soviet soldiers operating under the UN’s aegis on British soil - but between the story’s filming and its broadcast, the Soviet Union collapsed. In the entire twenty-six-year run of classic Doctor Who, it made two successful predictions - that there would be a female British Prime Minister (Terror of the Zygons), and that there would, one day, be a museum dedicated to the Beatles in Liverpool (The Chase).
The original draft of the script called for the real Beatles to appear, made up to look very old to indicate they were still performing in the future (the script specified 2012).
The Devil Goblins from Neptune reveals that The Beatles of the Doctor Who universe stayed together at least into the early seventies. John Lennon was murdered as he was in our history in The Left-Handed Hummingbird, though, and Paul McCartney was playing with Wings in No Future.
In The Gallifrey Chronicles, it’s revealled that Fitz collects Beatles records from parallel universes, and that he saw them play a song called “Celebrate the Love” at Live Aid. “Celebrate the Love” is the title of the song the Ewoks sang at the end of Return of the Jedi, at least until the Special Edition.
[199] “Five years” before Island of Death.
[200] “Six months” before The Devil Goblins from Neptune.
[201] Who Killed Kennedy. It is “1970” (p87).
[202] “Three or four months” before The Devil Goblins from Neptune. There are at least two UNIT HQs: one that’s almost certainly in a London office block by the Thames in London (seen in Terror of the Autons) and one that’s a stately home (seen in The Three Doctors).
[203] “Early March” before The
Devil Goblins from Neptune.
[204] “Three months” before The Scales of Injustice, “fifteen years” before Business Unusual.
[205] “A couple of months” and “a month” before The Scales of Injustice.
[206] Dating The Eye of the Giant (MA #21) - The story is set “thirty-seven years” after 1934, so 1971. UNIT have a photocopier. This is apparently the first time Mike Yates meets the Doctor, although he’s been working for UNIT “over the last year”. This is “a few weeks” before The Scales of Injustice, according to that book.
[207] Dating The Blue Tooth (BF CC #1.3) - It’s toward the end of Liz’s tenure with UNIT (she’s been with the organisation “about a year”) and Captain Yates is described as “a new boy” - which would place the story between The Eye of the Giant and The Scales of Injustice.
[208] Dating The Scales of Injustice (MA #24) - The back cover states this is set between Inferno and Terror of the Autons, and “immediately after” The Eye of the Giant. It’s a “few weeks” since that book. Liz tells the Doctor she is leaving at the end of the book “eight months, two weeks and four days” after Spearhead from Space. It is “six months” since Doctor Who and the Silurians.
The Silurians who sue for peace are not mentioned again. The next time we see them, The Sea Devils, they are pitted against humanity. By the time of Eternity Weeps, set in 2003, man and Silurian are working together in relative harmony. Perhaps the discrepancy can be put down to the fact that UNIT don’t feature in The Sea Devils, and the reptile people there were revived and are being provoked into conflict by the Master.
[209] Business Unusual
[210] The Scales of Injustice, which states that it’s “eight months, two weeks and four days” since she met the Doctor in Spearhead from Space, although their amount of time together has become “thirteen months” by The Devil Goblins from Neptune.
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