The Doctor became a godfather of sorts to Raine, always remembering her early birthdays. Her parents related many stories about him. Raine herself wouldn’t meet the Doctor until 1989. [93] Raine’s childhood holidays involved scuba diving in the Red Sea. [94]
1968
Donna Noble, a companion of the tenth Doctor, was born in Chiswick. [95] Lucia Moretti joined Torchwood in 1968. [96] The tenth Doctor wore a coat that Janis Joplin gave him. [97]
The Monk placed £200 in a London bank in 1968. He would travel two hundred years into the future and withdraw the money and compound interest. [98] The Mexico Olympics were held. [99] In 1968, the Doctor was a Tufty Club member. [100]
In 1968, the United Nations designed a first contact policy. It stipulated that such an event could not take place on sovereign soil. [101] The Time Lord Simpson interviewed a survivor of the Banquo Manor murders on her deathbed, and obtained the seed code for Compassion’s Randomiser - enabling Gallifrey to track her movements. [102]
During the 1960s, Iris Wildthyme worked for a government organisation, the Ministry for Incursions and other Alien Ontological Wonders (MIAOW) and met the Beatles while dealing with a robot guru at a holiday camp in Wales. She also intervened when the cast of Crossroads was transported to the moon by samurai jellyfish. [103] Iris appeared on Animal Magic, and had a thing for Johnny Morris in his zookeeper’s uniform. [104] Iris and Panda went to the London Zoo in the sixties, and Panda visited the well-known lady Panda named Chi Chi. [105]
1968 - Nightshade [106]
The seventh Doctor and Ace found murders and hauntings in the Yorkshire town of Crook Marsham. The retired actor Edmund Trevithick, former star of the Nightshade series, had been seeing monsters from his old show. Energy beings sealed off the village and began a rampage. The Doctor discovered the Sentience, an ancient creature, was feeding on the lifeforce of humans. He convinced it to transmit itself to a supernova in Bellatrix, where it became trapped. Afterwards, the Doctor prevented Ace from leaving him to stay on Earth with her new boyfriend, Robin Yeadon, instead taking the TARDIS to a planet with three moons.
1968 - The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories: “The Entropy Composition” [107]
Guitarist Geoffrey Belvedere Cooper (a.k.a. “The Coop”) enjoyed commercial success with his quartet. The BBC banned one of their songs, “You Can See My Pad, Doll”. The Coop pursued a solo career, and an Entropy Siren inserted primal sonics into his last composition, “White Wave, Soft Haze” - part of a scheme to similarly infect the music repository Concordium in future. The fifth Doctor and Nyssa destroyed the Siren, but primal sound disintegrated The Coop.
In 1968, Jean-Pierre Rex had given up being the Revolution Man. The singer Ed Hill murdered Rex and used the drug Om-Tsor to continue the Revolution Man’s anarchist activities. The Revolution Man symbol appeared on the deck of the US Constitution on 12th November. On 4th January, 1969, it appeared at a US Air Force base in High Raccoon, Tennessee. [108]
The Doctor bought a beach house in Sydney in 1969, and rented a green VW that he conveniently forgot to return. [109] The Victorian villa at 39 Bannerman Road was demolished in 1969, and replaced with a plain family home. [110] Paper from the planet Papyria in the Proxima Centauri system - a substance used by the long-dead, psionic Papyrians to rewrite reality for entertainment purposes - made its way to Earth. The budding author Gregory P. Wilkinson bought the paper as a journal from a Charing Cross Road bookshop in 1969, and the paper filled his head with such imaginings that he produced the Wraith World novel series. [111]
The tenth Doctor and Martha planned to see the Beatles’ rooftop concert at Savile Row on 30th January, 1969, but ended up in 1669 instead. [112] Canton Delaware III was fired from the FBI in February 1969, as he wished to marry a black man. [113]
c 1969 - Iris: The Sound of Fear [114]
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 astron
auts 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.
Thousands of words have been written trying to discount or reinterpret either the Pyramids of Mars or the Mawdryn Undead account of events. Dozens of distinct explanations - either within the logic of the fiction or taking account of production facts - have been proposed. They tend to be convoluted or to stretch the meanings of very plain English words beyond acceptable tolerances.
The only thing they have in common is that none of them would stand up in court. However you weigh up and prioritise evidence, the Pyramids of Mars and Mawdryn Undead dates are “as true” as each other. They are scripted and broadcast lines of dialogue within a single story that unambiguously state a firm date, then the characters go to that year and then the date is stated again.
Ultimately, the only way to come up with a consistent UNIT dating scheme is to pick one and ignore the other.
Broadly speaking, then, there are two schools of thought. Either the stories are set in the “near future”, as was originally stated (a view that actually elides two dis
tinct accounts, as The Invasion had the UNIT era starting no earlier than 1979, but Pyramids of Mars pretty much ended it in 1980); or they are set in the year of broadcast, as was stated in the early 1980s (which glosses over/ignores/corrects what was said in those previous stories) in a version of history where certain aspects of technological progress were more advanced and the political situation was different.
As noted in the individual UNIT story entries, there are a wealth of clues beyond what’s actually said that might be used to tip the balance one way or the other. Different chronologies give different weight to these, and so come to different conclusions. But most try to address the following areas:
1. Technology: There are an abundance of references to scientific developments that hadn’t happened at the time the UNIT stories were broadcast, but were reasonable extrapolations of what the near future would hold.
The technology is far in advance of the early nineteen-seventies: there are talking computers, compact walkie talkies, experimental alloys, laser guns and robots. Colour televisions and even colour videophones are commonplace. Man has landed on Mars, there are space freighters and advanced artificial intelligences. Comprehensive space and alternative energy programmes are underway.
It could be argued that the UNIT stories are set in a parallel history where by (say) 1970 mankind was more technologically advanced than the real 1970. One obvious reason for this might be that scientists had access to an abundance of alien technology from all the failed invasions, and so made great technological progress. There are examples of high technology being developed due to alien influence in some stories. For example, the interstitial time travel of The Time Monster is inspired by the Master, not because it’s part of mankind’s natural progress. There are other stories with no obvious alien influence, like The War Machines with its prototype internet and advanced artificial intelligence.
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