15 Annoying Mistakes You Never Noticed In Doctor Who
3. The UNIT Dating Controversy
For a programme that entirely relies on time travel, its surprising that Doctor Who couldnt get something as simple as the timeline of a single organisation right. Welcome to the great big mess that is the UNIT Dating Controversy. Referenced in both The Sontaran Stratagem (2008) and The Day Of The Doctor, UNITs timeline is all over the place. Its inaugural battle is against the Cybermen in 1968s The Invasion which is set approximately in 1979, meaning that the Third Doctors era takes place throughout the 1980s. Yet right at the other end of the spectrum, Mawdryn Undead (1983) establishes that the Brigadier left UNIT and became a maths teacher in 1976. Before the creation of UNIT and before hes even a brigadier. And dates included in other UNIT-based stories only complicated things further with Sarah Jane Smith having a UNIT access pass dated 1974 and recurring character Sergeant Benton being mentioned to have left UNIT in 1979. Basically; if there was a UNIT story, it probably ended complicating the timeline in some way. The entire thing is such a hugely tangled web of contradictions that even Terrance Dicks (one of Doctor Whos best and brightest contributors) just elected to avoid the whole mess and not explicitly date any of his episodes.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
