8 Times Doctor Who Mocked Itself

The UNIT Dating Controversy is another one of those ultimately pointless details that fans like to debate, although, to be fair, this one does involve some pretty huge inconsistencies with the Doctor Who timeline.

To provide a quick summary for the uninitiated, the UNIT Dating Controversy is a continuity issue that stems from some of the dates that were provided during the classic era. Basically, when it gets to the 1970s and the 1980s (in-universe), the timeline of UNIT goes a bit wibbly-wobbly.

It's definitely a strange problem, and since there isn't a clean way to fix it, the writers of the 2005 revival did the only thing they could: they made fun of it.

In Series 4's The Sontaran Stratagem, Martha Jones summons the Tenth Doctor to help UNIT combat a Sontaran plot. Attempting to explain his UNIT days to companion Donna Noble, he tells her that he used to work for them back in the 1970s, gets confused, and adds "or was it the '80s?"

It's an extremely quick line that most viewers will miss entirely, but for those in the know, it's a brilliantly self-referential joke about UNIT's complicated timeline.