Sorry readers my deep dive of the three big Doctor Who licensed RPGs has to wait a bit while I acquire the FASA gamebooks. So instead please enjoy this rundown of the UNIT dating controversy. AKA one of the nerdiest things about the fandom.

UNIT was founded in 1979 as a response to two invasions; a Cyberman invasion (as seen in The Invasion) and an as of yet unseen and unnamed one. As per the episode, The Mawdryn Undead Brigadier Colonel Lethbridge Stewart was stated to have retired from UNIT in 1976. Thus the Brigadier retired from service before the organization he served with even existed.

Over the years many writers both on the show and in the expanded universe have offered up several potential solutions to this problem. Marc Platt for example in his novelization of Downtime levied that the dating is so mixed up because UNIT just doesn’t have records about The Brigadier. Several other sources including  Interference – Book One and Interference – Book Two (Both by Lawrence Miles) posit that the Doctor’s routine jaunts to the era have caused the timeline to get fuzzy blurring the mid-70s and 80s together.

My take on The UNIT dating controversy is that at some point in the Third Doctor’s tenure something happened that jolted UNIT itself out of the flow of normal time (My money is on Omega dragging a lot of them off into the Antimatter Dimension in The Three Doctors.) This caused all the events in The Brigadier’s history to happen in two different times simultaneously. Alternately when 11 rebooted all of Time after Big Bang 2 some things just got put back in the wrong spots.

Anyways what do you think of The UNIT Dating controversy and what else do you have to talk about in Doctor Who this week? Let me know in the comments below.

Also, The DVD for Day Of The Daleks has a fun documentary on it all about this topic.