B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (119 page)

The Zygons intensified their campaign against humanity when oil companies started disrupting the free passage of their Skarasen, a vast monster that lived in Loch Ness but which ventured out into the North Sea from time to time. In the space of a month, the Zygons destroyed three North Sea oil rigs, causing massive loss of life. Two of the rigs were owned by Hibernian Oil. UNIT were sent to Tullock to deal with the problem.

Broton, posing as the Duke of Forgill, got into the Fourth International Energy Conference on the banks of the Thames - he planned to assassinate the world leaders assembled there by signalling for the Skarasen. Broton, the signal device and the Zygon ship were all destroyed, and the Skarasen returned to Loch Ness.

Harry Sullivan opted to return to London by InterCity as the Doctor and Sarah tried to more directly go there in the TARDIS...

Sarah Jane spread a cover story to help conceal the truth about the Zygon gambit.
 [330]
Probably owing to the Loch Ness Monster incident, the press got word of the Doctor’s role in saving the world. He played for Lord’s Taverners, but avoided most other tenants of celebrity-dom. A publisher approached the Doctor, who agreed to write a series of educational books for children.
 [331]

The government ordered Department C19 to be cleaned up, and many of its top brass were removed.
 [332]

Jo Jones travelled down the Amazon for months, and finally reached a village with the only telephone for thousands of miles. She phoned UNIT to ask about the Doctor... and was told that he had left and never come back. The Doctor, for his part, couldn’t find Jo because she stayed on the move so much.
 [333]

Harry Sullivan’s stories of being a naval doctor encouraged his younger step-brother, Will Sullivan - whose widowed father had married Harry’s mother - to enter the medical profession. When Will Sullivan was a medical student, the Crimson Chapter recruited him.
 [334]

Heart of TARDIS
 [335]

A collision with the second Doctor’s TARDIS further de-stabilised the Lychburg singularity, to the point that it threatened the entire universe. The Time Lords sent the fourth Doctor and Romana to deal with the problem, but the Jarakabeth demon impersonating Alistair Crowley impeded their efforts, hoping to use the singularity to re-write reality in the name of chaos.

The second Doctor (secretly aided by his future self) used telemetry readings from the TARDIS to return Lychburg to Earth, whereupon the residents deserted the town entirely. A benevolent Jarakabeth demon hosted in government agent Katherine Delbane killed the Crowley demon. She became a UNIT captain under the Brigadier’s command.

UNIT has recently requisitioned industrial lasers, marmosets, archaeological tools, rocketry components, Watsui tribal masks and a US college’s particle accelerator. They also took a third of the Bank of England’s gold reserves and didn’t replace them, triggering a stock market crash.

(19th-22nd June, 1976) - No Future
 [336]

The terrorist organisation Black Star, a group of anarchists, spent the summer planting bombs in sites around London: Hamleys, Harrods, the Albert Hall, the Science Museum and Big Ben. There was an assassination attempt on the Queen, junior treasury minister John Barfe was killed, the entertainer Jimmy Tarbuck was badly hurt in a hit-and-run incident, and Pink Floyd’s private jet was lost over the English Channel. Civil disturbances happened across the globe. Prime Minister Williams declared a state of emergency.

Meanwhile, the Vardans were preparing an “active immigration” to Earth. The Vardan High Command formed an alliance with the Monk, the Time Lord otherwise known as Mortimus. The Monk freed the Vardans from their time loop, and under the guise of Priory Records boss Robert Bertram, he used Vardan Mediascape technology to plant crude subliminal messages in Earth’s TV broadcasts. More sophisticated brainwashing techniques were available in the new VR training system that the Monk provided for UNIT.

The seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny helped some members of UNIT and Broadsword intelligence agents to repel the Vardans from Earth. The Vardan Popular Front, a democratic organisation, took control of Varda. The Monk had captured the Chronovore Artemis and had been tapping her power to alter time, but she was freed and took her revenge on him.

The Brigadier was seeing Doris at this time. The seventh Doctor selectively wiped his memory, and he retired.

The Russians were operating vodyanoi units at this time.
 [337]
One Vardan remained behind, living in the Liverpool phone network until 1983.
 [338]
Following this, the Brigadier spent a great deal of time in Geneva.
 [339]

(6th July) - The Android Invasion
 [340]

The leader of the Kraals’ Armoury Division, Chief Scientist Styggron, planned his race’s escape from the dying planet Oseidon using their technological skills. The Kraals could engineer space-time warps, and two years previously, Styggron had used one of these to capture an experimental Earth freighter in deep space. He analysed the mind of the astronaut within, Guy Crayford, and used Crayford’s memories to construct a training ground - an almost-perfect replica of the English village of Devesham, including the nearby Space Defence Station. It was populated with Android villagers, and the Kraals were able to study human civilisation and behaviour, honing their preparations to invade the Earth.

It was the Kraals’ first attempt at conquest, and although they were thwarted by the fourth Doctor and Sarah - as aided by Harry Sullivan and RSM Benton - Marshal Chedaki’s fleet survived.

SeneNet recovered a Kraal android.
 [341]

(early one month in autumn) - The Seeds of Doom
 [342]

The World Ecology Bureau was active at this time. They received reports that an unusual seed pod had been discovered in the Antarctic permafrost, and called in UNIT. The fourth Doctor and Sarah identified the item as a Krynoid seed pod and also discovered a second one. One Krynoid was killed in the Antarctic, while an RAF air strike on the mansion of Harrison Chase, the millionaire plant enthusiast, destroyed the other.

Sir Colin Thackeray ordered that cuttings be taken from the Krynoid remains, so a better means could be found of killing the creatures.
 [343]

The Pescatons
 [344]

Upon their return to Earth, the fourth Doctor and Sarah were attacked by a sea creature, which the Doctor recognised as a Pescaton. He hurried to the astronomer Professor Emmerson and watched Pesca, the homeplanet of the Pescatons in the outer galaxies, explode.

The Pescatons had escaped in a space fleet, which arrived on Earth and attacked many cities. A smaller number went to Venus. The Doctor located the Pescaton leader, Zor, in the London Underground and killed him with ultraviolet light. The Pescatons died without their leader.

The Pescatons and their sister race, the Piscons, both originated in the Picos system. While an expanding sun destroyed the Pescaton planet, the Piscons’ homeworld survived but became desert. The Piscons wandered around the universe acquiring water supplies - sometimes benevolently from unpopulated planets, sometimes illegally.
 [345]

The Hand of Fear
 [346]

The “obliterated” alien named Eldrad had fallen to Earth as a stone hand and regenerated into a humanoid (albeit female) form. There was near-meltdown in the main reactor of Nunton Nuclear Power station, although there was no radiation leak as Eldrad used the energy to facilitate his/her regeneration. The fourth Doctor and Sarah decided to escort Eldrad back to his/her homeworld of Kastria.

Afterwards, in answering a summons to Gallifrey, the Doctor was forced to return Sarah Jane Smith home. Although the TARDIS apparently failed to return Sarah to Croydon, she arrived in England.

The Doctor had dropped her off in Aberdeen
.
 [347]
Fortunately, it was the right timezone. Sarah resumed her work as a journalist.
 [348]

Wartime
 [349]

Benton was en route to UNIT HQ with a cache of radioactive material, and was passing through Bolton when he found himself haunted by apparitions of his mother, his late father and his dead brother Christopher. He also stopped a hijacker intent on stealing the nuclear cargo.

Realising that the Doctor’s visits were becoming less and less frequent, the Brigadier had Bessie mothballed.
 [350]
The Brigadier announced his retirement from UNIT.
Soon afterwards, he became a mathematics teacher at Brendon School.
 [351]

Unit Year 10

The Architects of History
 [352]

The seventh Doctor visited the new iteration of Elizabeth Klein, having erased the version of her that went to Colditz from history. The surviving Klein had been born in England to German parents, and now worked for UNIT. She acknowledged the Doctor as an ally in keeping the world safe.

UNIT Era Sidebar

British Politics in the UNIT Era

During the UNIT era, there are references to two Prime Ministers who are not the actual PM when the story was shown. However, both are semi-jokey references to actual opposition leaders of the time.

“Jeremy” mentioned in
The Green Death
would be Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party at the time the story was made. Thorpe, of course, was never Prime Minister, although he was in the ascendant at the time
The Green Death
was shown. Shortly afterwards, in the February 1974 Election, the Liberal vote tripled to six million and they entered a pact with Labour to form a government.

In
Terror of the Zygons
, the Prime Minister is a woman. Margaret Thatcher had already been elected leader of the Conservatives when
Terror of the Zygons
was taped - the scene in which the Brigadier is phoned by the PM was recorded on 23rd April 1975, and Mrs Thatcher had been party leader since February of that year. The Labour government of the time had a tiny majority of four seats, and predicting a Conservative victory at the next election was a fairly safe bet (in much the same way that
Zamper
, written in 1995, referred to “Number ten, Tony’s den”).

If we assume the UNIT stories are set in the near future, then this is remarkably straightforward, as only the result of one “real life” election need be changed. According to
The Green Death
, there is a general election won by Thorpe’s Liberals at some point after 1973 (it can’t be before
The Green Death
was shown, or it wouldn’t be the future). Thatcher’s Conservatives defeat this government. We can pinpoint the date of that election - it’s between
Robot
and
Terror of the Zygons
, as Harry is surprised by the female leader in
The Ark in Space
. This coincides neatly with Sarah’s assertion in
Pyramids of Mars
that she’s from 1980. So the Liberals win the next General Election (one that had to be called by June 1975), the Tories win the one after that (possibly in May 1979, as in our history) and it all fits.

The date the Liberals come to power is harder to pin down. The model above assumes that it’s a single-term government. A four or five-year term in office would mean they came to power around the time the Doctor was exiled to Earth. The man who’s Minister of Ecology in
The Green Death
drafted UNIT’s charter. It’s possible to squeeze the Liberal election victory in before
The Invasion
, but there’s nothing that demands he was a member of the governing party when he drew up the charter. A diplomatic, military or even legal career could have made him the right man for the job (we can only say for certain is that it’s an unlikely job for a serving Minister of Ecology). Politics in the UNIT era is a world of grey, middle-aged men. There are occasional visionaries, but government is practically run by civil servants. There’s no obvious point where the government’s character changes in the UNIT stories.

Throughout the UNIT era, the government is throwing money at new energy projects. We see grand schemes in
Doctor Who and the Silurians
,
Inferno
,
The
Claws of Axos
,
The Green Death
and
Robot
, although these all end in disaster and mankind is still dependent on oil in
Terror of the Zygons
. The environment is clearly a huge political issue, with concerns about pollution voiced in many stories. The existence of a Minister of Ecology as a cabinet post is telling. When the Tories come to power, a lot of these responsibilities might transfer to the World Ecology Bureau we see in
The Seeds of Doom
. It’s interesting to note that there’s no mention of Europe, especially as (perhaps because) the Common Market was a hot political issue at the time. (The EEC debate was - far more vaguely than most fans seem to think - satirised in
The Curse of Peladon.
)