Amogus I’m sorry it’s a reflex now
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Right! Because in real life when military institutions point guns at people armed only with cameras, it is not usually the ordinary people who are the ones endangering free information and human rights…
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I need to rewatch but wasn’t he pretending that it was UNIT who were dressing up as fake monsters, not him? Making it look like UNIT fakes all alien threats?
That would at least make sense…
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It makes them look incompetent and excessive, especially when the prank was revealed and they were basically pointing guns at civilians. Plus I suspect Conrad wanted to martyrs himself and others by getting arrested and portraying UNIT as authoritarian.
To the general public, UNIT is a military organisation that takes tax payer money and does… something?
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I see Conrad as a case of right message, wrong messenger. There’s certainly questions to ask about UNIT as an organisation, but Conrad is just using that discussion to assert his own populist media persona. Conspiracy theorists and the like, if only thanks to the broken clock principle (right twice a day), gesture at genuine problems, but usually in-between worse statements to make them seem reasonable by association. Same thing with Conrad and UNIT, and weirdly enough, it reminds me somewhat of the old PewDiePie vs. T-Series drama. PewDiePie being set up as the champion of the everyday, non-corporate content creator on the platform, and while that position is worth defending, Mr. Gamer Moment was not a good representative of the whole.
I’d even argue that UNIT doesn’t come out of this unscathed, and that comes down to Ruby’s involvement. She is immediately against Conrad’s manipulations, but she doesn’t follow Kate’s example of just leaving him to the Shreek’s mercy either. Conrad’s relationship with his mother influenced his actions as much Kate’s relationship with her father influenced hers in that particular moment. Instead, she follows the Doctor’s, and saves him despite what he’s done (similar to what the Doctor tried to do in Dot And Bubble). No bruised ego or honour, just… doing the right thing.
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Saw this on Twitter, and found it interesting. Re: UNIT and RTD2 as a whole. (Maybe this is where they’re heading, longer-term?)
The way that UNIT is treated in RTD2 feels like what they want out of it aesthetically is at odds with the narrative role it fulfils.
Like, aesthetically they’re still The Military, all jeeps, guns and general oorah. But, if you look at what they actually do to advance the plot, they mainly act as the Doctor’s earthbound science team, gathering data and sending to Mel inflitrate stuff.
If they were just a scientific group, that would square better with them constantly hiring former companions (and children!), and with them supposedly being under constant threat of budget cuts.
The fact they have a military presence just doesn’t fit anymore. Makes them feel like scifi border patrol, why would the Doctor trust this? Watching Rose Noble unload a clip into Sutekh is just weird too.
Demilitarizing UNIT is also a tasty direction for the story to take them, like what resistance would they meet from the government or more heavily armed sections of the organization? It at least fits better with the kind of character Kate is when she’s allowed to be one
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Look at the Doggo! 
So sad 
and still so much cuter than a cat! 
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I don’t think so, because it was his buddies in the costumes and they were all high-fiving and stuff afterwards. His general idea is saying that UNIT fakes the aliens, though, you’re right about that, but it was quite clear that the people on the prank were his mates.
Right, the general public doesn’t know all, but they do know it’s an organization that fights alien threats. So he fakes an alien threat… and UNIT shows up to do their job. I don’t think it made them look incompetent at all, quite the contrary. If UNIT faked all the alien threats, they would know that one wasn’t real. They would not have shown up at all, no? Maybe I’m missing something. But yes, he for sure wanted to be held at gunpoint and arrested to become a martyr, you’re right.
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They don’t even think aliens are real, they view UNIT as a group using the fear of aliens to oppress people.
I think a sticking point people are having with this episode is they’re sitting back and analysing the episode logically, when the episode made clear on multiple points that the people protesting against UNIT aren’t using logic, and that Conrad is intentionally getting people angry to fit his own agenda.
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Here’s my review! The allegory simply did not work since UNIT was being portrayed as a military organization in this episode and not a scientific one. In general, I’m sick of the RTD2 era praising UNIT so uncritically. If the show is going to bring UNIT back every episode, I want Luke Smith to return, since he’s a scientific advisor for them in Rani Takes on the World (the boxset with him in it definitely botches his characterization a bit, but I digress). My brother was under the impression that Kate’s a lesbian, and was a bit surprised when he watched this (I agree with him).
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Just because fictional characters within a tv show don’t act logically I don’t think it follows that the show shouldn’t be analysed logically. & I would argue that it isn’t the general public that don’t think aliens are real, it is those that believe the Think Tank conspiracy.
I feel some of the different opinions on UNIT, who they are & who the public think they are highlights to me the flaws in the script.
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Yes but a big part of the episode is that people irrationally believe lies fed to them by manipulative people. Yes, Conrad’s and Think Tank’s argument falls apart if you think about it for more than 5 minutes, however the people initially on Think Tank’s side aren’t going to do that because they’re already hooked into their lies, and once the arrests happened, the misinformation spreads like wildfire and gets people into a frenzy.
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Well, it would have been highly unlikely that every episode this season was gonna be an all-time instant classic.
But this one was pretty astonishingly naff for me. I’d rather watch The Twin Dilemma again.
I should perhaps clarify - there is a story in the center of this mess. There’s a whole vein of narrative to be mined about what happened to UNIT, what it has become, what it’s even for. It’s a legacy factor of the show that’s been invoked and puppeted in numerous ways by numerous writers for the sake of impact, just like The Brig’s name gets pulled up here. But McTighe isn’t the person to tell it. I’m starting to question the grounds on which McTighe is writing for the show at all.
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True, but that isn’t my argument. Mine is how UNIT are represented in this episode, & how much of a mess they have become seemingly changing to fit whatever they are supposed to be in that particular episode. Its from the perspective of a lack of consitency from the writers every time they appear in the show.
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No worse than RTD imho.
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Yeah, I’ll agree to that, I’m not particularly thrilled with how UNIT has been portrayed in RTD2 and especially this episode with how weirdly incompetent their security was. I think UNIT works best as a somewhat clandestine organisation.
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Russell has hit just as many times as he’s missed for me, and I can’t go back on what I’ve said previously, that being the first three episodes of this series really filled me to the brim with confidence. This was so rotten that it came jolly close to erasing that growing sense of positivity.
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I just rewatched this and for the first time this season, my rating went down upon a repeat, not up. It’s now at 7/10, which is still good but a marked decline from the last 3 episodes.
It’s mostly because once you know the twist, it loses some of its rewatchability. I didn’t really notice many “tells” from Conrad.
And I’m disappointed in Ruby. Yes, she just needed someone to talk to and Conrad played her perfectly, but she was dating a guy with a conspiracy podcast and thousands of paying patrons yet she never listened to the episodes or found out what he was saying?
Even Cherry and Carla were looking at his Instagram, they must have seen what he was like.
The suspension of disbelief required to believe that Ruby would fall for this is a bit too much for me.
Plus all the stuff about the mixed politics here, UNIT being squeaky clean, and also being woefully bad at background checks on its new employees, just makes them seem weak.
But it’s still a good episode, some great acting, and I love the speech by Fifteen at the end. There’s an amazing story in there somewhere.
I just hope, as was suggested in the Behind the Scenes, that The War Between the Land and Sea goes even further on looking at UNIT as being a bit troublesome.
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I think this is applying real world concerns a bit too extensively to an escapist family adventure show. Generally, UNIT have always been presented as the good guys, even when the Doctor has butted heads with them. Extrapolating this to how the army and police may arguably do similar in the real world isn’t really, to my mind, particularly relevant. Fictional UNIT protect fictional people from fictional monsters - sometimes I think fans overthink things far too much.
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