Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, Beverley Cressman, chris chibnall, doctor who, elisabeth sladen, gemma redgrave, kate lethbridge-stewart, Nicholas Courtney, steven moffat, UNIT

Doctor Who: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart & UNIT Suffer From Past Mistakes

Doctor Who fans are loving Gemma Redgrave's Kate Lethbridge-Stewart - but the new UNIT is still suffering from the old UNIT's biggest problem.

It's interesting that UNIT, the top secret paramilitary organization that fights alien menaces in Doctor Who always had fans. I guess a lot of fans always liked to play soldiers shooting guns and stuff. The thing about UNIT is that shooting at aliens or alien objects on Doctor Who never worked; it always made things worse. Anyway, UNIT was brought back in the modern version of the series led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, daughter of the original Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, as an organization that's supposed to be hipper, smarter, and more savvy since she's a scientist, not a soldier whose first impulse is to shoot anything that looks weird.

The Secret Origin of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart was originally introduced in the 1995 direct-to-DVD fan production Downtime, played by Beverley Cressman. Downtime was an "unofficial" spinoff sequel to Doctor Who, featuring the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) with Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) and former companion to the Second Doctor Victoria Waterfield (Deborah Watling), dealing with old enemy The Great Intelligence when the Doctor wasn't around to help out. The script was by Marc Platt, who wrote "Ghost Light," the final Seven Doctor story that was shot at the BBC and directed by former series director Christopher Barrie, who directed several of the Fifth Doctor stories in the 1980s. You could say it was Marc Platt who created Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. In Downtime, she was married with a daughter. She appeared in another direct-to-DVD unofficial spinoff sequel, 2004's Dæmos Rising, as the lead, still a civilian and working with an ex-UNIT to investigate a village haunting and tangling with an enemy of the Third Doctor.

When "Doctor Who" Introduced Kate Stewart 2.0

It was Chris Chibnall who brought Kate to the new series of Doctor Who in 2012 during Steven Moffat's stint as showrunner in the Sixth Doctor episode "The Power of Three." Now she was played by Gemma Redgrave, and her name was often shorted to "Kate Stewart," and she was also now the Scientific Advisor who ran UNIT. Chibnall gave Kate a character-defining cool moment during "Flux" when she proves she thinks five steps ahead of her enemies in the government when they try to assassinate her, keeping contingency plans in place, a safehouse and a way to lie in wait before popping up again to help bring down the baddies.

UNIT Still Has The Same Problems

I suspect UNIT was introduced so that the British Army wouldn't be seen as incompetent or ineffectual all the time on Doctor Who. Soldiers in virtually all Science Fiction TV series are always the first ones to panic and start shooting at the aliens and then getting killed first. Gemma Redgrave plays Kate Stewart with an air of intelligence and steeliness, but the scripts often still have her wanting to blow things up when things get tough. No one should shoot at the alien bad guy when The Doctor is telling everyone not to, and it was really dumb of Kate to shoot at The Toymaker in "The Giggle." Resorting to shoot at something is not something a scientist should ever default to. At the end of the day, UNIT is still the Generic Soldiers that are the regular army on Doctor Who with redshirt people with guns. Kate Stewart has fans because mostly because Gemma Redgrave plays her so well.

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