#unit era

yayyy i love unit era

why does a cape take him out

Namely, thoughts about trust. It's a central focus of the serial in more ways than one—there's the obvious, with Mike and the betrayal and all, but there's also a weird amount of trust being displayed between characters too. Moving away from the main parts for a second, the 'spaceship' and the colonists have some interesting displays of it too: they trust in Groves and the plan too much to question anything at first, but they also have to have that trust constantly reinforced by the re-education rooms. There's also some trust going on between Sarah-Jane and Mark, and eventually Adam too. But then, there's still so much trust in Groves that they have to give the others complete, concrete evidence that everything was faked before they would start to believe it.

Turning back to the UNIT plotline, there are a few very obvious moments that highlight the theme of trust (such as Benton letting the Doctor knock him out because he trusts him too much to believe that he was behind the dinosaurs, and the Brigadier defying Finch's orders for the very same reason) but there's another one that I found really interesting. When Finch first arrests the Doctor, he leaves Mike in charge of him, because he and Mike are working together. But then, Mike ends up leaving the Doctor with Benton, which felt a bit strange to me because Mike obviously knows that the Doctor and Benton are close, and that Benton is very likely to trust him. It made me think about Benton a lot as a character—loyalty is pretty much his defining characteristic, and I think what Mike underestimates here is the difference between being loyal to an organisation (because if Benton's loyalty was primarily to UNIT or to the government or the army, then he would have followed orders and done his best to keep the Doctor where he was) and being loyal to people or ideals. Benton's loyalty here is to the Doctor, not to Mike, because he trusts the Doctor to do the right thing thanks to his experiences with him. Benton trusted Mike too, but we know that he was already doubtful because he picked up on the fact that Mike had been behaving strangely, but didn't say anything about it because at the time he'd had no reason to. Mike however doesn't know this, and trusts Benton to follow his orders, possibly due to Benton's reputation for reliability, and possibly due to their past friendship. It's a strange situation, because Mike is in that instance working against UNIT, so he should know more than anyone that trusting others blindly is a bad idea in this situation. It makes me more inclined to believe that it's because of their past friendship that he left the Doctor with Benton, because Mike is still, in a way, trusting him, even when he has broken all trust between himself and UNIT as an organisation.

More unit textposts.. :))

UNIT ERA TEXTPOSTS!!

part 1 :)) part 2 here // part 3 here