The U.K.'s GCHQ issues an official response to the Dalek attack in yesterday's Doctor Who New Year's Special, reassuring the country that it's up and running again. The special episode, "Resolution," saw Earth threatened by a rejuvenated Dalek that had been lying dormant since the 9th Century - and it launched a devastating attack on GCHQ as part of the plot.

Established after the First World War, GCHQ - the Government Communications Headquarters - is based in the suburbs of Cheltenham. It's responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to the U.K. government and armed forces, and received significant media attention back in 2013 when some of its activities were reported by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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The Doctor Who New Year's Day special saw a lone Dalek identify GCHQ as a place where it could take control of the U.K.'s entire communications infrastructure. Amusingly, the GCHQ Twitter account has issued an official response to the Dalek attack.

GCHQ is only the latest official social media account to interact with fandoms: NASA recently responded to the Avengers: Endgame trailer by suggesting ground teams would be combing the skies for Tony Stark, stranded in space and possibly unable to communicate. For GCHQ, of course, this is a smart way of increasing exposure and hopefully helping people to understand the service they perform on behalf of their country. Hopefully a little sense of humor will go a long way toward getting Twitter followers, who will then become better informed.

The response to GCHQ's tweets has been equally amusing. There's been some speculation that GCHQ activities would have temporarily moved to a second site in the event of an attack. Naturally, such operational procedures are unlikely to ever be discussed on social media, but that's probably a good guess. In the world of Doctor Who, of course, government departments would no doubt have plans in place for alien incursions.

Others have taken advantage of the opportunity to petition for the U.K. government to restore funding for U.N.I.T., the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, an organization dedicated to protecting Earth from alien menaces in the Doctor Who universe. Various incarnations of the Doctor have worked alongside U.N.I.T. since the Patrick Troughton era, but "Resolutions" revealed that it's been shut down - a result of the government's austerity policies and the collapse of multilateral policies in Western politics. No doubt the GCHQ staff who man the official social media accounts will be more than a little amused.

More: Screen Rant's Top 10 Favorite TV Shows of 2018

Doctor Who returns for season 12 in 2020.

Source: GCHQ