“Sit down and talk”: Doctor Who and an imperfect peace myth

ABSTRACT

The globalized age of the Anthropocene, a spacetime in which humans regularly come into contact with other human and non-human ways-of-life, creates an exigence for stories that encourage living together-in-difference, or peace myths. In “The Zygon Inversion,” Doctor Who offers an imperfect peace myth that saves two species from war. To illuminate this myth, this essay first discusses the significance of memory and myth for national and cultural identity and situates Doctor Who in a sociopolitical context. Next, I show how the Doctor’s myth (1) reconceptualizes the metaphor of wargames from a game of strategy to one of luck, (2) invites a de-escalation of conflict through the Doctor’s enargeic rendering of his own, pained guilt, and (3) remains problematically partial as peace is achieved through a retention of the status quo at the cost of Zygon ways-of-life. Finally, I discuss how Doctor Who contributes to theorizing peace myths.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctor WHO
• myth
• guilt-redemption cycle
• imperfect peace

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Wargames” is a broad and generic term that refers to everything from commercial computer games to military strategy games. Early modern wargames have even been referred to as “war chess” (Caffrey, 2019, p. 14).

2. With that phrase, the Doctor makes an allusion to Hughie Green, the popular British host of Double Your Money and Opportunity Knocks.

3. The sunk cost fallacy refers to the motivation people experience to continue an endeavor or behavior once they have invested time, money, energy, or other resources. The sunk cost fallacy is a motivator not only in human behavior but has also been exhibited in mice and rats (Sweis et al., 2018).