Doctor Who and the seeds of anxiety: exploring popular narratives of energy justice and exploitation

Abstract

Achieving and implementing sustainable socio-technical transitions requires high levels of public understanding and acceptance across multiple sectors including energy, transport, heating, and other domains. However, the level of public understanding of even the most “obvious” high carbon sector, energy production, and of the surrounding class relations around its production and consumption, remains under-examined. A specific gap is how energy narratives diffuse through and are shaped by widely accessible popular sources. The extent that public understanding may be informed by how popular culture presents issues of energy, class and access, merits consideration, yet is underexplored. This article contributes to the emerging field of energy humanities by examining five stories from the popular BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, broadcast in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It situates them in the time they were created and finds that the program provides representations of energy production and class and that these stories yield critique of political repression of subjugated peoples. However, Doctor Who ultimately does not convey a meaningful sense of endogenous social change as questions of justice are resolved by a saviour arriving from without. Our contention is that Doctor Who distils and represents via drama a degree of support for energy justice critique present in a particular place and time, the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet we also contend the energy justice critique apparent in Doctor Who is limited by several interlocking characteristics: the paternalistic rescue of victims of oppression matched by the uncritical validation of other and newer energy sources; therefore, the need for technological progress is endorsed. These limitations in normative energy justice appear in a programme viewed by millions and we contend these limitations prevailed in the wider culture which produced and watched it. Ultimately therefore interpretation of Doctor Who reflects on the theme of denialism, of the need for a just energy transition, which is conspicuously relevant today across multiple nations.