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The Mercy Inversion

The Mercy Inversion

Last updated on: January 20, 2017 at 5:05 pm by Kate Cousino

The Mercy Inversion 2017-01-20T17:05:51-04:00 Kate Cousino

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Bear with me, this post is geeky.

I just finished watching The Zygon Inversion, last week’s episode of Doctor Who. Or rather, I just finished rewatching The Zygon Inversion, for the third time. The episode is the second half of a two-parter, but the first part–and much of the episode itself–is really just a setup to a very powerful piece of dialogue–monologue, really–about war.

Except it’s not really about war as much as it is about forgiveness.

Except it is not so much about forgiveness–though it is that as well–as it is about the power of mercy.

Which means, ultimately, it’s about love.

Here’s the meat of the speech:

It’s a remarkable, emotional performance from Capaldi. The speech itself is a marvellous rhetorical creation, moving from scolding to pleading, from frustration to raw pain.

It’s also a treat for fans, referencing as it does the Doctor’s backstory and the universe and character-shaping events of 2013’s 50th anniversary special, the Day of the Doctor. My second viewing sent me back to revisit that episode, wondering if it was the emotional resonances from previous viewing that had so captured my attention. The Doctor’s choice from his own warrior days, from his own Moment, is certainly consciously echoed here.

But I realized what it was, finally, this last time I watched the episode and the speech. I realized what was pulling me so intensely back to it, what it was I found compelling enough to watch again and again. It’s this:

“I did worse things than you could ever imagine, and when I close my eyes… I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count! And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight… Til it burns your hand. And you say this — no one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain. Not on my watch.”

This? This is a particular kind of mercy. The Day of the Doctor was about counting the innocents (also referenced in this speech). At one point in that episode, the Doctor revealed that he stayed up “one long night” and counted all the children’s lives at stake in his grim moment of decision at the end of the Time War. The Day of the Doctor–an episode that is also about war, and about alternatives to war–was about pleading the case for the innocent lives against the weight of the guilty.

But this episode takes that and inverts it by pleading, not for the innocent, but for the guilty.

Pleading so that “No one else will ever have to live like this.” Live, not as survivors of war, but as perpetrators of atrocity.

The Doctor’s speech first asks the combatants to have, not mercy on the innocents, but mercy on their opponents to break the cycle. The Doctor offers his mercy to Zygella when she thinks she deserves none. But the ultimate plea, the compelling plea, the most heartfelt of them all, is the plea he makes for her to have mercy…on herself.

Because sin–and if we can’t talk about unjust war and the murder of innocents in terms of sin, what can we?–sin’s costs only seem to be carried solely by its victims. The mercy of the Doctor is the mercy of someone who knows the true and lasting cost of sin to the one who commits it. It is the mercy of the broken towards the breaking.

In this moment, the Doctor’s pleas are something more than desperate attempts to verbally wheedle an opponent into submission. They are an act of love.

For the wrongdoer. For the terrorist, the rebel, the contemplator-of-genocide.

It is the plea that pierces to the heart. The plea from an opponent who loves you more than you knew to love yourself.

Sometimes we talk about mercy like it is something that the more virtuous person offers out of their virtue. Ultimately, there’s some truth to this. God’s mercy certainly comes out of His infinite goodness.

But the human impulse to mercy usually has different roots, I think. Because it isn’t the people who think well of themselves who find mercy most natural to them, is it? It’s not those who have found it easy and rewarding to follow the rules. It’s the reformed, the repentant, the humbled.

It’s our brokenness that teaches us to see what is broken in others and wish them, not condemnation, not punishment, but healing.

Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you.

We are all sinners.

We say these things so often they have become hollow, I’m afraid. We’ve forgotten, I think, just what that means. It means your enemies’ soul and fate matters as much to you as your own. It means there is no “us” and “them.”

There’s just varying degrees of broken, all in need of a Doctor.

And while I love my fictional Doctor, especially for this week’s speech, I love my very real Divine Physician all the more. Bearing all of the wounds of all of our wars in his hands and feet and heart, He waits for us to choose mercy and life.

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” (Deut. 30:19)

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