Writing about the upcoming BBC "The Day of the Doctor" special being released in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the original "Dr. Who," Jill Lepore, of The New Yorker used quisling when she wrote:
At the height of its first run, which ended in 1989, "Doctor Who" was seen by a hundred and ten million viewers in fifty-four nations, including the United States, where, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, it was broadcast by PBS and watched by the kind of quisling American kid who hadn't the heart for "Happy Days."
Quisling might be enough to send you to the Dictionary, where, based on context clues, you might expect to find a definition along the lines of "questioning" (as in quizzical) or "discontented," or even just simply "different." You might not expect to find out that 1) quisling is not an adjective but a noun, and 2) it means "traitor" or "collaborator."
Along with blitz and jeep, quisling came out of World War II, when Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling served as Minister-President of Norway during its Nazi occupation and was so reviled by the Norwegians, they reinstituted the death penalty at the end of the war simply so that he might be executed. Our usage tracker on quisling's definition page turns up this fairly typical use of quisling from a 1962 novel Talents, Incorporated by Murray Leinster.
Anything that happened to those records would be so much good fortune for Tralee, and so much bad for the master race and its quislings.
So why is Lepore associating quisling with the American teen "Dr. Who" audience of the 1970s? Is she just stretching the word's metaphorical muscles by suggesting that "Dr. Who" was an invading regime and its anti-Happy Days teen audience our nation's Vichy-style welcoming committee? Or is she tipping her hat to the deeply knowledgeable Dr. Who fans who might recognize quisling from the show?
According to TVTropes.org, the "Quisling Trope" was often used as a plot device in Dr. Who, and, as we found documented by the Doctor WhoNiverse wiki, quisling is even mentioned explicitly in the Dr. Who episode "Day of the Daleks" when the Doctor refers to the Controller incoming from "a family of quislings."
