Not So Different From Your Time (Rosa)
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It’s October 21st, 2018. Calvin Harris and Sam Smith are at number one with Promises, while Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, Little Mix and Nicki Minaj, Rita Ora, and Jess Glynne also chart. In news, 700,000 people led a futile and pointless protest against the implementation of Brexit, Caroll Spinney announced his retirement from playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, and Donald Trump moots the idea of legally defining gender as biological and immutable, a clear and productive step towards finally solving the transgender problem.
While on television, what is easily the greatest and most historically significant episode in the history of Doctor Who: Rosa. When this aired, it must have looked more or less like any other celebrity historical, albeit a bit more earnest and, dare we admit it, po-faced. But with forty years of hindsight, it’s astonishing just how many common tropes in contemporary Doctor Who originated here. Most obvious, of course, is last year’s George, which bordered on a straight-up remake, with its triumphant and moving conclusion in which the Doctor calls the cops on George Floyd to ensure that history proceeds as written, a moment of chilling and visceral horror that is thankfully leavened by the genuinely moving final scene in which the Doctor talks about how one of the oxygen farms on the Elon Musk Mars Colony is named after him. With life on Earth expected to be unsustainable within just fifteen years now, this was a moving reminder of how Floyd’s noble sacrifice led directly to the establishment of the colony that will be ensuring our future, or, at least, the future of the worthy heroes who are sent there. And we wouldn’t have had it without Chris Chibnall’s brilliant Rosa lighting the way.
There were, obviously, plenty of objections at the time, though the loudest of these ceased when Critical Race Theory finally got banned and so can be safely ignored. Most of the remaining objections, meanwhile, have largely revealed themselves as strengths. The decision, for instance, to recast Rosa Parks’s defiance from part of an organized protest into an individualist moment of heroic uppitiness, while mildly ahistorical, serves to rightly de-emphasize the disruptive nature of collective action. Instead, Rosa presents its title character as the originator of the civil rights movement, with a young up and coming Martin Luther King attending meetings at her house. Note how carefully the script works here—we see the meetings, and their activist purpose is alluded to, but no actual activism takes place at the meeting so as to preserve the claim that Rosa Parks’s protest “basically kicked off the US civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King.” It’s also significant what’s erased here—Parks’s protest is held up as singular, rightly eliding Claudette Colvin, who had engaged in a similar protest nine months earlier, and who, unlike Parks, was a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the court case that ended bus segregation, but who was also an unmarried pregnant woman, and thus simply not asteroid material.
But Rosa is more substantial than making history suitably telegenic. Consider Krasko’s actual scheme, which hinges on the idea that disrupting Parks’s protest on that specific day and on that specific bus route would derail the entire civil rights movement and result, as Krasko puts it to Ryan, in a future where “your kind won’t get above themselves.” This may not seem radical today, but in the context of Trump’s first term, when a legion of deranged communist soyboys were actively pushing models of history based on numinous concepts like “systemic racism” and “popular movements” that amounted to little more than spooky activism at a distance, it was striking to see the great man theory given such a thorough airing. For all that Rosa was at the time taken as siding against Trump and with the late “wokeness” movement, the truth was that Chibnall was always closer to the core ideological point of Trumpism in its belief that history is driven by individual actors.
This moral point also explains the opening scene, which some critics rashly suggested consisted of nothing other than historical trivia that failed to advance any themes within the narrative. In fact, this scene usefully frames Parks’s actions in a manner more conducive to understanding the historical process, making this not some ridiculous exercise about systemic oppression but a titanic moral struggle between Rosa Parks and James Blake—a clash between two great men, one a hero, one a villain. It similarly makes sense of the exchange in which Graham talks about Grace and how she talked about James Blake, a scene that some critics—mostly the ones who missed the nuance of the opening scene—took as contrived, but that in reality conveys the important message that Blake, as an agent of history, is just as important as Parks.
What is interesting about all of this is the status of ordinary people within the narrative, specifically in the climactic scene in which the Doctor, Yaz, and Graham find themselves having to stay on the bus in order to ensure that Parks will have to give up her seat. What is at stake here is the relationship between normal people and heroes. Certainly it is obvious that Parks and Blake’s struggle could only take place over a backdrop of ordinary people. The nature of the bus requires this, hence the episode’s otherwise perverse descent into being a bus seating procedural. There have to be a bunch of irrelevant, anonymous people so that history can take place. This is a truism of history: it is about great men, but it cannot happen without the ordinary ones.
It is of course especially poignant to reflect upon that as final selection for the Musk Colony begins. This division necessarily involves selecting those worthy few who will carry the future of humanity to its next planet and separating them from the ordinary masses who will stay behind for an uncertain and difficult future. Those selected for history will have to carry on humanity, not just for themselves, but for those who didn’t make the cut. Chibnall and Blackman obviously could not have had a situation like this in mind, but all the same, their depiction of the Doctor and company’s horror that they must be complicit witnesses to history captures the complex emotions of the ordinary when they are confronted with their betters—the horror and awe that reveals the sublime nature of true history. For the most part there is little to like in Chibnall’s decision to move the Doctor away from being a heroic figure, making her more like the ordinary people of the universe and less like a lonely god figure, but here it pays moving dividends by highlighting the stark difference between her and the true agents of history and giving her emotions appropriate to that stark disparity.
Indeed, for all that discussions of Chibnall’s flaws abound—and it’s true that his fascination with preeningly superficial diversity exemplified the worst instincts of the momentarily in vogue social justice warrior style—it has to be appreciated just how much he specifically brings to the table with Rosa. There were those who bristled at the fact that Malorie Blackman, a much acclaimed young adult novelist, found herself sharing a writing credit with her white boss. But Chibnall deserves credit for realizing that the story needed a white perspective to be told correctly. Blackman is, of course, entirely capable and indeed deft at depicting the degradations of racism—Ryan’s line about having to constantly fight his temper so as to “Never give them the excuse” is great and moving. But Chibnall’s relentless pursuit of a “view from nowhere” ethos for Doctor Who has benefit here, grounding the experience of racism in a larger and more neutrally presented context.
Ironically, this comes with some elements that are technically historical inaccuracies. Most notably, the idea that Yaz would have been treated as white for the purposes of segregation is entirely absurd—and one suspects something that was revised into the script at some point, given that the hotel scene clearly understands that she would have been discriminated against and has her ducking out the window, while the subsequent bus scene assumes she can legally occupy a white seat. This not only gives a specific sense of where Blackman’s script ends and Chibnall’s begins, it helps clarify what Chibnall brought to the table. The decision to grant Yaz a measure of contingent whiteness serves to further mythologize the sense of history—to write it with lightning, as it were, clarifying it by sanding away the rough edges. Removing all other dimensions of racism reduces it to literally black and white. Chibnall nearly endangers this with the joke of having Yaz mistaken for being Mexican, which almost strays into a tedious reduction of the American south into a bunch of unintelligent yokels. Ironically, it is saved by the degree to which the move is lazy Trump-bashing—the choice of “Mexican” is a cack-handed effort to connect the bigotry of the 1950s with the bigotry of the 2010s, but it does at least still keep the depictions of racism entirely within the American milieu, where it can be understood as the idiosyncratic and wholly irrational historical fluke that it was.
This allows Chibnall to put the focus where it really matters—on the march of progress that meant that by 2018 Yaz could be a policewoman. This choice of examples is especially powerful because it highlights the specific nature of the progress that human civilization at large has made. For all that the rhetoric of 2018 focused on notions of equality—a word, notably, that appears nowhere within Rosa—the real progress was something subtler. Equality, after all, is a fundamental lie: there will always be the great and the everyday, and no effort to erase that distinction can ever work. But what can be obtained is racial diversity within our understanding of the great. The Mars colony is once again a compelling example here. Yes, it’s inevitable that an elite few will carry human civilization onwards while the Earth collapses to barbarism, but as long as those elite few contain a suitably breedable spread of human biodiversity then we can say with honesty that we have made progress from the dark days of the twentieth century. What is important, in other words, is exactly what Yaz says: that historically disadvantaged groups are allowed to participate in the socio-administrative process, so that we have black politicians, Pakistani police officers, female prison guards, and, yes, Mars colonists of all of these categories. As long as the upper class contains sufficient diversity it cannot truly be said to be oppressive.
Indeed, this is ultimately the one major problem with Rosa—its sense of pessimism. For all that Yaz imagines “where they’ll be 50 years after” the Obama Presidency, the truth is that Rosa’s vision of the future is altogether bleaker than what actually happened. After all, its antagonist, Krasko, is an overtly racist man from the future. This is, we can now say with confidence, utter nonsense—as ridiculous as those 1960s stories that preposterously misjudged the speed of space colonization. The truth is that racism (a word that admittedly only appears once in Rosa, focused as it is on the nature of history instead of the nature of bigotry) was only a few years away from being eliminated from human society when Rosa aired, and that the civilization that was soon to arise was a firmly enlightened one.
All the same, looking at the history of Doctor Who, we can see that this is where the show first achieved modernity. It would be some time before the show was consistently this modern, especially given the unfortunate degeneracy of the second Davies era. But Chibnall and Blackman were the writers who most clearly saw what the future would be, and the world would be a far poorer place had they not done so. Episodes like this are why this project exists.
Thanks to Miranda Bonilla for sensitivity reading.
January 22, 2024 @ 5:26 am
Both brilliant and brutal.
January 22, 2024 @ 6:21 am
I was expecting this entry to be a more abstract piece about how “Doctor Who meets Rosa Parks” is a fundamentally bad idea that should never have been attempted.
I’m very happy to be wrong, because this might be the best, most vicious takedown of an episode in the whole Eruditorum.
It’s still shocking to me that Chibnall attached his name to the story, even if he did write a good chunk of it. The horrendous optics of that choice should have been obvious.
January 23, 2024 @ 1:41 am
Execution aside, the three historical stories in Chibnall’s first season are to periods when Ryan and Yaz are in danger from racism, Yaz is in danger from religious bigotry, and Yaz and the Doctor herself are in danger from misogny. After these three, why do they want to travel into the past?
January 22, 2024 @ 7:05 am
Masterpiece.
Even as someone who is more positive about the episode than you (not unreservedly so, to be clear – I certainly have criticisms of it), this is an astonishing, vital piece of Doctor Who criticism that ought to have a place in the hall of fame for the way it captures so many of the failings of this era of the show — in such an inventive, stylish way, too. Brava.
January 22, 2024 @ 7:46 am
Ouch. I get it, but, Ouch.
What I will say as a marginal defense is that it /did/ give a sense in the early scenes as to what it was like to non-white, non-male in that time and place. It’s so far from my lived experience I couldn’t dare comment on the details of who could sit and stand on the bus and whether Yaz would pass as part-white. I’ll leave that to others who know or who were there. There was a sense of banal evil at least as far as the “family viewing” would permit.
But why bother including pointless fascist-from-the-future? Must we have a monster and lasers in every single episode?
Attaching individual blame isn’t always a good idea, but I’d like to know how much of the fault is distributed with Chibnall’s original brief to Blackman (or did she suggest the topic and plot?), with the original script as submitted, and with the tweaks that the showrunner would generally be entitled to make?
January 22, 2024 @ 7:58 am
Summarising what we do know of the production process –
it was a Chibnall goal from the very beginning, a statement of intent about the sort of historicals they would now be telling, to do a Rosa Parks story.
when he first met with his writers’ room in 2016 (NB. it is by no means clear that Malorie Blackman was an active, regular member of this room in the way that Vinay Patel, Pete McTighe, Joy Wilkinson, and Ed Hime were, as well as one other writer called Tim Price who never ended up writing a script but created the Pting concept), he pitched “Rosa Parks, but in Speed [the film]/a thriller” and “get Rosa on the bus”, and he recounts how the group of about 10 people just stared back at him like “wat” (this is all on the RadioFreeSkaro podcast from last year’s GallifreyOne convention)
as both Chibnall and Blackman tell it, the drafting process involved her writing her (presumably several, as is standard) drafts and Chibnall giving her notes, then him polishing it up into his draft and her giving him notes. We know from the DVD commentary that Claudette Colvin was originally mentioned in the script but cut for time (likewise the activism scene with MLK, Fred Gray, etc, had more to it, but was similarly cut); it was Chibnall, not Blackman, who wanted to get MLK in there; we know that “today not working out & tomorrow being all you have” is a thing Blackman’s mother used to say hence its inclusion here; and that Blackman feels the Ryan & Yaz scene behind the bins perfectly struck the balance between celebrating how much progress has been made and how far there is still to go (her sentiment, don’t shoot the messenger)
we also know that Chibnall’s final draft included multiple asteroids of other famous 20th century people (JFK, Gandhi) and director Mark Tonderai overruled him on this, saying “look these guys are important but they don’t hold a candle to Rosa for black folks” (as Tonderai says in a Guardian article on Ncuti’s casting)
Tonderai decided on “Rise Up” (the BLM anthem) to play over end credits
January 22, 2024 @ 7:59 am
ah bugger, formatting messed up. oh well, hopefully you get the drift
January 22, 2024 @ 11:39 am
I think I do. Many thanks for such a comprehensive answer.
…. he recounts how the group of about 10 people just stared back at him like “wat”
Oh to have been a fly on the wall for that one.
… [Blackman] feels the Ryan & Yaz scene behind the bins perfectly struck the balance between celebrating how much progress has been made and how far there is still to go …
No shooting the messenger here, honest! Once a decision to include those sentiments in the story, there seems to be no other way to do it other than to exposit between the two non-white regulars. It wouldn’t have a hope of working with Graham without being hopeless condescending. Once again, the “tell not show” weakness. But to show effectively, you’d have to link it back to the known present-day lives of Yaz and Ryan. These were only sketched out briefly in TWWFTE and not as far as I recall in TGM. If it were a bit later in the running order and we knew more about the pasts and interiority of those two characters, Blackman would have had more to work with. We now know that exploring those characters in depth never really happened.
January 22, 2024 @ 12:38 pm
What’s interesting about the idea of this being a statement of intent is that, in the context of the whole era, it ends up being a statement of lost intent. Season 11 has this, and it has Demons of the Punjab, which is similar enough in general vibe that it carries on with the mission statement Chibnall wanted to make. But then, when you get to Season 12, there’s nothing like this, the historicals are all Davies-esque romps where the Fam hangs out with famous people and fights aliens. I’m not going to talk about Flux, because it’s obviously not at all what Chibnall intended for Season 13, but it does make me wonder what happened between S11 and S12 to cause this big course change, especially since I thought that the ratings and general opinion of S11 were quite positive.
January 22, 2024 @ 1:03 pm
It really is remarkable how quickly the Chibnall era abandoned its most substantial and (potentially) worthwhile idea.
Telling Mary Seacole to sit in the corner and look at Sontarans may be the single worst beat any historical has ever done.
January 22, 2024 @ 1:11 pm
Yeah, even with all the deserved reservations one might have about Rosa, the drop off from this (or as an even better example, Demons of the Punjab) to … Legend of the Sea Devils is insane.
January 22, 2024 @ 1:40 pm
the treatment of Madam Ching in LotSD is absolutely insulting, one of the few times the show has done a non-western historical figure, and all of her actual history is thrown out the window and we’re left with a character from a c-tier pirate movie
January 22, 2024 @ 5:24 pm
This is to me one of the central, baffling tragedies of the Chibnall era. S11 was not, on average, good. But it did have a few notably good episodes and another tier of near misses that maybe could have been polished to tolerability. It felt weird and different and very unlike the RTD or Moffat eras and sometimes it felt like the work of people who’d never seen a TV show before never mind Doctor Who and were trying to work out how you make episodic television from first principles. Chibnall’s decision to abjure all of the classic monsters until the first holiday special felt like a solid one. Its failures, in short, were occasionally interesting failures and if Doctor Who is going to suck I’d rather it suck while occasionally swinging for the fences or getting its freak on. You could just about wrap up watching Resolution and say “well, that was more crap than not but maybe now that they’ve got their feet under them the next season will be pretty good?”
And then: nothing. Not a single one of the potentially interesting stylistic threads from S11 were followed up on, and instead we got a hard right turn into Generic Doctor Who Content. And what’s dispiriting is that it’s hard to get away from the idea that something like “Praxeus” was in fact Chibnall’s idea of Doing Doctor Who Properly.
January 22, 2024 @ 8:45 am
Yaz could never pass as part-white because the One-Drop rule applied. Anyone considered mixed race was treated as non-white, no matter if white family far outnumbered the mixed race element. So no, Yaz was never going to be in the front of the bus if she looked in anyway not white. The same way that Graham couldn’t attempt to give Ryan any protection by claiming a relationship.
Also, Loving vs Virginia doesn’t happen for another decade, so interracial marriage was illegal in many states limiting the very concept of a mixed race person.
January 22, 2024 @ 7:16 pm
This isn’t true though. Plenty of people of mixed race passed as white. Whether Mandip Gill herself could have passed for white is maybe questionable, but people of South Asian descent certainly did (e.g. actress Merle Oberon)
January 23, 2024 @ 12:19 pm
The question wasn’t “passing as white”, it was “passing as part-white”. Which wasn’t a thing you could do. Under the law there wasn’t “part-white”. There are plenty of people who passed as white, but they weren’t claiming to be mixed race at all. That also isn’t something the episode is exploring in relation to Yaz, who in every other scene is perceived as not white. Not just in the first scene, but in the conversation with Rosa Parks as well. So the final scene really does come across as Yaz getting to sit at the front of the bus entirely because she isn’t black.
January 22, 2024 @ 10:49 am
From a storytelling perspective, Kresko is necessary to give the Fam something to do. Without him, the episode would’ve been “We seem to have landed next to Rosa Parks.” “Oh neat, we can meet a civil rights icon.” “Yeah but don’t say anything and don’t interfere with the racism.” “Can we watch her ride the bus?” “Only if you are willing to be an active participant in the racism.” “When you put it that way, it would be kind of crass for us to hang out here just to sightsee, wouldn’t it? Let’s go then.”
January 22, 2024 @ 12:29 pm
True, but if Chibnall had to add a superfluous villain to a story in order to pad it out, then maybe he should have realized the story is better suited to a short for the DVD or something.
Y’know, the writerly part of my brain keeps trying to fix the premise, and… I feel like the episode would have been stronger if it took place at any other point in Parks’ life. Like, I think a story about what her life was like AFTER the one famous thing she did could’ve been an interesting idea! It probably wouldn’t have been good, but it could have interesting!
Also, I think it’s notable that a whole three episodes of Chibnall’s first season was this type of historical edutainment. I remember a decent amount of press about this; the show was really making a big statement! Then, Series 12 also had three of those episodes – but two of them featured big villains like the Master or the Cybermen. And the final stretch had two – one Flux episode featuring the Sontarans, and one special featuring the Sea Devils.
January 22, 2024 @ 12:45 pm
This use of Rosa Parks is crass, but “Rosa Parks is important and targeted by evildoers from the future” is a much easier sell than “The Doctor sacrifices the future of the universe to save Percy Shelley”. (The Timeline does not align properly, but man would it be awesome to hop between realities to consider how Submitted For The Approval of the Midnight Pals deals with the same historical events. By merging the death of Percy Shelley, Strangers on a Train, and Columbo)
Come to think of it, The Giggle has elements of the pseudo-historical as well, though it’s surprisingly easy to not think about that.
January 22, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
My main problem with this story is that the “we have to sit on the bus to spark the protest” thing implicitly buys into the villain’s logic, when a better version of the episode would have had the villain put all that energy into stopping Rosa getting on one particular bus, only for her to get on the next bus and pull the protest she had planned with the same overall effect, and the Doctor telling him she’d allowed him to waste his efforts because she knew it would pan out that way because she knows his Great Man/Pivotal Accidents version of history is nonsense and fails to take the power of activist movements into account.
By making out that the time fascist’s plan might have worked, the episode implicitly endorses the time fascist’s theory of history.
January 22, 2024 @ 4:30 pm
We need a Like function for comments like this
January 22, 2024 @ 4:58 pm
“a larger and more neutrally presented context”
my everything clenched
January 22, 2024 @ 5:06 pm
This is up there with that Twitter thread which ended with Graham having to fly the plane on 9/11. (Can’t find it now, annoyingly.)
January 22, 2024 @ 6:15 pm
Damn that George part alone was enough to fire the bullet. The rest of this is just disrespecting the grave site.
January 23, 2024 @ 10:17 am
It’s odd, but in 50 years of watching the show, the only person remotely like me is Ryan, everyone else is “other”. Ironically it’s in perhaps the least engaging version of the show.
January 23, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
With the protagonists trying to make sure a historical figure did their famous thing with little understanding of significance and no exploration of context, it felt like a very long, unnecessarily serious episode of Me Peabody and Sherman.
January 23, 2024 @ 8:41 pm
Or, for that matter, a significantly po-faced and straight version of a Time Squad episode.
January 24, 2024 @ 7:49 am
One more thought: this episode was the first instance of what I’ve come to think of as “Jodie Wikipedia”: bits where the 13th Doctor just rattles off potted summaries on a subject on the level of Wikipedia articles. The main instance here is that speech at the end and showing off the asteroid, but at least it’s something of an earned moment because, for all its other faults, it’s at least trying to put the consequences of the episode’s events into a wider context. (I’m not saying it gets that right, but it is at least trying.)
Come S12 onwards, we’ll descend into the farce of her meeting someone and then quoting their wikipedia article to their face, and that’ll be the only significance of meeting that historical figure to begin with.
March 11, 2024 @ 6:29 am
I guess this is a consequence of most of the famous historical figures being “done”. There’s only a few you can hand-wave to the audience like Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare etc. Rosa Parks fits into that category, but once you get into well-known but not universally famous characters like Ada Lovelace, you do kind of have to have a sop to the audience explaining who exactly they are and why they’re well-known. But it could definitely be more deftly handled than Chibnall’s preferred method of spouting the wikipedia entry.
I think Baird in The Giggle is a good example. Not universally famous (my sister was confused that he had the same name as a pub in Hastings she frequents, not realising the pub was named after someone), but it’s pretty clear who he is and what he’s doing without needing the Doctor to show up and go “Oh, John Logie Baird? You’re brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I wouldn’t be able to watch EastEnders if it weren’t for you. Watch out for EastEnders, you’re going to love it. Oh yes!”
January 24, 2024 @ 7:55 am
That was exhausting.
I guess because satire is counterfactual, and reading a long piece of counterfactual writing saps my energy for some reason. Too much make-up is never enough, but too much satire is just too much satire. Or something.
January 24, 2024 @ 11:32 pm
yowza
ive been rereading TARDIS eruditorum while rewatching my favorite DW stories and it’s been a real treat, and i’m glad you’re still critiquing it to this day specifically because of sharp, funny, structurally surprising essays like this
This episode nearly killed me (for reasons you laid out here more eloquently than i could put together at the time) and then Kerblam came along and finished me off. didn’t get back into the show until the recent specials. I’m glad to be back round the same time as good ol Eruditorum Press 🙂
January 25, 2024 @ 8:31 am
You portray a sobering and frighteningly possible future. Like all good SF and unlike Rosa.
January 26, 2024 @ 7:53 am
I am reluctant to criticise this episode too much as it seems to be very openly and unapologetically aimed at small children. I am sure that many primary school teachers have pulled it out during Black History Month and found it a good way to engage kids in American civil rights movement. And from that point of view it should probably be viewed as a success.
Now I am kind of baffled why Chibnall and the Beeb thought it was a good idea to reposition their globally popular Sci Fi franchise as a children’s programme, but I do think we need to acknowledge that it is what they are consciously trying to achieve. It isn’t an accident that this episode is childish and simplistic. It is designed to be childish and simplistic.
January 26, 2024 @ 2:16 pm
I think there’s lots of room to criticize a children’s program; as someone who was a child once, “schoolteachers probably put it on” feels like the opposite of a ringing endorsement to me.
January 26, 2024 @ 9:29 pm
Fair point. Well made.
January 28, 2024 @ 8:20 pm
We watched it when it was broadcast with our son who was 6 at the time. My wife took teh opportunity to start explaining who Rosa Parkes was. He just said “I know who she was , I learned about her at school”.
January 27, 2024 @ 10:06 am
To be honest, I doubt little of us outside the United States know of the fifties\sixties civil rights movement. After it it’s the history of a “foreign” country and people. I know of MLK and the freedom riders but little else (and what I do know wasn’t taught at school, but then why should it have been?). The show originally had an educational remit, that’s why it had trips to such places as revolutionary France and met the likes of Marco Polo. Also the past (such as the USA in the 1950’s) should be as “alien” to the TARDIS crew as Skaro or Karn.
January 30, 2024 @ 3:00 pm
I freely admit I had no idea who Rosa Parks was until this episode. But educational value is not what I want from my Doctor Who.
January 27, 2024 @ 10:17 am
The whole thing is brilliant, but the “George” bit just floors me every single time.
January 27, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
Hindsight is the most depressing thing about this episode.
This is the closest outside of the “fair play” speech in The Woman Who Fell to Earth in giving 13 a moment where she defines herself. The thing where almost other Doctors would have done it differently. The bit where she uses the exact words of her opponent without mentioning it “I don’t know anyone I’d describe like that”. At the time it felt like that would be her Doctor’s thing. But no. Never happens again. Just a fluke of a good line
January 28, 2024 @ 2:20 pm
The episode had one cute but short part.
When The Doctor is writing on the wall in marker, Graham exclaims its vandalism.
Doctor: Special pen, don’t worry
Graham: You’re not Banksy!
Doctor: or am I ?
January 28, 2024 @ 10:03 pm
For the hell of it, I went and looked up what I posted on Gallifrey Base when this came out. Was I still giving the Chibnall era the benefit of the doubt? Yeah, but it was already fraying:
Certainly better than the last two weeks, not that that’s a high bar to clear. It would have been much more powerful without the various stretches of dialogue included for the purpose of reminding us why we should find it powerful, not to mention the stretches of dialogue that feel like they were transcribed from a study guide, but at this point I think it’s clear that the Chibnal era isn’t interested in even gesturing toward subtlety. And I suppose it wouldn’t be a proper Hartnell historical if it never lectured the audience.
It’s interesting to see “You can’t rewrite history! Not one line!” being deployed on behalf of social change rather than against it. I will have to ponder what to make of that.
In the meantime: If you’d like to see a good piece of television about the Montgomery bus boycott, I recommend Clark Johnson’s “Boycott.” In a better world, “Doctor Who does the Rosa Parks story” would be the Johnson movie with aliens in it. Not that I have any idea how that would work.
[And then, in a followup:]
[S]abotaging a single bus trip could have “nudged” events in a somewhat different direction, as the Doctor put it. But it’s doubtful that it would have prevented the boycott.
For the record, I still don’t know how the hell the Clark Johnson movie with aliens in it would work. Honestly, that was just my polite way of pointing people to something better.
January 28, 2024 @ 10:05 pm
Whoops, the asterisks that I used to set off the old post seem not to have appeared. That last graf (“For the record…”) is me in the present, not me in the past.
February 19, 2024 @ 3:29 pm
Finally, I was worried we’d never see a new entry in the Dalek Eruditorum!
March 2, 2024 @ 7:04 pm
Underrated comment.
June 2, 2024 @ 5:50 am
I loved Rosa primarily for one reason: it is the first time any of the (till then) all white Doctors actively owned their whiteness and self-consciously embodied the political significance of that. I thought the plotting was clever in getting the Doctor into a situation where, for once, she couldn’t jump up and be the white saviour. She had to be quietly but clearly white and be publicly seen to comfortably tolerate racism. It was a subtle but assertive departure from Tennant’s ‘walk around like you own the place’ and all the rest of the long history of the Doctors pretending they weren’t white. I think this aspect of Rosa deserves way more credit even if other aspects are easy to critique. I’ve always seen it as unsurprising that it took the show’s first writer of colour to come up with a scenario that could make that point. But I don’t know all the behind the scenes information you all seem to be aware of, so perhaps my view is naive?