There’s no pulling punches when your season’s first trip back to the past is to examine the actions of Civil Rights hero, Rosa Parks. So Doctor Who did not pull those punches. And we are left with a testament to the life of one of the bravest women in American history.
[This review contains an episode recap, so suffice it to say there are SPOILERS.]
Summary
The episode begins with a brief flashback to 1945, when Rosa Parks is kicked off a Montgomery, Alabama bus for entering at the front, where only white people are permitted to enter. Flash forward to 1955, the Doctor and crew have landed in Montgomery due to traces of artron energy the TARDIS is detecting in the area. They go to check it out, but get a rude awakening when Ryan is struck in the face by the white man after he tries to return a dropped glove to the man’s wife. Parks intervenes on their behalf to prevent the situation from escalating, and the Doctor finds traces of artron energy on her. They realize that they have arrived the day before she makes her historic stand on a local bus, which leads to her arrest and starts the bus boycott that sparks the wider Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.
The Doctor traces the artron energy to the local bus depot and finds equipment for a variety of gear from the future, including a temporal displacement weapon. These items belong to a man named Krasko, who turns out to be a recent release from Stormgate prison. He murdered thousands, and the prison only released him after planting an inhibitor in his brain that prevents him from being able to hurt or kill anyone. Without that ability, Krasko decided to jump back in time to “where it went wrong,” to stop Parks’s stand and arrest from taking place. The Doctor realizes that the group needs to do everything in their power to ensure that Parks does exactly has history says—they have to keep the timeline intact.
Krasko tries countless methods of sabotage, from trying to change out the bus driver to breaking down the bus to preventing other passengers from getting on so that it won’t be full. The gang meet him at each turn, foiling him up until the end, when they get on the same bus where Parks makes her stand. They believe they’ve done their work and make to leave, but the Doctor stops them; the bus has to be full enough to ensure that the driver harasses Parks to vacate her seat. They stay and watch her as she refuses to leave and is finally arrested. Once back on the TARDIS, the Doctor tells her companions about the effect Parks had on history.
Commentary
There’s no set up quite like having a companion get assaulted in the first ten minutes of an episode for daring to tap a white woman on the shoulder. In fact, there are many points in this episode that are hard to watch—and that’s as it should be. Racism shouldn’t be easy viewing, even if the intent of the experience is to remind viewers of all the work done and still yet to be done. “Rosa” manages to teach a great deal to those who may not know about Parks and the stand she took on an Alabama bus, but still doesn’t coat it with family-friendly imagery and vocabulary.
In the past, Doctor Who has shuffled back and forth on how much it wanted to address racism. There are episodes that bounce right off it (“The Shakespeare Code”) and episodes where we’ve seen companions antagonized for the color of their skin, though thankfully not brutalized (“Human Nature/Family of Blood”) and there are episodes where racism is crystal clear and criticized (“Thin Ice”)… but this episode is also set in America. Racism functions differently in America, embedded in the origins of the United States and marked by generations of slavery, bigotry, and segregation. This episode needed to be prepared to address that in all its ugliness, and it thankfully didn’t shy away from the issue.
Key to the success of that depiction was the creative team for this episode, co-written by Chris Chibnall with author and former Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman, directed by Mark Tonderai, and scored by Who’s new composer, Segun Akinola. Having a group of black creators working on this story helped its complexities shine through, rather than leaving us with the sanitized “after school special” on racism, told by white people. The fact that Ryan and Yas are a part of this story helps to highlight the prejudice running throughout; seeing them separated from the Doctor and Graham frequently based on where they can and cannot go is a pointed (and clearly intentional) jab that serves to remind us that the Doctor still has privilege for appearing to be white—which is something that the show could have chosen to gloss over entirely.
Who has helpfully depicted the Doctor learning more and more about how to handle racism in the past decade of its run, and last year’s “Thin Ice” saw the Doctor acknowledge for the first time that his companion, Bill, had reason to be concerned for her safety as a black woman in the past. While the Doctor is oblivious as ever about the general rules anywhere she lands (such as leading her group to sit down in the bar/restaurant where they are angrily told that Ryan and Yas won’t be served), she goes out of her way to let her companions know that she doesn’t expect them to subject themselves to abuse on this journey. She gives them all an out at the start of the episode, suggesting that they wait inside the TARDIS. Later, when Ryan is forced to enter the bus through the back doors, the Doctor tells him it’s wrong and apologizes for how he’s being treated. Not only is this heartening to see but it serves to build a brand new dynamic with this TARDIS crew; there’s more trust here, more mutual respect and consideration.
The villain in all of this is a relatively nondescript angry white man named Krasko, who the Doctor is rightly disgusted and also thoroughly unintimidated by. White supremacists don’t deserve our sympathies or our narrative attention, so the fact that Krasko feels like a cartoon, that he gets little explanations surrounding his beliefs and history seems exactly right. His complexities are irrelevant, should he have any at all. All we really need to know is that he’s a mass murdering racist, who desperately wants to change the past in order to prevent people like him from having to respect the lives of anyone they deem too different.
On the other side is Vinette Robinson’s poised and unshakeable portrayal of Rosa Parks. Though the southern accents throughout the episode get a little wobbly now and then, it’s incredible to see someone bring Parks to life with such intention. When she rescues Ryan from the altercation at the start of the episode that likely would have gotten him killed, it is couched in more history and experience; this is not down to a decision to be non-confrontational, but knowledge of the true cost that comes from even seeming to ignore white privilege. She tells the group about Emmett Till, and warns Ryan not to make that mistake again.
This continues, as the episode follow Ryan and Yas to key into their feelings specifically, and their assessment of how different things truly are in the future. Ryan points out that his grandmother Grace taught him to keep his temper in check as a black man, and he and Yas compare notes on how racism affects their lives. Yas recounts being called racial slurs, even while working as a cop, and Ryan talks about getting stopped by police more often than his white friends. While he bemoans the lack of progress, Yas is a bit more optimistic, noting that without the work of people like Parks, she’d never get to be a police officer.
Later on, Ryan’s chance to spend time with Parks and Dr. King helps him appreciate their work more than he had been able to previously. Both Ryan and Graham talk about Grace in regard to her love of Rosa Parks as an inspirational figure and how she would have reacted to being on this journey with them. (Which really only reinforces the fact that Grace should be there, but I digress yet again on that front.) Yas is forced to confront the specifics of American segregation laws and practices after she is mistaken for a “Mexican,” confused as to whether the word “colored” applies to her in this era, or if it was only meant to apply to black people. The complicated nature of racist systems are shoved into the spotlight, making it difficult for even the Doctor to parse out all the rules. There are tiny moments of protest where she has to use the language of dissent to declare herself against the status quo, and those are equally potent to any of the Doctor’s usual grandstanding; at one point, a local police officer asks if she or Graham have seen “a couple of mongrels” in reference to Ryan and Yas, and the Doctor simply replies, “I don’t recognize anyone by that description.”
The episode is a reflection on how small actions do change the course of history. Krasko knows that whatever ripples outward if Parks doesn’t make her stand will be enough to throw the timeline off completely, and so TARDIS gang have to work nonstop to thwart every wrench he throws in the temporal nexus. In this moment, Team TARDIS is working to safeguard history… which is, fascinatingly, what Time Lords (the Doctor’s species) are technically “meant” to do. But it’s not simply that; in the moment when it counts, the whole group has to stay on the bus in order for it to be crowded enough for Parks to initiate her protest. They are all dismayed to be counted among the people who perpetuate the injustice in the first place, but their comfort is less important than the timeline staying put.
And when that happens, Doctor Who reaffirms that what Rosa Park is the hero of her own story. Because history is correct when she refuses to move on that bus. Nothing needs sorting, nothing needs mending, it just needs to happen the way it did the first time. This story isn’t about the Doctor fixing time and being the hero along with her friends—it’s about the Doctor stepping aside and letting a real hero get to work.
As in other Who episodes where the accomplishments of real people are celebrated (“Vincent and the Doctor”, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”), the Doctor takes a moment at the end to tell her companions what Rosa’s future looks like. She talks about the struggle for rights that never really ended and the Congressional Medal of Honor she received. And then she introduces them to the asteroid named after her—a testament to the fact that doing the work to assure a better tomorrow for the people who depend on your strength and perseverance will land you amongst the stars… even if they weren’t what you were shooting for in the first place.
Asides and notes to keep about the episode:
- Krasko has a vortex manipulator, just like the one that Jack Harkness and River Song used to use.
- Krasko was also being held in Stormcage, the same prison where River Song was held after “murdering” the Doctor.
- The Doctor gave a mobile phone to Elvis, and he still has it. (Which Doctor, I wonder? It sounds like the sort of thing Eleven would do….)
- The Doctor still can’t quite get used to people calling her “ma’am.” It’s hard to blame her. Ma’am is a weird honorific.
- Nothing is funnier than the Doctor teasing Graham repeatedly that she might be Banksy.
Emmet Asher-Perrin wonders how often the Doctor calls up Elvis. You can bug him on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Emmet Asher-Perrin wonders how often the Doctor calls up Elvis
Well, we’ve had Winston Churchill call the Doctor, so…. :)
With all due respect for Ms. Parks and not meaning to denigrate her impact but this seems to give undue weight to American history. What about all the people fighting for equality elsewhere? Didn’t they change the universe too?
Yas isn’t too far off, sadly. My father and grandmother (both born in Italy) tended to get fairly tan in the sun. At separate times, they told me about getting refused service in a diner in North Carolina in 1954 bc the diner people didn’t consider them white. If an Italian (a Northern Italian at that) is “colored,” a person of Pakistani descent almost certainly was back then.
Loved the episode. I was left wondering about the initials in Krasko’s suitcase: G. F. B. Does anyone have any theories about that
I love that, after all that whining about how social justice warriors are ruining Doctor Who, instead of backing off, the show goes for broke in just the third episode.
I’m wondering how much power was left in that temporal displacer when Ryan zapped Krasko. If it dropped him back, say, a hundred years or so… in the antebellum south, even without equipment, he might still be a danger to the timestream.
I liked how, for all that this episode is unmistakeably modern in politics and approach, its storytelling roots go back to the Hartnell era. We have a whole new Time Meddler in Krasko, a bigoted version of the Meddling Monk. Seeing an extended TARDIS team wrestle with what they can and can’t change in history made me think of the knotty moral problems raised in The Aztecs and The Massacre.
It’s almost more interesting to imagine how this episode could have gone horribly wrong than acknowledge how it got things right (Speed with Rosa Parks, anyone?). It’s really heartening to see risky issues usually left to the novels being raised in the show itself, and it being done so well.
I was a bit worried about that episode, worried that they’d fall for the white saviour trope. When I looked up the creative team in advance, I didn’t see Malorie Blackman listet as author, only Chibnall’s name was given, and I wasn’t so sure about some British white guy trying to explain Black history… glad to see my worries were unjustified.
I liked the episode (what I saw of it, my Internet connection broke down and I missed a few minutes in the middle). Right after watching it, I complained that Krasko seemed a bit weak as a villain, but after thinking about it, I agree with the OP. It was right that the episode put the spotlight on Rosa and the struggle against racism, not on the racists.
I liked that the Doctor and her companions had to focus on keeping history intact instead of fixing it. All three companions were put to good use, Ryan got to be badass, Yas had possibility to shine and Graham could be his grumpy but helpful self. The Doctor grew more into her own, too, got a more distinct personality. And I loved the more detailed glimpse we got at the TARDIS interior in the beginning.
“Ma’am is a weird honorific.”
It’s a mispronunciation of “madam”.
I’m not American, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of important context. But can someone please explain to me why Rosa Parks is famous?
She completed her high school education when only 7% of black people did so (I loved what her character says about the importance of education), and went on to further her studies in order to be a better activist. She took an active role in defending Recy Taylor after she was raped by 6 white men. Parks of course did a lot more after 1955, although this is difficult to disentangle from her civil disobedience on that bus, since by then, she had become an icon (although not everyone uses their fame to encourage positive change). Yet, everyone remembers her as “the bus woman”, as Ryan says.
The episode mentions Emmett Till, brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman, and whose killers were acquitted. It seems as if the most important consequence of this horrific tragedy was to motivate Parks to resist authority on that day. So I guess there is something special about civil disobedience on buses that is more important a symbol than such a gross miscarriage of justice.
But earlier that year Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery. I had never heard her name before now. Before her, there was Irene Morgan in Maryland too. And Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Frances Harper, Ida Wells, Homer Plessy, John Mitchell Jr., Bayard Rustin, Sarah Keys, Sue McDonald, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith-Ware, The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Riders movements (interestingly, I looked those people up without any consideration of gender, and the vast majority of them happens to be women. I wonder why?). Buses are and trains seem to be the most important place where to fight segregation. I’ve always been baffled that people seem to care more about absurd transportation rules than about lynching, and moreover, that after opposition against those stupid rules having led to the downfall of so many racist political systems (although not racism itself obviously), said racist systems keep insisting upon them. When there is strong inequality in education, income, voters’ rights, health, and plain survival, why is bus transit the hill that both civil right activists and racists are willing to die on? But I’m mostly confused that Rosa Parks’ name became synonymous with civil disobedience in segregated transportation systems, when so many black women before her had done the exact same thing.
Rosa Parks certainly is an inspiring figure, but so was everyone in the civil right movement. This movement was gathering such momentum that it’s hard to imagine that nothing else could have sparked this movement (although considering that Till’s death wasn’t enough to inspire, it’s not clear what else would have been enough to move things). Parks’ action certainly was brave, but so were those of all those people who had tried the same thing before her. Yet this episode is not called ‘Claudette’. So I guess the difference is that she was successful, and that is why everybody remembers her name?
In December 2010, a street vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire after his wares were confiscated. This sparked revolutions in several countries, leading to the deposition of dictators who had remained in power for decades, and a war in Syria that is still ongoing 7 and a half years later. Who can tell me the name of this street vendor without looking it up? This is what confuses me about the story of Rosa Parks: I don’t see why what she did caused the change, and neither why she is so famous among all the other people who have inspired historical changes.
So what was so special about this event that it took such a great importance in the history of civil rights movements?
Athreen @@@@@ 10
A good answer is at wikipedia.
@11: I believe I have read enough to understand how the events unfolded. What I’m missing is a feel for the events. Here are two excerpts from that Wikipedia page:
“Edgar Nixon [the president of the local chapter of the NAACP] intended that her arrest be a test case to allow Montgomery’s black citizens to challenge segregation on the city’s public buses. With this goal, community leaders had been waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was “above reproach“. When Colvin was arrested in March 1955, Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Parks was a good candidate because of her employment and marital status, along with her good standing in the community.”
“Rosa Parks was introduced but not asked to speak, despite a standing ovation and calls from the crowd for her to speak; she asked someone if she should say something, but they replied, “Why, you’ve said enough.””
It seems like Rosa Parks wasn’t allowed to be more than a symbol at the time, and that the black men in the civil rights movement only approved of this woman’s strength of character as long as she kept quiet and let the men talk. That all she was to them was a working, married church-goer who happened to be at the right place at the right time. What’s interesting about her life is what comes after her trial: she lost her job due to economic sanctions used against activists, so did her husband for related reasons, and they had to leave Montgomery as they couldn’t find jobs afterwards. She continued to be propped up as an icon, but never listened. Despite all that, she kept receiving death threats. She apparently wasn’t allowed to be more than a name until the mid-sixties.
I want to believe that she was more than that, but with the sexism of that time, maybe she just wasn’t allowed to rise to her full potential.
This is a profoundly different show now, much more of a drama, and much more grounded in the level of the storytelling. The stakes are smaller but more personal. And yet it’s still making use of past continuity in ways that serve the story rather than just being a wink to the viewer. It’s an interesting and effective new approach.
Still… I’ve seen this episode compared to Star Trek and Quantum Leap, and that actually concerns me a bit. I appreciate the change of pace from the Moffat era, but I don’t want Doctor Who to start feeling too much like other sci-fi and time-travel shows. I long ago got tired of “We have to fix history!” stories, and I’ve always appreciated that the Doctor generally more or less just lets history happen and doesn’t worry about the timeline ramifications (as in “Thin Ice”).
I’ve also seen people complaining that Krasko was too much of a one-dimensional or underdeveloped villain. It’s weird to me that people are saying the one-note racist killer didn’t have enough motivation, given that the primary villains in this franchise for the past 55 years have been one-note racist killers.
The music is still by Segun Akinola, but it was a much more melodic, motif-driven score this week, almost as much as a Murray Gold score, but still quite different in style. I like it. Meanwhile, playing a song over the end titles is something Doctor Who has never done before. The only previous time they didn’t use the normal end title theme was when the last episode of “Earthshock” played the titles over dead silence.
And I’m trying not to think about the fact that the Doctor’s “We have to keep history exactly on track” plan depended on the fact that they’d carelessly loaned a mobile phone to Elvis, who loaned it to Sinatra.
Meanwhile, our new Doctor is unexpectedly aggressive at times. Compared to a lot of the Doctor’s previous selves, she’s a lot more in-your-face and contemptuous toward the baddies, like when she yelled “Stop right there!” when she first saw Tzim-sha, as if she were the police.
Interesting that the episode opened with them saying the Doctor had already missed Sheffield 14 times. I guess that leaves room for novels and comics between episodes.
@10, that of course is the basic problem with the whole premise of this episode. It harks back to the Great Man, in this case Great Woman, theory of history. Ms. Parks was a leader of a movement. She was not the only leader or the originator of that movement. And far from the only member. If it hadn’t been her taking that stand somebody else would have. Ms. Parks IS a significant figure in the Civil Rights movement, she deserved the fame and honors she gained. But she was not decisive and she was far from irreplaceable.
While I love the idea of the episode, the fact that they are thwarting an evil plan through careful and smart planning, and the interaction between the Doctor and the companions; I feel like the execution fell flat. I don’t want to dismiss the importance of the issue being addressed by the episode, but it’s just not as good as the van Gogh one. I did love the fact that Rosa Parks is the star, and Martin Luther King is just a small supporting character. He deserves all the respect and praise in the world, but this time, it’s about her.
And every episode makes me love Graham more and more; but Yas and Ryan also got stuff to do.
@5 – Gordon: Yeah, that’s cool.
There was a Star Trek time travel story that Gene Roddenberry apparently wanted to make for years after TOS (despite the plot’s similarity to “City on the Edge of Forever”), where Scotty or Klingons or something prevented President Kennedy from being assassinated and messed up the timeline, with Kirk winding up meeting JFK and Kirk or Spock later forced to restore history by killing Kennedy in place of Oswald. (Trek later gave us the whale movie and First Contact instead.)
Given that the Doctor’s companion Graham is explicitly a bus driver, for about 90 percent of this episode I feared “Rosa” was going to take the same approach, and force Graham to drive the bus and play the role of James Blake ordering Parks to leave her seat and then calling the police. Which might have been a more interesting take, given the episode’s otherwise lecture-y approach to the importance of Parks in history and lack of explanation as to why this incident had to happen at that specific time instead of any of the following evenings. (As Athreeren points out @10, Rosa Park’s refusal to move wasn’t a spontaneous event, but one planned by the local activist community.)
The episode also felt like the Doctor’s sense of morality was muted to make the plot work. In how many other episodes do we see the Doctor agreeing to let her companions not only be punched, but treated as second-class citizens by the local regime? And why, given her revulsion for Krasko’s time-displacement weapon, does she say nothing when she learns that Ryan used the vile device on Krasko? (And this two episodes after she ripped into targeted train passenger Karl for pushing Tzim-Sha off the crane.)
Depressing.
I’m a black american male and long time Doctor Who fan. I got my start with Tom Baker and my end with the end of Capaldi’s first season.
As unnecessary as I felt a female Doctor was, I also thought it was my duty to give her a look. I had already quit the show and didn’t watch Capaldi’s second season (series) but here I was again.
This episode brought to mind the frustration that I have with a lot of entertainment in my country. I watch TV and movies to get the HELL AWAY from life’s problems, and socio political issues. I want to escape the bad things by slipping into a fantasy land. I DON’T want my entertainment trying to teach me about race relations, feminist girl power (hello Star Wars) how to better love gay people, or anything like that.
I have no problems with any kind of multicultural cast or inclusiveness. All of that is fine, but it shouldn’t appear to matter more than the show or movie itself. But it’s often preached up to matter more than the entertainment. Within the world of fantasy, we should be able to indulge in the fantasy.
I just want to have FUN! What the heck is so wrong with that?
Yasmin “I’m a police officer. Just starting. Not where I want to be.”
Rosa “Where is it you want to be?”
Yasmin “In charge.”
Rosa “Amen to that!”
Yay girl power! We got a girl power message and a statement on racism both in one show. Yippee! Of course she wants to be in charge.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but we all know that it’s really there to push a message.
Why can’t we just have fun without everyone trying to cram their annoying little teaching messages into everything? Why can’t we escape the daily mess of our own lives for just a little bit without someone trying to shape and mold us to their own liking?
I have boycotted many things because of this (Star Wars) and might soon be boycotting this.
Yas apparently doesn’t want to put in the work to learn her job. She wants to go straight to the top without earning it. Great message.
@16, Exactly. Parks’ act of defiance was planned. If it hadn’t worked out that evening she would have just tried again until the conditions were met. If it hadn’t been Parks somebody else would have done it. The whole premise of the episode is wrong.
I too get tired of being lectured to. I don’t enjoy the emotional manipulation involved.
@16 – jeffronicus: I was afraid of the same thing with Graham.
@17 – Brian: Science fiction appears to be the wrong genre for you.
@18 – princessroxana: Most time travel fiction hinges around the idea that historical events have to happen at the same date and time as they “did” in history. It’s related to the butterfly effect, I guess.
Maybe so, MaGnUs, but I don’t buy it.
Good, solid story, well told and well acted. My wife, who watches Who mostly because I do, but is not usually enthusiastic about it, told me later she thought this was a great episode.
@18 – princessroxana: When it comes to a non-hard SF approach like Doctor Who consistently has (it’s more fantasy, really), that’s like drinking water complaining it’s wet.
@@@@@ 22, There are limits to my suspension of disbelief. Magic technology doesn’t bother me because I know nothing about engineering. I do know something about history so magical notions here bother me.
It’s true that removing Rosa Parks’s protest might have made only a slight change in the overall history, but given what was at stake, can you blame the Doctor and friends for not wanting to take the risk? Better a known success than an unknown alternative that might or might not work out.
Besides, it’s simply a matter of respect for the person. Rosa Parks was a hero to the travelers. They would’ve wanted to preserve her achievement out of sheer sentiment if nothing else, or out of the belief that Krasko didn’t have the right to steal it from her.
@16. The British sf comedy series, RED DWARF, did a really fun take on time travel and JFK’s assassination. “Tikka To Ride” Season 7, Episode 1.
@14. I live near the site of the Woolworth’s sit-in. One point I’ve heard from a number of people involved and historians is that Greensboro was a good place for this to happen because they knew the local police would not kill them. In the same way, I imagine that having a respectable black woman as the protester was the most likely scenario for survival in Montgomery where a black man would have probably died. So, maybe, it had to be Rosa Parks.
Regarding Elvis and Las Vegas, Eleven spent some time there during the Rat Pack era and spent some “quality time” with Marilyn Monroe. So, not surprising that Elvis had a phone.
For me, this Doctor with her goofy charm lacked the gravitas to pull off this episode so I found it less than enthralling.
@25, It had to be a respectable black woman who the community would rally behind. Rosa fit the bill. No doubt there were others who would have too.
@24, It’s not the Doctor and co.’s actions I have a problem with. Of course Rosa’s accomplishment shouldn’t be taken from her. The problem is Krasko’s notion that preventing Rosa Parks from making her statement on that particular day would somehow eliminate the entire Civil Rights movement.
Of course it could just be he’s an idiot. That would explain everything
@26/roxana: Exactly. Krasko’s obviously not a rational actor if he blames all his problems on a civil-rights movement that began 5000 years earlier. His action probably wouldn’t have had the effect he hoped for. But it still could’ve been harmful in the shorter term, and it was still an assault upon Parks, in a way.
@27, Thanks, that makes it work. He can’t really change anything, except Rosa’s life and I agree she deserves to hold onto her place in history.
@17 Brian Foster.
Oh no, is there social/political views in your entertainment? WOE IS YOU. Except… the whole premise of fantasy and sci-fi is “good versus evil”. So then you kinda have to define what is good and what is evil. Lord of the rings isn’t just nine guys on a road trip to throw some tacky jewelry in a volcano for sh*ts and giggles. It has some quite strong views on oppression, slavery, war, industry and pollution, and predjuices (see: elves and dwarves, elves and humans, elves and anyone not elves and even not the right type of elves). The movies also specifically touch on the injustice of women’s roles (but I guess you skip those parts huh).
If you just wanna have FUN, then you have chosen the wrong genre. Even white boy nerdfantasy such as Ready Player One has a touch of social commentary (poverty). It’s basically built into the genre. Evil comes in many forms. Wether Star Trek or Harry Potter or the Doctor, they fight evil and right wrongs. I really don’t see how this is so hard to grasp or why you’re whining over it. Want pure entertainment with no need to think? Go watch The Hangover or some other comedy that relies on making fun of women/fat people/black people/lgbtq+ to be “entertaining”. If you haven’t grasped by now that Doctor Who is pretty strong on it’s commentary then you have the strongest blinders ever.
You sound exactly like the white boys whining about Furiosa being more badass than Max.
I think Brian’s issue is it’s getting a bit too blatant and heavy handed. The best literature doesn’t underline morals and lessons.
I guess Rosa Parks is remembered is for a similar reason as the Wright brothers are remembered.They were the first to fly a powered aeroplane, so most people don’t remember the people who almost managed it.
In the same way Rosa Parks was the person who’s arrest finally sparked change, so those who came before jsut aren’t as well known.
Anyway, I reckon there’s a bunch of British kids (the original audience for Dr Who after all), who’ll have turned round to their folks and asked questions along the lines of “why couldn’t she sit at the front of the bus?” and “did that really happen?” and hopefully learned something, which can only be a good thing.
(PS this whole episode made me think of the Bristol bus boycott)
This episode made me queasy.
I think the structure is actually pretty clever. Take a famous incident in history, then defend it against someone trying to nudge it in a different direction. It leaves the power of change firmly in the hands of the historical actors, while giving our heroes something to do.
I think it could have been handled a little better – putting the Tardis team a little more backgrounded, but you want to give Parks a chance to talk, and you want to develop these characters a bit, so you foreground them some.
What upset me was the presentation of Parks – it was less sophisticated than I’d demand from a half hour after school special targeting elementary school students. The handwaving of her prior activism was deeply upsetting. Also, and maybe this is dumb, but I hear every moment the accents are wrong. I’m from the South, I got family in that part of Alabama, and its one thing if you’re going to present the Disneyworld version of American History (like Daleks in Manhattan) but quite another when you’re hitting the civil rights movement.
I’m glad other people are responding to it well, I’m glad the show tried honestly. I’m upset it failed – and going by the reaction of all my friends who are black-while-being-Whovian, I’m not the only one who felt that way.
A slight correction, Ms. Parks received the Congressional Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Honor is restricted to the military and since the 60’s has been 90+% posthumous..
@32, for many years it was fashionable to present Parks as an innocent everywoman caught in the gears of segregation. It was only recently her activism and proactivism has been recognized.
The Doctor is fuzzy about unimportant things like when a planet is being quarantined for centuries because of a deadly virus, but she knows exactly where and when Elvis is having a concert! Also, I know that the TARDIS has a mind of her own, but the companions must be really patient and trusting to believe that the Doctor cannot get them home after 14 trips, but she has no trouble finding a particular asteroid in the asteroid belt…
“Is anyone excited? Cos I’m really excited!
– You won’t be if it’s a bomb.
– Don’t kill the vibe, Graham!”
I love Graham keeping up with the most important question about time travel: when is lunch time? And another thing I liked about him in this episode is how much useful he is as a bus driver. He studies the bus lines, he befriends local bus drivers and hear rumours from them, and he gets to drive a bus (I too considered that he might be the driver for that particular bus, but that wouldn’t make sense, as history remembers it was Blake at the wheel). So often, companions decide to travel with the Doctor because they want excitement in their lives, but Graham is happy with who he is and proud of his career as a bus driver (to be compared with Rose for instance, who in her first episode says of hersefl “I’ve got no A Levels, no job, no future”). When the Doctor asks “who’s up for a bus ride?”, only Graham’s hand rises. Would any of the segregated bus driver have described their jobs in such loving terms as Graham did?
Yaz also gets to do most of the investigative work. I don’t think there has ever been a companion who was in the police (although many worked for UNIT). I apreciated that she insisted to Ryan that being in the police didn’t mean that one had to be racist.
“Could be worth a lot!
– Nah. Not that one. Second hand, huge mileage, one careless owner”
Reminds me of Shada, in which the very ancient Pr Chronotis describes the Doctor’s TARDIS as “Type Forty, isn’t it? Yes, came out when I was a boy. That shows you how old I am.”
That scene with Ryan, Graham and James Blake was brilliant! Especially as it ended with Blake demanding of Graham that he leaves his sit: they even got him to rehearse his lines!
@35/Athreeren: “Also, I know that the TARDIS has a mind of her own, but the companions must be really patient and trusting to believe that the Doctor cannot get them home after 14 trips, but she has no trouble finding a particular asteroid in the asteroid belt…”
Maybe it took her 16 tries to find the right asteroid?
“I don’t think there has ever been a companion who was in the police”
Bernard Cribbins’s character in the second Peter Cushing Doctor Who movie was a police constable. There’s also Sara Kingdom, who was a space security officer, which is sort of a cop.
Maybe Yaz, Ryan and Graham are in no particular hurry to get back to their mundane lives.
It was very easy for me to be cynical going into this episode. Firstly, my reaction when everyone acted as if Rosa Parks was really famous was “…Who?” Despite claims that English schools name classes after her, I suspect she’s as obscure on these shores as Catherine de Medici or Madame de Pompodour. That’s not a bad thing: Educating people about eras of history they might not know about was part of the show’s original premise. (Incidentally, it seems the pre-credit sequences have gone, another old school touch.) But then we get the old Star Trek thing where an incident in a small American town is vital to the history of not just the country or even the world but the universe. Like other countries or planets didn’t tackle racism without their help. It feels a bit like an attempt to appease an American audience who may have found that Christmas 1914 stuff going over their heads. Still, I suppose that’s no sillier than claiming democracy wouldn’t exist without Magna Carta!
Secondly, it’s always a bit self-congratulatory when a show decide to “do” racism by taking its ethnically diverse cast back to a less enlightened time and tut-tutting about how ignorant our grandparents were. It’s even more distant when they also go to another country and tut-tut about how awful someone else’s grandparents were. (When the Sarah Gang went back to 50s Britain, Rani was treated as more of a novelty than a target for prejudice, which isn’t entirely unlikely. As Graham confirms, segregation was never really a thing in the UK, although that’s partly because the country wasn’t racially diverse enough for it to be an issue!) It’s only the scene of Ryan and Yas discussing their experiences of prejudice in 21st century Britain that stop it seeming like yesterday’s issue which was solved long ago. (Plus the inclusion of future racist Krasko, who doesn’t really fit the way the future is usually depicted in Doctor Who but let’s go with it.)
The first part is tonally awkward, with unflinching portrayals of the ugliness of racism mixed in with the Doctor running around with a machine that goes beep being cute and eccentric. As a result, the episode seems to morph halfway through into a fun caper keeping history on track. Early on, there’s a real feeling that if Ryan looked at people wrong, they’d string him up from a tree and no-one would stop him. Later, the locals seem more like figures of fun, with the Doctor and Graham running rings round the police officer and the increasingly befuddled Blake being pushed around by both sides without realising he’s being set up to be history’s fall guy. But when the moment of Rosa’s arrest comes, the use of overpowering I-assume-period music undermines it more than anything. Is it meant to be a tragic moment or a heroic one? Are we meant to be outraged at what’s being done to her or cheer her for making a stand and showing up the corruption of the system? Maybe both, but it feels like the music was saying “Okay, kids, you should be in floods of tears at this moment”, when we should have been allowed to make up our own minds.
Not sure how realistic the reaction to Yasmin is? The scene at the diner felt right: No-one’s quite sure what she is, but they know she’s not one of the privileged class. But would they really let her sit in the White section of the bus when her skin’s darker than Rosa’s, as if they’ve gone “Hmm, you don’t look like you’re descended from slaves so you’re okay”? Was it to make her more involved in crowding the bus (which could easily have been done with just the Doctor and Graham)? Was it to isolate Ryan further? Also, can’t help wondering if all these villains who get teleported to parts unknown at the end are meeting up somewhere to plot revenge!
And did they have to make the title only one letter different from the new series’ first episode? It’s The Seeds of Death and The Seeds of Doom all over again…
“Secondly, it’s always a bit self-congratulatory when a show decide to “do” racism by taking its ethnically diverse cast back to a less enlightened time and tut-tutting about how ignorant our grandparents were.”
Maybe I’m cynical, but I wondered if Yas was telling the truth about not stopping black people more often.
@38/cap-mjb: “(Plus the inclusion of future racist Krasko, who doesn’t really fit the way the future is usually depicted in Doctor Who but let’s go with it.)”
Until the last few years, it seemed to a lot of Americans and Europeans that the old racist and fascist movements were dying relics and that those who still clung to those ideologies were a tiny fringe that would soon go extinct. After President Obama was elected in 2008, I read articles saying that the culture wars were over and we’d entered a post-racial age. So it’s entirely possible for a culture in a given era to appear totally enlightened and egalitarian, yet still to have a racist fringe tucked away somewhere.
“the use of overpowering I-assume-period music”
No, “Rise Up” is a 2015 song performed by Andra Day. Apparently it’s been adopted by Black Lives Matter as their unofficial anthem.
@35 – Athrereen: Wait, Amy was a cop… oh, wait, no. :)
@38 – cap-mjb: No one is setting up Blake to be anything. He did what he did on his own, yes, saddled with the prejudices of his era, and the “duty” of his post, but still.
@40, IMO there will always be people who bolster their justfiably low self-esteem by hating somebody different. Human nature doesn’t change. The best we can do is keep those people and their attitudes under control.
@38, Yes with all due respect for Parks and the Civil Rights movement their impact was on America. Other people were fighting similar battles elswhere and the cumulative effect was certainly world wide but narrowing the entire mass movement down to Rosa Parks only works if we assume Krasko is full of wild blueberries, which is perfectly probable. It is also perfect probable that the Doctor would squee over Rosa, she’s always admired brave people who do the right thing, and work like heck to save Rosa’s future as a Civil Rights leader. But implying that the entire Civil Rights movement and future equality all hinge on this one incident is ridiculous. And slightly patronizing if you ask me.
@38:”Plus the inclusion of future racist Krasko, who doesn’t really fit the way the future is usually depicted in Doctor Who“
Our first view of the future in new Who was Lady Cassandra, the self-proclaimed last pure human. Racism is still a thing in 5,000,000,000, so why not in 50,000?
@43/Athreeren: Fiction often tends to assume that people in the future (or alternate presents) who are racist toward aliens or mutants or robots or whatever have overcome the more traditional forms of human-on-human racism. Indeed, it’s quite common to cast minority actors as the fantasy-racists, e.g. Will Smith as the robot-hating lead in I, Robot, or The Gifted‘s mutant-hunting Agent Turner, or Supergirl‘s alien-hating Hank Henshaw.
But it’s probably more realistic that people who hate aliens might also hate different kinds of human. Some recent Star Wars productions have implied that about the Empire — in Rebels in particular, the Rebellion is multispecies and its human characters are ethnically diverse, but the Imperial characters are pretty much all white humans other than Thrawn.
Barry B. Longyear wrote an Alien Nation tie-in novel called Slag Like Me (a play on Black Like Me and the racial slur for the aliens in that series) in which a human man married to an alien woman was murdered, and what was believed to be a hate crime motivated by bigotry against aliens turned out to be because the killer perceived the aliens as white and the human victim as part-black. So the killer was more angry about whites and blacks mixing than humans and aliens, as long as the aliens looked white. It was an interesting subversion of the series’s usual sci-fi racism allegories, and perhaps a veiled commentary on the fact that the show overwhelmingly cast white actors to play the racial minority characters in its allegory.
I was a child of that time, in a place not unlike that one, and looking back I have deep regrets for my ignorance and lack of empathy. I found this episode effective and moving, and all the more relevant for recent developments in this country.
ETA: as an adult Rosa Parks has been one of my heroes.
@40/CLB: “No, “Rise Up” is a 2015 song performed by Andra Day. Apparently it’s been adopted by Black Lives Matter as their unofficial anthem.”
Really? Wow, that’s even more inappropriate than I thought, especially with the way they replay it over the end credits just in case we missed it the first time. (Thankfully, the BBC had the sense to talk over it so it was hard to tell.) With the move from Saturday to Sunday, it increasingly feels like Doctor Who is no longer seen as a family show. I’m not entirely sure what they do see it as.
@41/MaGnUs: “No one is setting up Blake to be anything. He did what he did on his own, yes, saddled with the prejudices of his era, and the “duty” of his post, but still.”
They manoeuvre him onto the bus, to the point of driving it up to him when he’s walking home and insisting he drive it on his day off. They make sure Rosa gets on the bus. They make sure that the allocated white seats are full so he’s required to make room for more. Yes, his choices are his own, but they do everything they can to get him into that position knowing how he’ll react. That definitely qualifies as “setting him up” in my book!
@46/cap-mjb: “Inappropriate?” It’s hardly unprecedented for a modern pop song to be used to score a scene set in the past. Tons of shows and movies have been doing it for decades. (And some, like Killjoys, use modern songs to score scenes set in the distant future.) Unless you’re saying that it’s somehow inappropriate to use a song associated with the civil rights movement for a historical event key to the civil rights movement, and I can’t parse that at all.
And yes, they maneuver Blake into the situation, but obviously it’s to put him where he was supposed to be before Krasko messed up history, so what is your point? You can’t blame them for it, they were just fixing what Krasko broke. Their interventions were to cancel out his interventions, nothing more. You might as well say Marty McFly set up his parents to meet and fall in love. Obviously he did, but it was in order to restore the outcome of the original, unaltered history where they did it spontaneously.
@46/CLB: Inappropriate in the sense of…why the heck would they do that, I guess. I mean, do they not trust their composer to come up with emotive music on his own, instead of making a rare use of non-didatic pop music to make a rather laboured political point in the middle of a series about a quirky alien in colourful clothes who travels around in a police box? I mean, it leaves me seriously worried about the future of the show that instead of making family viewing they’re trying to turn it into some overly-worthy Sunday night drama, at a time when young children will likely have been sent to bed because they’ve got school in the morning. Chibnall’s banged on about “Well, no-one watches television live these days” but it’s hard to imagine an eight-year-old scouring iPlayer, coming across a programme description that says “The Doctor and friends meet a 1950s civil rights activist” and pressing Play. And if the programme isn’t being made for them to watch, that’s our future audience gone.
And my point was…exactly that, I guess. That they were setting Blake up to play the part he’s supposed to play in history which is going to leave him vilified for decades to come and bring about the end of the segregation he was trying to enforce. And he didn’t realise.
@48/cap-mjb: “I mean, do they not trust their composer to come up with emotive music on his own, instead of making a rare use of non-didatic pop music to make a rather laboured political point in the middle of a series about a quirky alien in colourful clothes who travels around in a police box?”
Evidently you’re not familiar with how music spotting works. The composer works with the director on deciding what music to use on which scenes, including the selection of pop songs. So both composer Segun Akinola and director Mark Tonderai must have considered the song appropriate.
And no, they weren’t “setting Blake up,” they were correcting Krasko’s damage. It’s dishonest to pretend Krasko isn’t part of the equation.
I must admit my feelings of this episode are tinged with a bit of disappointment as, from the early scenes, I was really hoping the antagonist would turn out to be The Meddling Monk, and the suitcase would turn out to be a TARDIS. (In the-scenario-in-my-head he’d not be interfering with the Rosa Parks story to be racist, but from some misguided notion of improving history maybe by delaying progress on racial equality until you get a ‘sea change’ moment). Instead it turns out to be Future Racist Time Traveller, which was a bit boring. Yes, he doesn’t deserve/need much more development beyond ‘racist’ if that’s what he is but I was hoping he’d be something other than that (especially because, even if not the Monk, the notion of a recurring time travelling antagonist who specifically can’t kill is a good one for the show, but I don’t want recurring RACIST time travelling antagonist who can’t kill).
The episode otherwise was okay, save for a few off moments, and the fact that it felt a bit too rushed in pace… too many plot points to get through and not much time. I also would have liked a “Yes, if Rosa didn’t do this, it might not change history much on the whole, somebody else would probably, eventually, have done something else that made a difference… but each person choosing to stand up STILL matters, they STILL made a difficult choice and if nothing else, made things better for people FASTER, and we’re going to protect that.” type speech but it was too rushed for that.
Also, a little off-topic but I’m getting really annoyed by Graham’s “will he ever call me grandad?!” moaning. I feel like smacking him every time. You married Ryan’s grandmother… three years ago. He’s an adult. You’re not his grand-dad. I especially don’t like that I feel like the show is building up to a big end-season moment where Ryan finally calls him that. Because it doesn’t feel real. I’ve got a stepfather who’s married to my mother for more than 20 years. Great guy. I still call him by his first name. (That’s not to say that step-relations can’t occasionally be very close and call them by the family honorifics, but that’s not the thing you force or EXPECT like Graham seems to and eventually paying it off only makes it worse).
Hey, poor Graham perhaps never had kids of his own, and just wishes he did.
@50/ghostly1, yeah, I’m with you on that. My father remarried some number of years ago, and while the woman he married is a wonderful person, she’s not my mom or step-mom, as I was an adult when they remarried. I’ve never heard from her that she expects or even hopes that one day my sister and I would call her that. Now, she does have children of her own from a former marriage, so maybe what MaGnUs says is correct, that Graham never had children/grandchildren of his own and is just looking for that.
Remember Grace kept reminding Ryan to refer to Graham as Granddad. This is not only Graham’s wishes.
Maybe Grace felt Ryan needed a solid male role model as opposed to his feckless father. Graham night be pressing this because he knows it was important to Grace.
@54 – I really hope the show doesn’t take the route of having a black woman choose a white man as role model for her grandson because the father is write with the stereotype of the bad/absent black man on the black family.
I enjoyed the episode but was disappointed that they made it seems like a spur-of-the-moment decision for her to refuse instead of the calculated and planned event it actually was. There were huge amounts of people working to make that happen and I think that truth is more impactful than the “happy accident” version of she happened to refuse that day and just happened to be made the icon.
As I said, for decades ‘happy accident’ was the official version of the event. Rosa’s role was to be innocent, respectable woman bullied by whites and their rules and she played along. It wasn’t until years later that it was admitted that it was a planned protest and she was backed by an organization. I personally don’t think that reality minimizes her all, if anything it makes her look more proactive.
@55, I would agree with you but that particular stereotype does keep appearing. Remember Clyde also has an absent Dad.
I have noticed that a number of shows have included messaging about white [heterosexual male] supremacy. This is appropriate. It was the normalizing of gay people on tv that led to the push for changes in laws that were discriminatory. We need more as the backlash to non-discrimination increases.
For reasons already discussed and commented above, this was a very good Who episode, one which I think might be selected for an award next year.
@29 You are not the gatekeeper for the genre. People can enjoy Sci Fi for whatever reason they like. There’s no need to personally insult or mock someone for liking something different than you. You are not the better person for it.
“I really don’t see how this is so hard to grasp or why you’re whining over it.”
Personally I thought the episode was a bit boring – I liked the smaller scale of the changes they were fighting, it makes the struggle a bit more relatable. But the villain was so badly motivated he came across as mustache twirling evil just for the sake of it. Even the Daleks have the notion of their innate superiority driving them to explain their hostility. This guy just picked this time as ‘when things changed’ and we never get any understanding of what drives him.
And that pushes the whole thing into a preaching to the choir morality lesson which undermines the good work the episode does do of showing, not telling, how pervasive the racist attitudes were and the effects they had.
It also is pandering a little to the American audience. Why didn’t Krasko sabotage the Abolitionist movement for instance? Causing the then largest empire the world had known to not choose to end slavery would arguably have a bigger impact if that was what he was after. Much as Rosa Parks was an important person for doing what she did it isn’t like she was the only person capable of doing it – as commentors above have pointed out other people had been doing similar things too at the time. I’d liked to see at least some explanation for why this particular point in history is so important to Krasko.
You can handwave it away as Krasko being an idiot but this is an idiot capable of murdering a lot of people, using a variety of time manipulation technology and also concocting in the first place plus adjusting his plan to what the Doctor & friends were doing. It plays into the comforting trope that racism is just done by stupid people for stupid reasons when the truth is sadly more complicated than that.
Finally I hope Ryan gets some blowback for using the time manipulator weapon on Krasko. The Doctor did lecture him on why she hates guns last episode, it is inconsistent for her character to *not* gig Ryan for using a gun again to try and solve things this time. Even as it is a consistent character trait for Ryan to not get the message with just one lesson.
@61/Philip Banks: I’m not sure a time displacement device counts as a gun. I mean, it basically does what the TARDIS does, just to somebody outside it rather than inside it.
@61 – Philip: What “largest empire the world had known”?
“Largest empire the world has known”? At the time of the US civil war, the sun never set on the British Empire.
Anyone think G.F.B. could be the Great Face of Boe?
@66, that makes a serious amount of sense. Jack was fond of gadgets…
@62/CLB, isn’t this what the Weeping Angels do, though? Zap people to a different time to feed on their “potential time energy” (or whatever the wording of it was)?
@67/BonHed: Yes, but trapping people in different times is also a tactic the Doctor has used on occasion to vanquish foes, e.g. the Meddling Monk and Sutekh. Even in the case of the Angels, it’s a fairly benevolent way to dispatch someone, because they still have a chance to live out a full and rewarding life wherever they end up, like Amy and Rory did.
Besides, the question I was addressing wasn’t about the morality of using the device, merely over whether it was valid to use the word “gun” to characterize the device. I don’t believe anyone in the episode described it that way.
@18: Yas says she wants to be in charge. What’s wrong with that? In her first scene, she’s shown putting in the effort, resolving a tense situation peacefully. The fact that she would like advancement doesn’t mean she expects to skip ahead, just that she hopes her efforts will be rewarded, eventually.
Okay, forget what I said in my last comment… I just watched the episode again, and the Doctor does call the device a “temporal displacement weapon” and expresses a strong dislike for it, calling it very nasty and “deadly,” even though it doesn’t seem to kill.
Seeing it again also clarified something I was unsure of — why they snuck Ryan and Yaz into a motel room instead of just going back to the TARDIS. The Doctor explained that Krasko would be watching the TARDIS and she didn’t want him able to track their movements.
The fact that Krasko recognized the TARDIS for what it was tells me he might have known full well who was opposing his efforts. And that leaves me wondering about how he ended up in Stormcage for that mass murder in the first place.
@71/Bytowner: He knew it was a Time Lord, yes, but since Gallifrey is back in play in the series now, he didn’t necessarily know it was the Doctor. Historically, in the classic series, the Time Lords were essentially time police, intervening to prevent others’ use of time travel and protect the integrity of the timeline.
#72/ChristopherLBennett: But how many Time Lords have TARDISes whose chameleon circuits are stuck so that they look like an English police box even when they materialize in the American South (much less in other centuries or on other planets)?
@73/Beyond the Fringefan: I doubt Krasko knew enough about 20th-century Earth history to know that English police boxes were out of place in Alabama, and he certainly had no way of knowing what it would look like in any other setting, because he’s a character within the show, not a viewer of the show. He presumably just knew the box was generating artron energy but didn’t look like a timeship, therefore it was probably a timeship with a camouflage system, therefore it might be a TARDIS.
“White supremacists don’t deserve our sympathies or our narrative attention, so the fact that Krasko feels like a cartoon, that he gets little explanations surrounding his beliefs and history seems exactly right. His complexities are irrelevant, should he have any at all. “
That is EXACTLY WRONG.
I realize it feels right to punch the villain, but having any cardboard characters is lazy story telling and, in this case, inexcusably preachy. Yes, we can all agree that white supremacy is wrong. We didn’t need Doctor Who to teach us that. But it very much matters how people become white supremacists, because understanding that is the first step in making it diminish in society.
This and the Doctor’s whiteboard history lesson were the two main things, among many smaller ones, that made this episode seem like a cartoon outline for an episode to be written later. Having a good message does not by itself make it good drama.
@75 – Most racists don’t have any “good” reason to be racist, they just are. There is no reason for Krasko to have any more “reason” for his racism than there is for all of the white people in Montgomery. Or all the white people of the US, both then and today. You can’t escape the effects of systemic racism in our culture, you can only do your best to watch for it in yourself and around you, and address problems as they come to you.
Pay too much attention to the “reasons” white people have for being racist, and you wind up erasing Black people and other people of color from their own stories. It becomes a story about white people’s anger, or white people’s redemption, etc.
It doesn’t matter, at all, how the waitress felt about telling customers to leave, or how a white bus driver felt about making black people move seats. They did it, and it was racist and harmed people, and it doesn’t matter if they did so with regret, or with joy, or just without thinking.
The Doctor appears as a white woman, and she sat in the front of the bus, and because she sat, Rosa had to move. And that’s the Doctor being complicit with racism by being able to sit. If she tried to sit in the back, out of ignorance or solidarity or anything else, she’d disrupt the system, and the black people would be forced to move, as Rosa pointed out.
Kraske wasn’t the villain of this story. He was just the excuse for the TARDIS to land. The villain of the story was white racist society.
That is very well put. Thank you.
What I find most disturbing, is that if Krasko was a prisoner of the storm cage in the 52nd Century, and he was so utterly convinced that abolishing segregation is where everything went wrong. That means there is enough evidence (from his insane point of view at least) over the previous 3,200 years years of recorded history to justify his beliefs.
It’s not Alien Invaders, Space Viruses, Killer Robots, Nuclear War, or the brain leeching power of the Emoji Language Virus that left Earth and Humanity in ruins… It’s black people that need to be stopped to make things the way they should be.
I’m disappointed that the episode made the villain such a one dimensional character that they ended up arguing for segregation almost as much as they were arguing against it.
@78/R.O.Y.: That doesn’t follow, because racists’ beliefs are never rooted in accurate facts. Rather, they distort and fabricate facts to fit what they want to believe. And their rhetoric often directly contradicts historical fact. For instance, white supremacists persist in claiming that Native Americans had no civilization before Europeans came, despite the abundant evidence of sophisticated civilizations that’s emerged over the past several decades. They also buy into false beliefs about Jews that have been known for generations to be anti-Semitic hoaxes. People like that don’t care about objective truth or reality; rather, they want to pretend that reality conforms to their twisted worldviews. So there is no way in which Krasko’s beliefs about history can be taken as valid evidence of how actual history has unfolded.
As I and others complained repeatedly picking on Rosa Park’s protest as the key to the whole civil rights movement was so obviously flawed as to derail the entire concept UNLESS you accept that Krasko is an idiot and delusional.
Martin Luther King became involved in the civil rights movement after Rosa Parks was arrested, and because she was arrested. He emerged as a leader because he was a local minister who was one of many black ministers who announced the Montgomery bus boycott at church services on Sunday.
I was sorry to see the episode blur over this in favour of having Reverend King attend Rosa Park’s branch meeting of NAACP. Might have been difficult to work that into the timeline of the episode, I suppose.
There are episodes that bounce right off it (“The Shakespeare Code”)
Historically accurate: read Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann. Racism-as-we-know-it was inspired by the African slave trade, which didn’t get going til well after Queen Elizabeth’s (and Shakespeare’s) deaths.
18: You have absolutely no reason to assume that because Yas is ambitious and intends to rise through the police force to become a Chief Constable, that she’s not prepared to work for that. (Granted at the moment she’s off seeing the universe with the Doctor, but we know the Doctor will be getting her back to Sheffield and work at some point. Probably.)