Onward to "Rosa".
Spoiler: show
First off, I just want to say that Whitaker continues to improve as the Doctor. She felt really solid in this episode -- in particular, I loved her giddy excitement over Space Klansman's weird suitcase. And Vinette Robinson is great as Rosa Parks, though I can't go any further into her performance than "great" as I'm typing this up at a very late hour and want to get all of my thoughts out before I collapse.
Now. This episode's about Jim Crow-era racism, and judging by the quality of the season so far and Doctor Who's previous attempts to tackle racism in recent years, I wasn't confident at all that it would be any good one way or the other. Credit where credit is due: for all the problems I have with this episode, this feels like a pretty potent picture of my country just a scant sixty-three years ago, and it doesn't too often pander for political relevance. A lot of the displays of overt racism were predictable and not all that compelling to me, but they showcased it and they made it feel as grim and disgusting as it should be. It's laid on a little too thick at times, but this episode has a very clear educational bent like old-ass bits of Classic Who, and I can imagine very young kids who don't know anything about this stuff getting something important out of it. And that's good. That's really, genuinely good.
But I will always champion this: something being "important" doesn't automatically mean it's good work. And when I say that, I'm trying my best to ignore my usual displeasure at all of the lunatics I've seen in reviews and forums preaching that this is a unique and bold episode full of issues that no other time travel show has ever tried to tackle before -- fuck off with that, have y'all ever watched a time travel show? Have y'all ever watched PREVIOUS EPISODES OF THIS SHOW? Blech. Anyway. To the nitty-gritty of the ep. As Marc covers, the plot here was pretty thin gruel and not much actually happens, so I'm bouncing around as my notes go.
To start, it really stuck in my craw how everyone seemed to constantly forget where -- and when -- they were. From the minute the Doctor said they'd landed in a Southern state in 1955, Ryan (and to a slightly lesser extent, Yaz) should've been on eggshells. I just don't buy that two people who have experienced racism in the modern day would be so cavalier about walking around and interacting with white people there and then. And then there are multiple times where Ryan is entrusted with an important job someone else could reasonably accomplish, even though it's already been clearly demonstrated that his skin color makes him a big flashing target, but no one ever brings up how dangerous it is -- the closest we get is the Doctor telling him urgently to "be careful" at one point. It actively sabotages the atmosphere of danger that should've been building, and it's one of the main reasons why I was never immersed.
I made a note of something that's entirely personal, but still bugs me. I didn't care for the invocation of Emmett Till's murder and then just having it brushed off with "they found his body in the river". This is a family show and this episode was, again, clearly meant for younger viewers, but I don't feel comfortable with how underplayed it is. What was done to Till was one of the highest atrocities of the Jim Crow era, and learning about it in my youth was one of the first times I felt genuine shame for my country. Any adult viewing the episode should know that Till was savagely beaten, mutilated, secured to a wagon wheel with barbed wire, etc, etc, fucking etc, all before getting shot and dumped like an animal -- but it doesn't feel like the people in the show's world know that. It just... irks me a little. Moving on.
It was pretty weird to me that Ryan spent much of the first part of the episode getting the history of racism and Civil Rights explained to him, while the elderly white Graham was consistently the most knowledgable and visibly disgusted by it. The show does justify the latter, admittedly, and part of the reason I don't buy much about Ryan is that Tosin Cole's performance still isn't making much of an impact for me. And don't get me wrong, I am glad they didn't go the most predictable routes with each companion in this setting. But it's still an odd thing that keeps popping up throughout the episode.
But now for one of the biggest problems: Chibnall is batting three for three on shitty villains working inside thin, narratively unsound stories. Krasko, time-traveling bigot fuckhead extraordinaire, is a boring thug whom I was never able to take seriously (and not just because he looks so much like Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia trying to be cool). He has no personality and no unique gimmick, and his casual mention that he killed 2,000 people to get incarcerated doesn't make him sound dangerous, it makes him sound forced and unbelievable; you can't just have your random bad guy be personally responsible for a body count worth 2/3rds of 9/11 and have that be a tossed-off detail that's never elaborated on.
But worst of all is that he's a white supremacist from so many centuries into the future. This actively pisses me off, because the idea that we'll still be fighting the same old racial divisions well into a time of mingling with actual aliens strikes me as so unbelievable, ill-thought out, simple-minded, and plain pandering that his every appearance took me right out of it. And that's just from a perspective of pure logic, not how badly it grinds up against my optimistic worldview for the space-faring future. It feels like they just wanted to see what would happen if a racist bastard got his hands on a time machine, but would it not have been much simpler to just have some modern-day skinhead fumble his way into possession of alien tech?
Probably the thing I liked most about this episode was that unlike the previous two, it's full of lovely little character moments to make up for the paper-thin plot. Yaz and Ryan sitting behind the dumpster and chatting about the discrimination they face in the present somehow doesn't feel nearly as unnatural or pandering as Klansko, and Yaz's brief monologue on the bus about whether she's expected to sit in the White or Colored section finally gave Yaz something meaningful to do. And in the climax, my heart nearly broke for Graham when he was forced to be the random white man who got Rosa kicked off the bus, after a whole episode spent establishing how passionate he is about the subject. The last one is genuinely the most creative thing to come out of these first three episodes combined, which is great for the moment and a bad tiding for the series.
The group's separate plans to counter Krasko's manipulation amused me at first, but I'm with Marc in that they dragged on to the point of tedious absurdity. I did appreciate Blake's escalating frustration and confusion at seeing Graham popping up everywhere, but that ultimately didn't go anywhere. And after just watching this video today, it irritated me to see Chibnall once again relying on a ticking countdown to juice the story with tension, albeit this time not a completely visible one. Let's see just how many times he does that over the course of his tenure.
Back to Krasko, and to what might be the thing I most hate about this ep. Ryan deals with Krasko not with words or smarts, but by using his own time-displacement gun against him and stranding him in what we can only assume to be prehistory. There are many problems with this, but I'll boil down my biggest ones.
1) Just like Tim Shaw, it technically leaves him open to reappearing if Chibnall just can't get enough of the guy. The show has bullshitted its way out of much harsher fates for characters than merely being flashed offscreen to a date Ryan can only estimate, and I obviously don't want him to pollute any further stories.
2) Sending a time manipulating villain way back in time is just a logical bad move, no? Yes, he'll almost certainly die if he doesn't bullshit his way out, but who's to say he couldn't vengefully go around stomping on as many butterflies as he can in hopes of dramatically altering the future? He has the convenient neural implant stopping him from killing a human being should he encounter their prehistoric ancestor, but his mere presence could and should be fundamentally damaging to the proper flow of history. Unless he was sent so far back that Earth hadn't even evolved flora or fauna yet, which... jeez, Ryan.
3) Most pressingly, the Doctor warned Ryan not to mess with the time gun, but then he went and did it anyway, and when he told the Doctor, she might as well have just laughed it off. What Ryan did was tremendously unethical, tantamount to murder, even for someone as loathsome as Krasko. And given that the Doctor previously lost Amy and Rory to exactly this sort of sudden forced time displacement, shouldn't she be even more furious with him? Doesn't this breach every code of ethics she has?
This last one is somehow a problem that's haunted all three episodes so far, and I can't ignore it. There's a hypocrisy in these characters regarding violence and its implementation, enabled by implausibly lazy writing that shouldn't have made it past the first drafts of any of these stories. The Doctor uses Tim Shaw's DNA bombs against him in a move that very well could melt him to death, and at the very least causes him excruciating pain, and then immediately gets pissed at the guy who punts Shaw off the crane for being unnecessarily violent. She dramatically chides Ryan for using a gun on the robots instead of solving the problem with his brain, and then solves the problem of the evil blankets by blowing them all up with acetylene. Now she makes a big show of telling Ryan how deadly and horrible the time gun is and that he should absolutely never use it, and then he goes and uses it -- condemning a man to death -- and it's accepted as a perfectly reasonable solution. This is unacceptable writing. I'm not sure Chibnall even gets the Doctor's code or beliefs beyond the most basic surface level.
Blech. Anyhow, the episode closes on Parks's protest and arrest, followed by a nice little educational epilogue for the children, and then a corny but I guess fine shot of the asteroid named after Parks. All good. What is not fine is the choice to back Parks's arrest to the insipid and overplayed inspiro-pop ballad "Rise Up", instead of, say, an actual protest song from the period. It's pandering shit, but it's not the worst pandering shit. It's just deeply annoying and made me feel like an old man waving my cane at the hip young kids.
The next episode is about spiiiiiideeeeeers! Woooowwwowowowoowowooooooo spooky! Then again, I'm a serious arachnophobic, so maybe it'll work on me.
Now. This episode's about Jim Crow-era racism, and judging by the quality of the season so far and Doctor Who's previous attempts to tackle racism in recent years, I wasn't confident at all that it would be any good one way or the other. Credit where credit is due: for all the problems I have with this episode, this feels like a pretty potent picture of my country just a scant sixty-three years ago, and it doesn't too often pander for political relevance. A lot of the displays of overt racism were predictable and not all that compelling to me, but they showcased it and they made it feel as grim and disgusting as it should be. It's laid on a little too thick at times, but this episode has a very clear educational bent like old-ass bits of Classic Who, and I can imagine very young kids who don't know anything about this stuff getting something important out of it. And that's good. That's really, genuinely good.
But I will always champion this: something being "important" doesn't automatically mean it's good work. And when I say that, I'm trying my best to ignore my usual displeasure at all of the lunatics I've seen in reviews and forums preaching that this is a unique and bold episode full of issues that no other time travel show has ever tried to tackle before -- fuck off with that, have y'all ever watched a time travel show? Have y'all ever watched PREVIOUS EPISODES OF THIS SHOW? Blech. Anyway. To the nitty-gritty of the ep. As Marc covers, the plot here was pretty thin gruel and not much actually happens, so I'm bouncing around as my notes go.
To start, it really stuck in my craw how everyone seemed to constantly forget where -- and when -- they were. From the minute the Doctor said they'd landed in a Southern state in 1955, Ryan (and to a slightly lesser extent, Yaz) should've been on eggshells. I just don't buy that two people who have experienced racism in the modern day would be so cavalier about walking around and interacting with white people there and then. And then there are multiple times where Ryan is entrusted with an important job someone else could reasonably accomplish, even though it's already been clearly demonstrated that his skin color makes him a big flashing target, but no one ever brings up how dangerous it is -- the closest we get is the Doctor telling him urgently to "be careful" at one point. It actively sabotages the atmosphere of danger that should've been building, and it's one of the main reasons why I was never immersed.
I made a note of something that's entirely personal, but still bugs me. I didn't care for the invocation of Emmett Till's murder and then just having it brushed off with "they found his body in the river". This is a family show and this episode was, again, clearly meant for younger viewers, but I don't feel comfortable with how underplayed it is. What was done to Till was one of the highest atrocities of the Jim Crow era, and learning about it in my youth was one of the first times I felt genuine shame for my country. Any adult viewing the episode should know that Till was savagely beaten, mutilated, secured to a wagon wheel with barbed wire, etc, etc, fucking etc, all before getting shot and dumped like an animal -- but it doesn't feel like the people in the show's world know that. It just... irks me a little. Moving on.
It was pretty weird to me that Ryan spent much of the first part of the episode getting the history of racism and Civil Rights explained to him, while the elderly white Graham was consistently the most knowledgable and visibly disgusted by it. The show does justify the latter, admittedly, and part of the reason I don't buy much about Ryan is that Tosin Cole's performance still isn't making much of an impact for me. And don't get me wrong, I am glad they didn't go the most predictable routes with each companion in this setting. But it's still an odd thing that keeps popping up throughout the episode.
But now for one of the biggest problems: Chibnall is batting three for three on shitty villains working inside thin, narratively unsound stories. Krasko, time-traveling bigot fuckhead extraordinaire, is a boring thug whom I was never able to take seriously (and not just because he looks so much like Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia trying to be cool). He has no personality and no unique gimmick, and his casual mention that he killed 2,000 people to get incarcerated doesn't make him sound dangerous, it makes him sound forced and unbelievable; you can't just have your random bad guy be personally responsible for a body count worth 2/3rds of 9/11 and have that be a tossed-off detail that's never elaborated on.
But worst of all is that he's a white supremacist from so many centuries into the future. This actively pisses me off, because the idea that we'll still be fighting the same old racial divisions well into a time of mingling with actual aliens strikes me as so unbelievable, ill-thought out, simple-minded, and plain pandering that his every appearance took me right out of it. And that's just from a perspective of pure logic, not how badly it grinds up against my optimistic worldview for the space-faring future. It feels like they just wanted to see what would happen if a racist bastard got his hands on a time machine, but would it not have been much simpler to just have some modern-day skinhead fumble his way into possession of alien tech?
Probably the thing I liked most about this episode was that unlike the previous two, it's full of lovely little character moments to make up for the paper-thin plot. Yaz and Ryan sitting behind the dumpster and chatting about the discrimination they face in the present somehow doesn't feel nearly as unnatural or pandering as Klansko, and Yaz's brief monologue on the bus about whether she's expected to sit in the White or Colored section finally gave Yaz something meaningful to do. And in the climax, my heart nearly broke for Graham when he was forced to be the random white man who got Rosa kicked off the bus, after a whole episode spent establishing how passionate he is about the subject. The last one is genuinely the most creative thing to come out of these first three episodes combined, which is great for the moment and a bad tiding for the series.
The group's separate plans to counter Krasko's manipulation amused me at first, but I'm with Marc in that they dragged on to the point of tedious absurdity. I did appreciate Blake's escalating frustration and confusion at seeing Graham popping up everywhere, but that ultimately didn't go anywhere. And after just watching this video today, it irritated me to see Chibnall once again relying on a ticking countdown to juice the story with tension, albeit this time not a completely visible one. Let's see just how many times he does that over the course of his tenure.
Back to Krasko, and to what might be the thing I most hate about this ep. Ryan deals with Krasko not with words or smarts, but by using his own time-displacement gun against him and stranding him in what we can only assume to be prehistory. There are many problems with this, but I'll boil down my biggest ones.
1) Just like Tim Shaw, it technically leaves him open to reappearing if Chibnall just can't get enough of the guy. The show has bullshitted its way out of much harsher fates for characters than merely being flashed offscreen to a date Ryan can only estimate, and I obviously don't want him to pollute any further stories.
2) Sending a time manipulating villain way back in time is just a logical bad move, no? Yes, he'll almost certainly die if he doesn't bullshit his way out, but who's to say he couldn't vengefully go around stomping on as many butterflies as he can in hopes of dramatically altering the future? He has the convenient neural implant stopping him from killing a human being should he encounter their prehistoric ancestor, but his mere presence could and should be fundamentally damaging to the proper flow of history. Unless he was sent so far back that Earth hadn't even evolved flora or fauna yet, which... jeez, Ryan.
3) Most pressingly, the Doctor warned Ryan not to mess with the time gun, but then he went and did it anyway, and when he told the Doctor, she might as well have just laughed it off. What Ryan did was tremendously unethical, tantamount to murder, even for someone as loathsome as Krasko. And given that the Doctor previously lost Amy and Rory to exactly this sort of sudden forced time displacement, shouldn't she be even more furious with him? Doesn't this breach every code of ethics she has?
This last one is somehow a problem that's haunted all three episodes so far, and I can't ignore it. There's a hypocrisy in these characters regarding violence and its implementation, enabled by implausibly lazy writing that shouldn't have made it past the first drafts of any of these stories. The Doctor uses Tim Shaw's DNA bombs against him in a move that very well could melt him to death, and at the very least causes him excruciating pain, and then immediately gets pissed at the guy who punts Shaw off the crane for being unnecessarily violent. She dramatically chides Ryan for using a gun on the robots instead of solving the problem with his brain, and then solves the problem of the evil blankets by blowing them all up with acetylene. Now she makes a big show of telling Ryan how deadly and horrible the time gun is and that he should absolutely never use it, and then he goes and uses it -- condemning a man to death -- and it's accepted as a perfectly reasonable solution. This is unacceptable writing. I'm not sure Chibnall even gets the Doctor's code or beliefs beyond the most basic surface level.
Blech. Anyhow, the episode closes on Parks's protest and arrest, followed by a nice little educational epilogue for the children, and then a corny but I guess fine shot of the asteroid named after Parks. All good. What is not fine is the choice to back Parks's arrest to the insipid and overplayed inspiro-pop ballad "Rise Up", instead of, say, an actual protest song from the period. It's pandering shit, but it's not the worst pandering shit. It's just deeply annoying and made me feel like an old man waving my cane at the hip young kids.
The next episode is about spiiiiiideeeeeers! Woooowwwowowowoowowooooooo spooky! Then again, I'm a serious arachnophobic, so maybe it'll work on me.