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BBC Rosa |
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| Story No. | 305 | 
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| Production Code | Series 11, Episode 3 | |
| Dates | October 21, 2018 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Marjorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall Directed by Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Sam Hoyle |
| Synopsis: The TARDIS Fam wind up in 1950s Alabama, where they have to ensure Rosa Parks gets on a crucial bus. |
Three Theses on Rosa by Hugh Sturgess 4/12/24
1. As TV, it's good.
It's become de rigeur to say that this episode is bad as a piece of television, perhaps even morally so. That's funny because the initial public reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Unlike Kerblam!, which received at best a stunned "huh?" on first viewing, Rosa was praised! Rewatching it many years later, I think this initial reaction was more correct than the subsequent backlash. Unlike structural and emotional messes like Spyfall or Can You Hear Me?, this doesn't need excusing or explaining, this is just good television.
Despite being set in a small city in the United States with no monsters or aliens, Rosa manages to have the tensest, scariest scenes of Series 11. The scene in the motel room as the cop tries to frighten the Doctor and Graham into giving up Ryan and Yaz is genuinely nerve-wracking.
A lot of criticism of Krasko has been aired over the years, though I think this is a case of an aesthetic criticism (variations on "it's lame that the baddie is just a racist from the future") masking a political criticism (to wit, that it's depressing to imagine that there will still be white supremacists in the fifty-first century). Why, exactly, is it so stupid that a racist would use a time machine to change history to make the world more racist? Of all the aspects of the plot to criticise, this fairly intuitive and logical thing for Krasko to do is not one of them. Joshua Bowman gives Jodie Whittaker her first opportunity to have a really meaty, dramatic scene, and their confrontation is delightful. There's a wild, reckless relish to the Doctor's treatment of Krasko here; she's really enjoying driving him crazy. It's strange that Chibnall made the thirteenth Doctor such a happy-clapping pacifist when some of her best scenes are of her taunting irredeemable pieces of shit like Krasko and the Master with borderline cruelty.
A scene that has had a 180-degree reverse in (some corners of) fan opinion is the climax where Graham realises that he is one of the white passengers Rosa was ordered to stand for. The initial reaction was praise for Bradley Walsh's incredible performance, which was followed by a backlash against foregrounding a white man's reaction in a story about black liberation. I agree to an extent, which is that the episode does put its POC characters at a curious remove throughout (more on that below), but this is swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. Yes, it foregrounds a white man - but a very large chunk, if not a majority, of Doctor Who's UK audience are white males. Most of whom would no doubt consider themselves to be progressive and non-racist. So to put Graham, who was married to a black woman and who spends the episode standing up for Ryan and gleefully telling the racist Alabamans that Ryan is his grandson, in a position where he is the beneficiary (and, inadvertently, initiator) of racism, regardless of his choked, anguished insistence that this isn't what he wants, is both incredibly powerful and very relevant to the plurality of the audience. It's the one moment when it feels like there's a point to this episode.
The problem is not that Graham gets the limelight here, it's that the episode treats Ryan, Yaz and every other character of colour as more peripheral.
2. What's the point of this episode?
In pretty much the only scene where Ryan and Yaz get to foreground their own feelings about being in a direly racist period of history, Ryan expresses the pessimistic view that 2018 is not so different to 1955, while Yaz makes an argument for progress as achieved through small, bitterly fought incremental actions.
I happen to agree with Yaz on this one, but the argument cuts against the entire focus of the story on Rosa's action as the singular event that leads to the present day. Progress can't be a "two steps forward, one step back" deal if a quieter than expected bus one night in Birmingham Alabama is all that Krasko needs to derail the entire future history of humanity. (One could argue that this is just Krasko's racist delusion and doesn't reflect reality, but the Doctor goes out of her way to endorse it: "He's clever, I'll give him that. He knows. He's not planning on killing or destroying or breaking history. He's planning to nudge it just enough so that it doesn't happen.") Yet it isn't about Rosa's personal greatness herself, because she's kept firmly in the background of the story. The episode is very careful to not have Rosa be inspired by the Doctor, but it does this by making her a bit part in her own story.
It's fair to call this a return to the "educational" aspect of the earliest years of Doctor Who, but what exactly is it teaching? Famously, this episode erases Claudette Colvin from history (Blackman says on the episode commentary track that she was originally mentioned but cut so as not to detract from Rosa's importance) and cut a scene of Ryan talking to Martin Luther King Jr, so the "education" we have left is minutia. You can watch this episode and learn that the bus driver's name was James Blake and what time exactly Rosa got on the bus, but learn nothing about the civil rights movement or how Rosa contributed to it.
At the risk of being harsh, what are we even doing making a hagiography of Rosa Parks in Doctor Who? Without disputing her dedication to the cause of black liberation and her bravery, the thing about collective activism is that no individual is essential. The civil rights movement was a mass movement, it survived the death of Dr King and other leaders because it wasn't the creation of a handful of exceptional individuals. As the story of Colvin shows, many people had the bravery to defy segregation laws (and Parks wasn't even a party to the lawsuit that ended bus segregation, which the episode studiously avoids saying); this is the thing about an idea whose time has come.
Yet this runs counter to the whole premise of a celebrity historical, which valorises the celebrity as a world-historical genius, something that is easier to sustain if we're talking about Shakespeare or Dickens; clearly no one else would have written Hamlet if the Carrionites had conquered Earth, say. But even if Krasko had pushed Rosa in front of the bus, someone else undoubtedly would have done the same thing, based on the very solid argument that "someone else" really did do it!
Even more specifically, why is a British show making an episode that treats Rosa Parks as the source of all modern civil rights for black people? Segregation was never the law in the UK - for instance, the UK government made it clear that it would not allow US personnel to enforce the colour bar while troops were stationed in Britain during the war. Of course, the US civil rights movement inspired similar movements in the UK (and Australia among indigenous people), but trying, as the episode does, to draw a link between Rosa Parks and all modern race relations is bizarre. She's not even the most important civil rights leader in America! The episode seems to tip its hat to the irrelevance of Parks to the UK by having Ryan barely know who she is... but the whole thrust of the episode is her irreducible importance to all of world history!
For all that the episode pitches itself as a po-faced prestige TV event, this reminds me of the Sliders episode "Prince of Wails", which presents a world in which democracy and human rights are completely unknown concepts because the American Revolution failed. It also reminds me of something Alan Moore said about the V for Vendetta film, which was that it was a political allegory about Bush-era America made by people too scared to set it in their own country. If Doctor Who is going to do an episode "about" racism, it should set it in Britain.
3. Chibnall doesn't care.
This confusion is the product of an episode thought up by a creator (Chibnall) who has no particular personal interest in Parks and chose to focus on her more as a statement of his general intent as a showrunner rather than because he has any investment or interest in the topic. Progress depends on incremental actions over decades, but history hinges on the singular actions of great individuals, and Rosa eventually got an asteroid named after her... this incoherent thematic arc makes more sense if we discard the notion that Chibnall wanted to say anything with this episode beyond that he was performing the act of "saying something". Content need not apply.
What's this episode about? It's just "about the time Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her bus seat", purely about the minutia of the event itself. It seems likely that the bulk of the writers' efforts went into carefully treading around all the truly dire things that might have gone wrong with this story - most obviously, any suggestion that Parks was inspired by the Doctor. Notably Chibnall takes a co-credit on this one, as if he wanted to keep extra-close tabs on the script at every stage in case Blackman started going off-piste. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. This episode plays it completely safe, and maybe it's the best case we could hope for from the premise "Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Rosa Parks". But in trying to avoid saying anything disastrous, it manages to also avoid saying anything at all.
I seem to say this in all my reviews of the Chibnall era: "this isn't about anything". Sorry, but if Chibnall will insist on writing TV that says nothing, then I'll keep saying it says nothing. To give Rosa credit, it doesn't end up endorsing Strom Thurmond or calling Krasko a refugee. Given the regularity that inadvertent catastrophes like that happen in this era, its absence in Rosa presumably reflects a particular effort to be careful, and for that I'm thankful.