Rosa
(Series 11, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 21/10/2018, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Malorie Blackman, Chris Chibnall, director: Mark Tonderai)
Rank: 123
'When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all people — yes, Black humans as well as white humans, Sontarons as well as Rutans, green Silurians and red Racnoss and blue Moxx of Balhoon — would be guaranteed the deeply alienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where aliens will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Where thanks to some time travellers, we are free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last. I might not get there with you. Then again I might because the Doctor has a time machine and time is relative. But whichever of us get there I can see the promised land'.
One of my biggest complaints with the Chibnall era is that while other producers, showrunners and script-editors from other period of Dr Who show how you should feel, this era tells you. Over and over and over again. While the series run by Verity Lambert and Russell T in particular were all about exploring other worlds and times through other people’s eyes and leaving the viewer at home to sigh with relief that they lived where and when they did, the Chibnall era is all about why all the social values of past times were wrong and now is the place to be. Only this idea is somewhat undermined by the fact that the here and now is rarely a nice time or place to be for the 13th Doctor either: most stories set in the present day show it to be a potential paradise interrupted by continual greed, whether it be Donald Trump like presidents, Amazon like businesses, environmental disasters, p’ting aliens run amok in space hospitals or talking frogs in parallel universes created out of grief. If you were to look at the depiction of 21st century Sheffield neutrally as just another era (as future generations who didn’t live through this time surely will) then you won’t ever get the sense of comfort and relief you do from 1960s stories when, say, Ian and Barbara finally make it back home (because the 1960s really was one of the best times to be alive – if only because we’re seeing it through Ian and Barbara and later Ben and Polly’s eyes and how much they miss it; none of this lot ever seem that pleased to be home and treat the Tardis as a way to run away from the empty lives they were leading). It doesn’t help that the 13th Doctor is such a passive figure either, someone who observes rather than meddles and upholds rather than overthrows the status quo until she really doesn’t have any choice.
For this one story,
though, this era all makes sense. ‘Rosa’ is, on the face of it, one of Dr Who’s
simplest plots: all the Tardis team have to do is make sure that the right
person travels on the right bus on the right day to make sure history unfolds
the way it’s mean to. But of course that one person isn’t just anyone but Rosa
Parks and the history that rests on her shoulders is the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, a key part of the Civil Rights movement. The modern world, while it
still has so far to go, would look very different had she not taken a stand
that day. This desire to tell us what to think and to have a Doctor there to
maintain history rather than change it is perfect for ‘Rosa’, a story that no
other era and no other showrunner’s technique would have been able to tell so
well. That haranguing, lecturing tone is for once justified and the Tardis
team’s job is to make sure history unravels the way it was meant to, keeping
the meddling aliens away from what really happened. They’re not meant to be at
the heart of this story, just the reflectors of it, while the real change is
meant to spread out past the ending credits so that we take its core values
away with us into our real lives too. It’s hard to imagine any of the other
Doctors in this story (the 1st Doctor perhaps, if they’d kept
William Hartnell’s thoughts to himself, but even he’d deliver a few stern
lectures and the 15th Doctor – more personally involved through
Ncuti’s skin colour – wouldn’t have felt right going through this at a
distance, while the 12th Doctor would have punched somebody if ‘Thin Ice’ is anything to go by. I can see
this as a 5th Dr story maybe, the hands-off regeneration closest to the 13th in
many ways, but even that would have had Adric siding with the villain and Tegan
getting everyone thrown off the bus for getting stroppy – by contrast Graham
getting out his sandwiches and gawping in a very British way is the right way
to go). The 13th Doctor, though, is perfect for this story. It’s
right that she should be an onlooker, that Rosa isn’t inspired to be what she
is because of The Doctor’s influence or interference or because of an alien
possession like so many other historical stories, that The Doctor instead works
behind the scenes to keep the monsters at bay. It’s right, too, that this story
should be ‘just’ a history lesson, a lecture, because this stuff isn’t taught
in schools (at least In Britain) and its in danger of being forgotten (they
have Ryan, confused, asking if Rosa was the first black bus driver, a telling
line on behalf of the modern audience. I only know this stuff because my
primary school gave me volumes of outdated 1970s historical pamphlets to read,
in desperation from giving me something extra to do so I stopped giving them
500 pages to mark each lesson. Hard to believe I know. If we weren’t taught
this in the 1980s though no wonder it wasn’t being passed on to the kids of the
2010s).
Former child laureate
Malorie Blackman is, shockingly, the first non-white writer Dr Who has ever had
(though Noel Clarke was the first if you include the spin-off shows, writing
one of the noisier episodes of ‘Torchwood’, ‘Combat’). This despite having an
Indian director as early as the first story (‘An Unearthly Child’) and black
cast members not far after. Understandably she wanted to do something about race
relations, given that it had already cropped up in a few Who stories anyway
(both metaphorically in stories like ‘The Ark’
and ‘The Savages’ and more
realistically in Ace’s look of disgust at 1963 Britain in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ or the
attack on Martha in ‘Human Nature/The
Family Of Blood’ and on Bill in ‘Thin
Ice’). Chibnall, who’d already hired the show’s first black composer, sensibly
hired the show’s second black director for this story too, in Mark Tonderai. In
some ways the story choice is an obvious fit: it’s a story all about the sort
of personal heroism that Dr Who stands for and the message that things aren’t
always set in stone, that ordinary power to change things. Short of the cliché
of watching Martin Luther King Jnr give his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech (he’s here
too) and given that the walk to ‘freedom’ in Selma would have been too violent
and upsetting (and the lynching of Emmett Till, a completely innocent black man,
only more so), this is the most obvious place that the new-look equal-opportunities
Who should be going to. Especially with two companions of colour in the cast
for the first time (in the show’s best and most telling line Yaz’s half-Indian
half-white status is seen as so unusual everyone assumes she’s Mexican, because
America really didn’t do mixed race in 1955 – by Dr Who standards this time
period really wasn’t that long ago but it feels longer ago than the cavemen of
the first episode in other respects to our multi-cultural eyes). It feels
‘right’ to be here, if not a little bit overdue. This creates problems though:
social change doesn’t happen in one go but in fits and starts and the
Montgomery bus boycott was a stepping stone towards equality, the first stop
rather than the whole story. This isn’t the marvellous revolt in the grand Dr
Who tradition that sees computer-based regimes destroyed (‘The Armageddon Factor’) or taxmen
thrown from their own roof (‘The
Sunmakers’). This is a middle-aged woman sitting on a seat and refusing to
get off it. Not the most dynamic moments of television if you don’t know the
story.
Somehow, though, they
make it work with an ending that manages to be tense even when you know how
things have to turn out, The Doctor and co stuck to their seats desperately
trying to make sure time runs on rails. Having a baddy trying to interfere with
history, like a sort of racist Meddling Monk, is a bit odd (why should a
passing alien care about skin colour? They should have gone all the way and
made them green!) nevertheless it’s the right threat for this story. Despite
being alien, though, Krasko is everyone’s idea of a dumb-headed racist. He’s
whiter than white, speaks with a Southern accent (though none of the cast are
Americans and all struggle with their accents actor Joshua Bowman is closest to
getting this right – despite coming from outer space and being the one actor
who could afford to be a bit off’!) and has fixed hierarchical views. Of course
he’s going to fire up the white bus drivers and mess around with history so
that people take unexpected holidays, stirring up trouble even though one of
the cleverest things about this script is the subtle hints that secretly
everyone agrees with Rosa, even a lot of the white passengers, they just don’t want
to be the ones getting into trouble for staring something they might not be
able to stop (the real villain is apathy).
Usually I like subtlety and the grey area of baddies who are doing wrong
things for the right reasons or a Doctor who accidentally makes things worse
despite trying to do the right thing, but not here – we need to make out that
the racist bus driver is a monster without ambiguity, to have clearcut heroes
and villains, to be on the right side of history. There is no ambiguity here,
no monster or even human with an empathetic past. The people who think some
Humans are better than others were wrong in 1955 and they’re wrong ‘now’ in
‘2018’. And it’s not because The Doctor was inspiring for once, or because she
defeated a monster, it’s because an ordinary person was brave enough to take a
stand against the bullies without resorting to the same brute force in
retaliation. The brilliance of ‘Rosa’ comes in the climax that has nothing to
do with Dr Who and everything to do with history, when Rosa stays quiet and
stoic in the face of all these angry unhinged white people screaming in her
face and acting like the animals they accuse her of being.
Some fans reckoned this
story stood out because of that and it certainly looks different to any of the
more modern stories. However it’s a welcome return to the grand tradition of
where Dr Who started, with the same feel as the early historicals under David
Whittaker that treated the past with reverence, as something fixed that
couldn’t and shouldn’t be changed, ‘not one line’ (with just a hint of Dennis
Spooner’s Meddling Monk from ‘The Time
Meddler’, albeit a racist one that makes him more dangerous than
‘naughty’). ‘Rosa’ isn’t at all like the other Chibnall historicals (where The
Doctor meets celebrities and hero-worships them, the ‘guest cast’ portrayed as
extraordinary and other-worldly somehow despite being Human) but it is very
much in keeping with ‘Marco Polo’ (where
Kublai Khan was a nice old man playing backgammon) or ‘The Crusade’ (where Christians and
Muslims both are ordinary people muddling along). Unlike the one-note
portrayals of, say, Ada Lovelace or Mary Shelley, Rosa Parks is not an obvious
icon. When the Tardis crew first meet her she’s wary at best and grumpy at
worst, not prepared to indulge their nonsense of time travel in just the same
way she won’t indulge the Montgomery’s idea of segregation. Usually she’s the
sort of disbelieving fringe character who would be the first to be eaten in
another story for not taking the Doctor’s pleas seriously. She’s bitter and
cynical, weary after years of struggling to make a living for all the respect
she has in the black community. Yet there’s also a sparkle in her eye: her
idealism is dimmed not extinguished (she’s not unlike the 1st Doctor, in fact).
You can totally see why she’s such an inspiration and why so many people flock
to her support. She’s not a natural troublemaker, she’s just reached the end of
her tether and changing America is somehow the easier path than putting up with
inequality and injustice for longer.
‘Rosa’ is also the story,
out of all the modern Who adventures, that creator Sydney Newman would have
recognised the most: a story designed to educate, with an accuracy respectful
to the past (this is arguably the most ‘accurate’ historical since ‘The Massacre’, complete with dialogue as
recorded in history books and a replica of the actual bus, ‘borrowed’ specially
from a museum), where the Doctor by her won admission is ‘guarding not changing
history’, where the scifi tones are kept to a minimum and where the past is a
scary place that’s as alien as any foreign planet could be. Even though this
story, which seems so long ago, is set just eight years before Dr Who started
and if anything downplays the racism and violence (this really was an amazingly
lefty show for 1963. Until they recover the rest of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ and the blackface
in ‘The Crusade’ it’s amazing how
un-racist this series has always been compared to other 1960s shows. It’s a
slightly different story in the 1970s admittedly, but even Who as a series has
always been more tolerant than most shows it’s age). There are links to the new
series too. Though it’s probably coincidence I like to think that someone
somewhere titled this story simply ‘Rosa’ to contrast so much with the person
and episode ‘Rose’. because Rosa is everything Billie Piper’s companion isn’t:
she’s guarded not open-minded, she’s grumpy not joyous, she’s wary not curious,
resigned to her fate where Rose would have ripped the whole universe apart to
right one wrong. But both are brave and prepared to stand up for justice and it’s
that which comes over so well in this story, the idea that Rosa Parks is a
heroine of history that changed the world not because she’s a natural do-gooder
but because she couldn’t stand it any longer. She was the heroine they needed
in 1955 just as Rose was fifty years later.
Like many of the biggest
moments in human history Rosa’s decision not to swap seats for a white
passenger that day is a small decision, a tiny point in time, far easier to
change than a big battle or an invasion and so more vulnerable to evil time
travellers. Watching events unfold, almost in real time, as passengers shift up
and down the bus and James Blake, the white bus driver, becomes crueller and
crueller, gives you a far better idea of real history taking place than many
other Dr Who historicals, showing change to be both accidental and inevitable –
if not this day, then this change was coming some day. Of course it nearly wasn’t
this day at all and the simple plot follows Krasko, the time traveller
determined to wreck history. While the Doctor expects him to do what so many
time-travelling villains in Dr Who have done and try to assassinate the hero,
instead he tries to manipulate the driver, changing the world by something as
simple as changing the bus timetable – a typical Dr Who twist on the ordinary
becoming extraordinary. It’s a ruse that keeps The Doctor guessing for most of
the episode though and ironically enough, though it changes nothing, the 13th
Doctor’s showdown with Krasko is one of Jodie Whittaker’s very best moments as
The Doctor: she’s fiery in a way we don’t often get to see, outraged and angry
and convinced she has the upper hand after discovering his time gadgets (even
though she’s got the wrong end of the stick). Where was this Doctor in the rest
of this era? With so much waiting around between scenes we get more
characterisation from the Tardis crew than pretty much any other series eleven
story too (Yaz, especially, almost feels like a real person at last), while we
actually get to know what their feeling too (everyone’s reaction to Ryan
innocently picking up a white lady’s hanky and nearly getting beaten up for it,
before Graham steps in and Yaz fumes, is the most united we ever see these
three; the confused look on the man’s face as Graham mentions Ryan being his
‘Grandson’ says more than any plot exposition could about this era too). The
incidental characters are excellent too – Morgan Deare is far better here than
he was in ‘Delta and the Bannerrmen’
thirty-one years earlier (he was Hawk, half of the Sputnik scout team, with
just as outrageous an American accent), while Trevor White even makes bus
driver James Blake into a believable narrow-minded shouty baddy rather than a
caricature.
Montgomery is well
presented on screen, only the fifth time Dr Who has been to America and –
against the odds – only the second not to feature the Empire State Building or
surrounding district as part of the plot. It’s drab and grey, not unlike the
scenes of 21st century Sheffield as it happens (though they filmed it in Cape
Town, South Africa) but with a sepia tinge that makes everything seem a long
time ago (unique for a Who historical story, which are almost always about
making a long time ago seem now – but right for this one, all about attitudes
that feel as if they belong to centuries past even if, sadly, they often
aren’t: I still remember the shock from my childhood of finding out just how
close this time was to my own and though we’re another generation or even two
later on this story still captures that feel that these events aren’t as long
ago as they really ought to be and how these battles are still being fought
every day in some places still).Overall this is a story that uses all the best
things the Chibnall era has to offer: I love the way we’re looking at stories
outside Britain, with filming in another country so that the story has a very
different look and ‘feel’ to it and being brave enough to bring in new voices
and tell the sort of stories Dr Who has never told before.
Unfortunately all the
usual problems of the era are true here too, though. Ryan really is becoming
unbearably thick and rude and this story more than any other means you need him
to be likeable. Having your story revolve around a bus means that you have to
keep vamping until that moment with all sorts of unlikely and unnecessary
sceneWe get a whole sub-plot of Ryan meeting Dr King at a meeting which is pitched
all wrong: Ryan treats this as if he’s watching a film and is looking round for
the popcorn, making clumsy errors, while they don’t get Martin Luther as
historically ‘right’ as Rosa (he would have something a lot more interesting
and inspiring to say than ‘sorry for your loss, son’ while actor Ray Sesay
looks nothing like him, especially in this era when he should be a decade
older). It’s as if everyone went ‘oops, people might not know who Rosa Parks
is, what other celebrity can we add in?’ It’s also wrong: Parks and King did
become friends and helped inspire each other, but that came after the boycotts
not before – here they’re bosom buddies (the Tardis has done something timey
wimey again. Or maybe Krosko decided to wreck the timelines by introducing them
earlier?) There’s another sub-plot involving a suitcase full of time-travelling
gadgets that ends up being ignored when the main plot comes into gear, which in
many ways would have made for a far more interesting story. Once Krasko has had
his weapons taken off him he stops being a threat and becomes a weak-kneed sort
of villain, too faceless to last long in the memory. There are way too many
scenes of endless exposition, as we we’re told what’s going on rather than
shown it and the dialogue is quite weak in places (surprisingly so for a
children’s laureate – the only line above and beyond the perfunctory is the
revelation The Doctor might be Banksy. ‘Or am I?!’), full of empty gestures and
clumsy lines, with a lot of this story never feeling quite ‘real’ for all the
lengths they’ve gone to with the background and costumes. ‘Rosa’ too never
quite shakes off the atmosphere of being a ‘learning for schools’ episode
that’s teaching us first and entertaining us a distant second. So much so
you’re half surprised the broadcast doesn’t end with a list of York (well,
Sheffield) Notes and further reading material. It’s sad that they don’t even
mention that this wasn’t the first bus boycott: Claudette Colvin had made
exactly the same stand nine months before, but the segregation movement decided
that, as a pregnant teen, she wasn’t quite the moral pillar of the community
they were looking for – but she was just as much of a heroine).The ending in
the bus is great but the story should have stopped there: we don’t need The
Doctor filling everyone in on the Tardis on what happens next (especially in an
age where, if you really want to know, the internet is at your fingertips. I
miss the days when Dr Who production teams assumed their audience were right
enough to go away to public libraries and fill in the gaps). ‘Rosa’ has, for
the most part, done a good job of not being patronising, but having that scene
end with a look to camera about how racism isn’t over and the end credits
fading not to the usual Dr Who theme tune but Andra Day’s ‘Rise Up’ is
over-egging the pudding (the first time we haven’t had the tune since Adric’s
death meant the credits to ‘Earthshock’
episode four scrolled in silence; The Freedom Singers’ ‘Woke Up This Morning’
is a little more palatable but still not quite right for this story’s tone. I’d
have gone with Sam Cooke/Otis Redding’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ myself).
For history and civil
rights were in the news anyway. Though they make no reference to it ‘Rosa’ was
clearly written to the backdrop of the 2017 ‘Unite The Right’ ‘protest’ (the
word is used loosely) in Charlottsville, when a bunch of Nazis turned up to
talk about how white culture was being ‘suppressed’ and a car deliberately
drove into a crowd of counter-protestors. This would have still been fresh in
the minds of the audiences watching on first transmission, with fears (that
turned out to be true) that we’d only see more of this during Trump’s first
term (this is the notorious occasion when he talked about wrong ‘on both sides’
even though one side was peaceful and the other was using cars as weapons). So
it was important to have a story like this one that shows what suppression is
really like. People fought hard for freedoms that a small percentage of the
population who shout the loudest want to throw away – being reminded that your
grandparents fought the same fight and won is important. This wouldn’t be the
first Dr Who historical inspired by the present either (there’s a long
tradition of ‘cold war’ stories hidden away in tales of Catholics v Protestants
and French revolutionaries ending up as corrupt the system they overthrow), but
it’s a shame they didn’t do a bit more to like the past and present. So much of
this story is about making the past scary alien and strange, as if it happened
a very long time ago and has no relevance to now - you can’t then have your cake and eat it
and make people see the connection in the present day. If they’d have had
either a sympathetic character from Charlottsville dreaming of an equal future,
or a racist who vows to undo everything Rosa does ‘even if it takes sixty years’,
that might have sold the present threat home to a modern audience a bit more. Similarly
having the threat come from an alien time traveller who just happens to ‘look
like us’ (if you have white skin anyway) is less of a threat than a time
traveller from Earth’s near-future would have been, someone looking to unravel
all the achievements of the civil right movement back to its core because they
resent living in a more equal, tolerant society in the future. Overall I’d say ‘Dot
and Bubble’ still tells a better tale of civil rights and oppression, for all
that it’s set on another planet: Russell T’s script is subtler than this one
and more contemporary somehow, for all ‘Rosa’s strongest points.
Yet good points there
are. Unlike ‘The Demons Of The Punjab’ (the
one Chibnall story that tries something like this again) they don’t shy away
from the horrors of this era (I suspect the use of the ‘n’ word in the bar
scene was the first time it had been heard on daytime television on the BBC for
a long time, but the scene needs it: it isn’t gratuitous), but they give us
some good people to admire rather than painting everything as black-and-white. We
need different voices on Who and while this story can’t undo fifty-five years
in one go it does a good job of offering up a side of history the show had
never really dealt with before. Like Rosa herself, you have to be patient (it
took another year and a fortnight for the official rules on segregation in
busses to end), while this journey is full of more cul-de-sacs than my trip to
school (how many detours to pick up kids who live miles away and don’t always
get the bus anyway do you need?!) When this story gets there, though, it nails
the all-important scenes and the climax with the Tardis team all stuck to their
seats tensely against their will is far better than it sounds and makes a nice
change from running down corridors madly. This is a very different way of going
about things and a welcome change. Other eras would have done this story better
in many ways, been subtler, more complex or had the Tardis crew taking a more
hands-on approach to saving the day. But for once they’d have been wrong and
for this story and maybe this story only the standard Chibnall approach is the
‘right’ one: this is Rosa Parks’ story, set in a past delivered on screen as
exquisitely as Dr Who historicals in any era, while any of the more-hands on
Doctors getting involved would only have taken away from the story. ‘Rosa’ may
not be Dr Who at its best or even the Chibnall era at its best (there are a
couple that are far less clumsy and way more entertaining than this) but it’s
the sort of story that makes good use of this particular time and these
particular era traits. It’s the sort of thing, after all the ballyhoo of this
being a more ‘politically correct’ series unafraid to make big decisions, that we’d
have been sorry if they hadn’t tried – and were then relieved that they got
pretty much right without too many of the era’s awkward errors. This is the
sort of story we thought we were going to get every week when Chibnall took
over and in terms of being told how to think it is, but this era of Dr Who was
never quite as on the money again, the baddies never quite as obvious the stakes
never quite so high in a way that the audience can understand it and the links
between the land we visit and the one we live in while watching this on first
transmission never quite this much of a straight line. Odd to think that they
worked out how to do this and make it so different to previous eras as early as
the third story – yet never did anything remotely like it again. ‘Rosa’ is a
brave, bold statement and as confident in its own abilities as this era will
ever be (even the better ideas of the next two seasons are undercut by how timid
Chibnall becomes) and even if some of the execution lets it down this story is
very much a step in the right direction, a stop off on the way to greatness
that sadly never quite came.
POSITIVES + Vinette
Robinson, cast after Chibnall remembered her from his Who debut ‘42’ a decade before (where she plays the far
less interesting character of Abi) is truly excellent as Rosa Parks. What could
have been a very unlikeably crotchety haughty old lady is given just enough
layers of warmth and vulnerability behind it all to show us why so many
respected her and I’m even more relieved they didn’t just portray her as a
happy carefree young woman (the way they did with Ada Lovelace or Nikola Tesla,
who don’t resemble their real selves at all in character). Rosa is the way she
is because she’s lived her whole life under the rule of others; free of their
influence, even if it’s just in a chat with the Tardis crew, she brightens up
and shines, full of idealism and hope so that’s she’s almost unrecognisable.
The turning point of this story and its best moment isn’t actually when she
stands up for her rights, or takes down the bus driver with insults, it’s when
she finally trusts someone and smiles because the Doctor is actually listening
to her and backing up what she says. They should have carried on making Dr 13 a
confidante in this way; it suits Jodie more than the clumsy, socially awkward
chatterbox she usually is.
NEGATIVES - The story’s
biggest problem is that this great moment of history around which this episode
and the whole civil rights movement pivots, is – like many great moments in
history – small and short. The plot is literally a bunch of people playing
musical chairs down a bus, trying to make history happen, which after a diet of
bases under siege and mass invasions feels a bit, well, anti-climactical. There
are no fireworks when Rosa takes her correct seat and for all we know what she
does makes no difference at all, however much the Doctor lectures us at the end
with all the changes that happened because she took a stand (maybe someone else
would have had the same fight the next day? Or maybe Rosa herself would have
crossed paths with James Blake another week?) The one thing this episode fails
to show is that this fight was inevitable with someone, sometime – that
changing the dates and bus numbers changes nothing in how outrage at an unfair
system was always going to rise up at some point. It’s that feeling, at
injustice that continues in our present day, this episode should be instilling
in us too. And no, a couple of lecturing speeches and putting an anachronistic
song from 2015 over the credits is no substitute at all.
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