Spoilers Doctor Who - Series 11, Episode 3: Rosa

[VenusianFryCook]

The Doctor shows off her knowledge of Earth's history by bringing two minorities to 1950s Alabama. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this.


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[VenusianFryCook]

Surprisingly better than I thought it would be. You could nail them on bad history but most Americans don't know about Claudette Colvin or that the protest was planned, so I can't really get mad at Brits for the same thing. The villain was a bit stock and I prefer my space racists to have plungers but at least they didn't make him an obvious alt-right stand in with a "Make Space Great Again" or something similar.

 

[J0HN_L0CKE]

This was a good episode. But the antagonists of every episode have been an absolute joke/non-existent.

Random future racist for no reason? Christ. If they could be subtle it might help.

 

[ZERO_ninja]

So I took a bit of time not even really talking about the show because I was internalising my feelings of disappointment and frustration more, but I'll give a go at verbalising what I thought about the last few episodes.

Rosa was the best episode of the series so far (including up to Tsuranga Conundrum) and that's not really a good thing. On the positives, Chibnall wasn't writing this episode solo, and it shows. Character dialogue wasn't great in Rosa but it was better than it has been in any other episode of this series. The dialogue works and the recurring characters largely seem to come together in this episode, so far it's the only episode where Jodie's Doctor has really seemed to begin to click for me. Graham is the one consistently great thing in the series so far and this episode is no exception. Yas actually begins to show some personality, Ryan is err not great, but that's mostly frustrations towards his personality he mostly is written fine though. Regarding one off characters though things were decidedly more mixed. The racism was dialed up to 11 for every character gone is the subtlety in dealing with such an issue like Human Nature/Family of Blood did. The episode also seems to believe that just putting Martin Luther King on screen would be interesting by the fact of who he is because it failed to do anything with him. At least Rosa was a strong and interesting character, which I'd hope so given the episode is built around her... unfortunately that's part of the episodes problem.

Taking a very important but very brief and not very cinematic moment from history and trying to blow it up to 50 minutes requires a lot of subtlety and creativity that this episode unfortunately lacks. Rather than just explore the events as they were the episode feels compelled to add a sci-fi twist and a villain to fight, this villain seems about as much an afterthought as is possible though. His entire character and motivation is "future racist" we here about how many he's killed just to make sure the audience know for certain he's super duper evil and that's about it. The episode actually nearly forgets to even give any direct indication he is indeed racist if it weren't for a single passing line of dialogue directed towards Ryan there would have been nothing to indicate that was his motivation and would have had to be concluded from the events of the episode.

His plan to prevent Rosa parks iconic moment is a hard one to create much dramatic tension for, I'm sure there are ways but the episode failed to find them. I'm fully aware of the repercussion and the issues the episode is presenting to me as a result of these events (both the societal and sci-fi ones) but even given that it's hard to really find myself going "gasp, oh no, the bus driver schedule has been changed!?!!?!?!? Whatever shall they do?!?!". The continual small incidental knocks to try to throw history off track the Doctor and co had to correct veered far from dramatic tension and by the end was approaching comedy with Ryan chasing down people in the street to talk them out of walking home.

The episode does pull it back a little at the end with a strong dramatic position to force Graham into. Before following it up with a pop song that makes the whole event feel a bit trashy CW.

Unlike most episodes this series so far, there was actually a good episode in here somewhere (possibly because Chibnall didn't write it alone). Unfortunately it got lost in Chibnall's usual problems, lack of interesting characters, lack of subtlety and most significantly a complete lack of dramatic tension.