The Doctor Who Review | Season 11 Episode 3 Rosa

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The Doctor Who Review s11e3 Rosa — Image from BBC.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! Welcome back to the Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned. Check out the rest of the Doctor Who Reviews here.

Title: Rosa

Written by: Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall

A mini prologue to the episode greets the viewers, as we see Rosa Parks in 1943 have her first bus encounter with driver James Blake. Flash forward 12 years, and the Doctor is still trying to get the team back to Sheffield…with little progress. They’ve landed in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, one day before Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus for white passengers.

The team doesn’t know this yet, but as they step out of the TARDIS to investigate a strange amount artron energy emitting from the city, they run into Rosa as she comes to their aid in a heated confrontation due to Ryan’s race. Thirteen and team follow the energy levels to a warehouse, where they find a suitcase full of interesting looking weapons. Then boom, hello Daniel Grayson from Revenge, or in this case, Krasko (played by Joshua Bowman). Krasco is armed with a vortex manipulator like Captain Jack, and basically just wants to change little things in history so the future will be different. The Doctor learns that he was a prisoner in Stormcage (the same place River Song was imprisoned), and it turns out he’s more of a pest than a villain.

The team’s mission is now to make sure that Krasco’s meddling doesn’t affect Rosa getting on a full bus with James Blake as the driver and having to give up her seat. Without that happening, the world would be an entirely different place today. After figuring out as many details about the route she takes, where she works, and who she meets with day to day (including Martin Luther King – Ryan has some major fanboy moments when he’s in the same room as MLK and Rosa Parks, and he is every one of us in that situation) and they’re all ready to make sure Rosa gets on that bus. But things start to unravel as Krasco steps in and starts making minor changes.

Eventually, Thirteen and the team, and most importantly Rosa, are all on the right bus at the right time, with the right driver, and the right about of people. For Rosa to refuse to give up her seat, the entire team need to stay on the bus (as if they were there in history) … and Rosa refuses to move. And she’s arrested.

One year later segregation on busses in Montgomery is abolished. But even today it’s a seemingly never-ending fight, which started because one woman sat down for what she believed in.

My thoughts on Rosa

I haven’t cried this much in an episode of Doctor Who in years. Probably when Amy and Rory got sucked back in time by weeping angels. But never have I felt so much in an episode of Doctor Who, and that in itself tells me that this episode has been one of the most important, most true-to-history, most heart wrenching episode in the 2005 remake series to date.

What I loved about this episode was not only that it’s one of my favourite types of episodes (historic rather than machine heavy or robot-heavy), but the fact that it was so respectively done, keeping to history so well and making the villain in it a splinter in the foot, easily removed and not even really relevant to the story. Ryan easily blasts him away to somewhere else in time and space, so we may even see him again in future episodes. Who knows. The main villain in this movie is 1950s white society and the insane racism that went on (and still goes on today). Krasco seems like an afterthought, a ‘oh, we’d better put some sci-fi element in this episode because we’re a sci-fi show’.

While historical episodes like this have often had a bigger sci-fi element (I’m thinking Season 2 Episode 4 Girl in the Fireplace, Season 4 Episode 2 The Fires of Pompeii, Season 5 Episode 10 Vincent and the Doctor, Season 8 Episode 3 Robot of Sherwood, to name a few), the fact that Rosa didn’t doesn’t erk me at all. It was a slow paced episode which was powerful and emotional, but it also had it’s funny moments, and team members bonding times. Ryan and Yas have a talk about racism back in Sheffield in their own time, and while it’s a bit different to that of 1955, it’s in no way gone from our society. They both struggle with it in some way, despite the fact that we’re now in 2018. It was a raw look at the world we live in, and while that’s different for a Doctor Who episode, the world really needed this.

The humour is still there though, with Ryan calling Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks by their full names in one scene. The best line in this episode was when Graham gets alarmed at the Doctor is writing on the hotel wall, claiming ‘You can’t do that! You’re not Banksy!”, to which the Doctor spins round and replies “Or am I?” and now I like to think she is.

The one thing that annoyed me a few times was the way the team spelled things out a lot. There was a bit of repetition in ‘what do we know’ and ‘here are the facts’. Doctor Who fans are used to having complicated story lines to keep up with (thanks to Stephan Moffat and the past few seasons which often did my head in and I lost track of things), and while I didn’t enjoy those insanely complex overarching stories, I think this week was a little too simple at times (not in plot necessarily, just in the way they figured things out).

Also, can I just point out … I don’t think I like the new TARDIS. Last week I was unsure because we only got a small glimpse of it, but what on earth is up with those gigantic orangey yellow crystal things?! Surely they’re just in the way? They had better have some sort of epic and useful feature because right now I want them all to disappear. The rest can stay, but those need to go.

Overall

This was a hard episode to watch, but it’s also now my favourite from this season (I know, I know, there’s only been three), and possibly from the past few seasons too. It was raw but respectful, heartbreaking but necessary, both entertaining and educational. I suspect a lot of Rosa was due to writer Malorie Blackman, who wrote the Noughts And Crosses series which is all about racism in a dystopian world.

What an episode.

What did you think of this week’s episode?