Yes, I know YouTube comments are low-hanging fruit, but I could not resist. Didn’t sugar coat it? They literally had a climax where a bunch of white people end segregation by bravely doing absolutely nothing!
Except, no? Rosa is 100% given the agency and the credit she deserves. Of course the Dr. And Graham have do nothing- they cant do what Rosa does. Thats like…the point? (Also, a bunch of white people? 2 is a bunch? Cuz Yaz and Ryan aint white.)
OK, I usually don’t respond to things like this, but I’ll make an exception this time because the episode pissed me off so much, which is the same reason I made two separate posts about it. It was an utter mess. It should have been a pure historical story, but instead they had some idiotic plotline about a time travelling Cosmic Racist trying to stop Rosa and change history. Never mind that Rosa didn’t actually decide to just stay seated on a whim, and was actually involved in activist groups beforehand and the sit-in was planned, and claiming otherwise devalues the struggles of black Americans, and was very obviously added in by a Chris Chibnall and not Malorie Blackman (dear God, you can very much tell which bits were written by who), we just need some simplistic story about a guy with a big gun. So no, she’s not given ‘100% the agency and the credit she deserves’, given that she only succeeds with the help of white people.
Also, whatever the reason they had to do nothing, having white characters doing nothing at all as the climax to your Rosa Parks episode is an awful, awful idea. And yes Yaz and Ryan are not white, but they weren’t involved in the climax. Due to not being white.
Even leaving aside the race issues, the episode was just bad on its own, with clunky dialogue such as ‘See? I’m not stupid. I just got confused by the whole bus thing’ and ‘Thanks to Rosa Parks, I can become a police officer!’. And why didn’t the Cosmic Racist use that gun thing on Rosa? Like, I know he couldn’t kill anyone, but that gun didn’t kill, it just sent you back in time, and he was seen firing at the Doctor earlier in the story. Seems like that would have been much simpler to me.
God, I really miss Steven Moffat. He actually treated his audience like they weren’t utter morons.
You care very deeply about race issues in media, even if we disagree about our analysis of this episode.
But you miss MOFFAT? Uuuuuuhhhhhh because Moffat was always GREAT with his nonwhite characters, right? Pffffft. K.
Literally never said Moffat was great with that. Neither is Chibnall, as this episode proves. Neither was RTD, remember ‘Planet Chinatown’ in Turn Left? Nobody was really great with that, yes including Moffat, Moffat was just better at actually telling complex stories that rewarded close attention.
Or telling convoluted stories with massive plot holes and no stakes mixed in with frequent and unrelenting sexism. But sure. Ok.
Don0303 