Review of Rosa
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I’ve managed so far to stay unspoiled for Series Eleven; I don’t even know the names of the next episodes until I start poking around the BBC website looking for details of the current one. So my first inkling of what was coming for episode 3 was its Next Time trailer. It made me nervous.

I wasn’t nervous because they were going to look at the beginnings of the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s—quite the opposite; I love a historical. But it has been the habit in Doctor Who to depict the real events of history as being caused by the Doctor, either through direct action (e.g., The Visitation) or through her influence (e.g., giving words and ideas to Shakespeare or Christie). I didn’t want to see Rosa Parks’s very real, very human bravery be cheapened by implying she wouldn’t have acted as she did without the Doctor arriving on the scene.

I thus spent my first viewing watching with a constant underlying tension, always fearing that some major faux pas lurked around the next page-turn of the script. I shouldn’t have worried, given that Malorie Blackman, the first woman of color ever to write for Doctor Who, was the primary writer for this episode (a fact that escaped me until a subsequent viewing). She hit it out of the park.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I have been soaking in white privilege all my life. Especially as a white American, I’m sure there are parts of Rosa Parks’s real story that have passed me by. I’m equally sure that Rosa had elements that didn’t make the same impression on me that they did on Black American fans; I look forward to learning more from those folks as this episode gets discussed throughout fandom.

But for me, the most important thing was that the story preserved Rosa’s agency. While all sorts of time-altering shenanigans played out behind the scenes (I noticed several nods to earlier parts of the modern era this time, like Krasko’s vortex manipulator and his incarceration at Stormcage), there was never any doubt that Rosa would make her historic choice* if the circumstances stacked up in the familiar way. She is the heroine of this story.

So what of the Doctor and her friends? They put Rosa’s actions into context. Ryan’s poor recollection of who she was serves as an excellent opportunity to explain her role to any viewers who may themselves be unfamiliar with it. (Frankly, I am a little surprised that her story was so well known to any of the gang. Perhaps growing up in the American education system has skewed my views, but I wouldn’t have thought that Brits would necessarily know much about events in another country’s history like that. Perhaps it’s simply a more generally famous moment than I knew.)

The team’s discomfort with the overt racism of the day is also good framing. While it paints a clear picture of the mindset of the time (as does mention of the murder of Emmett Till), it doesn’t dismiss or excuse the persistent problems of today. And it brings them right up in the characters’—and our—faces.

So many of us with white privilege, who would yet like to consider ourselves allies, can relate to Graham’s dawning horror as he realized that he had to be an active part of oppressing people with a different skin color. We benefit from that shit every day and often don’t realize it, but here they were—not least the Doctor herself—keeping silent, maintaining the status quo in a blatant, undeniable way. It was a deeply uncomfortable situation, even to watch from the audience.

As awful as it was, I hope that acute discomfort sticks with me. Time travel stories—this episode included—like to emphasize that “tiny actions change the world.” Yet so often we fail to think about how our own tiny actions in the present could push the course of history in just a slightly different direction for our own future.

I want that icky feeling in my stomach to give me courage, and help me make the hard choice next time. I want to stand up for inclusion and dignity instead of sitting in silence. And maybe, if each of us take those little actions every chance we get, we can make things better sixty years from now, too.

*For completeness, I can’t help but note that Rosa Parks was not actually the first Black person to refuse to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery. Nine months prior to Rosa’s arrest, a 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin was arrested for a similar offense. “It felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder.”