Rosa

Rosa represents the sort of material which makes it very, very difficult to review without wondering what sort of reaction you might get from the very vocal, paradoxically right-on left brigade. I am as liberal and lefty as they come, believing everything the Doctor believes in, but I endured a humiliating defeat when arguing with my – staggeringly intelligent – younger cousin when she spat the words, “You would say that because you’re a straight white male” at me. Onlookers may have seen me manually retrieve my jaw from the floor and force my opinions back inside my mind where they so obviously belonged. Now, I am neither a man of colour, nor a female, so I fear that whatever I have to say about Rosa may be rendered worthless by people who seem to think that straight white males are incapable of empathy with anyone other than straight white males. A straight white male wrote half this story alongside renowned author Malorie Blackman, and it’s only by the standards of his last few writerly efforts that I can judge Rosa.

To be fair, the first scene on the bus is pretty magnificent. Although the dialogue is as on-the-nose as dialogue is ever likely to be, it’s directed with furious intent. Trevor White plays the loathsome character of bus driver James Blake without fear of looking ugly and a truthful, hateful abomination of a man lives and breathes vividly on the screen. Vinette Robinson as the eponymous Rosa Parks is, by contrast, remarkably and powerfully understated, the strength of her performance in her quiet resilience and stoicism. 

Moments of brilliance abound over the next ten minutes. It’s a real thrill to see the TARDIS materialise in the alleyway of a truly all-American-looking 50s Montgomery and doesn’t the new exterior look completely delicious? There is the strongest sense of place here, wiping the floor with the likes of Daleks in Manhattan which made do with a few plate shots to simulate the USA. The scene in the street in which Ryan picks up the lady’s handkerchief and is slapped by her husband for being black is extraordinarily powerful in its illustration of the banality of such everyday racism. It’s almost impossible to believe that the mindset of the population of this town was as such a mere 63 years ago. Such contemptuous behaviour is unthinkable to the rational, modern even humane mind and it’s almost impossible to imagine why people decided to treat each other this way in the first place. The brief interchange here illustrates the issues faced by people of colour economically and with a hard-hitting, almost literal punch. The only problem with this scene is that it’s the most powerful one in the episode, saying everything this episode has to say in thirty seconds without feeling the need to explain itself.

The biggest issue with the show on the whole right now is the clunky dialogue. I worried about Chris Chibnall’s propensity for graceless, sledgehammer tactics and here, the lines could all be screamed at us and we wouldn’t notice the difference so aggressively unsubtle and expositional are so many of the passages. The worst offending scenes are Ryan and Yaz’s disclosure on racism behind the bins and that last TARDIS lecture, impotently importantly delivered by Jodie Whittaker. To see the events take place in themselves is enough to persuade any remotely empathetic human being that these acts are despicable. The running commentary is unnecessary and not a little patronising. Awkward dialogue elsewhere that isn’t making points at us feels amateurish too: signposting the means of Ryan’s defeat of Krasko in the hotel room so blatantly is toe-curlingly poor writing.

Aside from the very funny Banksy joke, there’s so little humour here that the subject matter starts to feel po-faced and over-reverential rather than important, thought-provoking and above all real. It is as if the writing team have made a list of What We Can’t Possibly Do Because It Might Offend Someone ideas and stymied their own creative flow. For instance, monsters would render the ideas on offer laughable, so we can’t have any of those. Imagine the headlines. (Worked for Vincent Van Gogh but he was only insane, not a person of colour.) We can’t have any of the characters from the future talk to Rosa about her decision because (even though that’s exactly what a person from the future might do and would make for extremely interesting conversations) it would render Rosa without agency. We have to have a person of colour aboard the TARDIS so that the team’s commentary isn’t from a white-only perspective. It feels like any other TARDIS team couldn’t have had this adventure without some corner of the internet feeling offended. It’s a sad reflection of society that every aspect of this production feels artificially constructed because it feels the need to tread as carefully around subjects as the TARDIS team do when stepping into history. The story is so busy telling us how obviously wrong racism is that it forgets to explore its roots and complexities and essentially its drama.

What’s more, we’re stuck with a villain lacking any kind of presence. He can’t possibly match Vinette Robinson’s stoic Rosa nor even Jodie Whittaker’s more affirmative Doctor. Granted, in a rather neat conceit, he can’t harm or kill anyone thanks to a nice nod back to Stormcage Prison and the intricacies of his scheming – the damaging of the bus and the mocked-up timetables – make for exciting, unusually small-scale problems to solve. However, Joshua Bowman looks like a Strictly dancer as opposed to a white, racist, criminal time-travelling supremacist. Surely casting someone as cranny, tortured and frightening looking as Ken Bones or Ian Hanmore would have made more sense than America’s next Top Model? The point might be that racism is invisible and that sexy young bucks can be racists too but Bowman isn’t remotely scary despite Segun Akinola’s valiant attempts to flag up the threat level with some discordant strings every time Bowman walks flaccidly into shot.

In fact, Akinola is suffering his first off-day. Last week’s Ghost Monument score was thrillingly industrial and other-worldly. Here, he provides a story about the evils of America with a saccharine cavalcade of We Love America horns. He’s even replaced in the last few minutes by Andra Day singing the embarrassingly over-produced Rise Up (probably from Chris Chibnall’s Spotify playlist along with that bloody awful Glorious song from the adverts), which criminally overwrites the closing theme tune, at the last minute making the powerful events of the climax seem distastefully mawkish. 

That final bus scene, however, has moments of supreme tension. (Doctor Who definitely has a history of brilliant bus scenes, even in this episode alone!) Jodie Whittaker makes her best performance choices so far here, unnerved that the bus is noticeably emptier than planned. The realisation that she and her companions must stand by and watch the most unjust prejudice unfold is gut-wrenching and were it not for the overblown musical choices, the sequence might have really hit home.

There’s no denying Rosa’s heart is in the right place. It’s exciting that Doctor Who wants to tackle the issues that matter. (The Sylvester McCoy era is my spiritual Doctor Who home and a part of that is down to its obsession with becoming socially relevant and dare I say it, trendily on-message.) But Rosa goes about its exploration of 1955 Montgomery in as blatant and unadventurous a way as possible. It’s striking that it dares to say Paki but it can’t bring itself to say the less anachronistic, more controversial Nigger. It’s walking so carefully on a tightrope that it never gets to say anything truly hard-hitting, other than the least controversial message conceivable: Racism is Still Bad. For a show as optimistic as Doctor Who, which in the past has relished the idea that racism in the future is all but defunct, Captain Jack for example refusing to notice species let alone skin colour, the bad guy here is disappointingly just another racist from the future. 

As is only proper, it is Vinette Robinson who perhaps leaves the drama with the most dignity intact. She brings heart, poise and reality to some hokey lines and says so much with facial expressions alone. In fact, she wipes the floor with the regular cast, bringing us to the show’s second biggest issue at the minute: the cast aren’t strong enough to sustain the clunky dialogue. They all of them, even the more experienced Bradley Walsh make the most obvious, “first-reading” choices and flag up the cliched, hackneyed nature of the ham-fisted lines they are dealt. Next week, we can be sure of three things: the title sequence will still look utterly gorgeous, the TARDIS set will still look utterly wretched and we’ll still be in the company of perhaps the most uncharismatic set of regulars we’ve ever had. Hopefully, Vinette Robinson has taught everyone, from writers to actors to directors, that less is so obviously more.

4/10

JH