This is a profoundly different show now, much more of a drama, and much more grounded in the level of the storytelling. The stakes are smaller but more personal. And yet it's still making use of past continuity in ways that serve the story rather than just being a wink to the viewer. It's an interesting and effective new approach.
Was the music still by Segun Akinola? It was a much more melodic, motif-driven score this week. Meanwhile, playing a song over the end titles is something
Doctor Who has never done before. The only previous time they didn't use the normal end title theme was when the last episode of "Earthshock" played the titles over dead silence.
And I'm trying not to think about the fact that the Doctor's "We have to keep history exactly on track" plan depended on the fact that they'd carelessly loaned a mobile phone to Elvis, who loaned it to Sinatra.
Interesting that the episode opened with them saying the Doctor had already missed Sheffield a bunch of times. I guess that leaves room for novels and comics between episodes.
However, I'm not sure if I quite believe multiple people mistaking Yaz as Mexican instead of Pakistani, but perhaps there's historical precedence for that.
There weren't a lot of South Asians in the US then, certainly not in the South. Race was perceived as basically white, black, and Hispanic.
By the way, the acknowledgment that Yaz is Muslim was so casual I almost missed it.
Another plus: I really enjoyed Vinette Robinson's performance as Parks with what felt like an authentic 50s southern accent.
I wasn't quite sure about the accent, since she pronounced "serve coffee" like "soive coffee," which is a pronunciation I associate with Brooklyn, not Alabama. But maybe I'm wrong.
I don’t expect racist motives to make a lot of sense, but this guy is from 2200 years in the future, a time with interstellar commerce and compact time travel devices. It’s a stretch for me. Maybe if he was from now.
That's the sad thing, though. Every time we think racism has been beaten for good, it turns out there are people who still cling to it and fight for it. Look at how many Americans today are trying to turn back the clock to before Rosa Parks, if not even before the Emancipation Proclamation.
A while ago I saw the
Twilight Zone episode that George Takei was in, a heavy-handed story about racism, and the things said by the racist character in the early 1960s sounded uncannily, exactly like the things today's racists say. And I realized that people like that are completely frozen in time. They cling to the past and they teach their children to do the same. The rest of the world moves forward, but they refuse to move with it. So I can believe that there would always be some fringe groups that cling in secret to such beliefs even when society has advanced far beyond them.
Or maybe it's just that this guy reinvented racism on his own. He resented that he didn't get his way, blamed the people around him, then read a history book and found that there used to be a time when people who looked like him ran everything, and in his narcissism he decided that was the way things should be.
Not much difference, is there? And I'd prefer not using the word supreme or any derivation thereof when describing them. I have other words for them, but family-friendly subforum, y'know.
The point is, "Alt-Right" is their own term for themselves, protective camouflage to hide the fact that they're actually neo-Nazis. So using their own sanitized, misleading term for themselves is perpetuating their deception. If you don't like "supremacist," call them white nationalists. Or just Nazis.
One think bothered me, Ryan zapping Kresko into the distant past, given the Doctor's disdain of guns, and the way she reacted to crane boy in TWHFTE, she seemed awfully relaxed about Ryan essentially killing someone.
No more than the Weeping Angels kill someone by sending them into the past. Sure, they're dead in the present, but they lived a whole life in the past. Basically he just subjected the guy to involuntary one-way time travel. The fact that they didn't tell us when he ended up suggests that we may see him again.
OK, that was pretty great, and different and interesting on several levels - it actually felt more like one of the better Trek social commentary episodes - doing a Quantum Leap plot - than like Dr Who.
That actually concerns me a bit. I appreciate the change of pace from the Moffat era, but I don't want
Doctor Who to start feeling
too much like other sci-fi and time-travel shows. I long ago got tired of "We have to fix history!" stories, and I've always appreciated that the Doctor generally more or less just lets history happen and doesn't worry about the timeline ramifications (as in "Thin Ice").
If it had a flaw, it was having the random time traveller villain. He was totally unnecessary, and it would, I think, have been better as a pure historical, as the bus driver, cop, guy who hit Ryan, etc - in fact the society of the time - made good enough villains as was.
But without a bad guy trying to change things, it would've felt too much like that dumb show
Voyagers! from 1982, where the characters kept getting alerted that history was going "off track" and had to fix it, but it was never explained why or how. If the heroes were the only ones intervening in the past, then doesn't that mean the way it was trying to go spontaneously was the way it
should have gone? I hated that show because its premise was so damn stupid!!!
Or if the idea had been that the TARDIS crew was part of the history all along and helped bring it about in the original version, that would take away from Rosa Parks somewhat. It was important to make this something she did on her own, something she wouldve done no matter what, and the gang was just there to prevent it from being derailed.
I was very afraid they were going to have him drive the bus to fix history.
I was thinking the same thing.
BBC America is rather butchering the pacing of these episodes with the commercials. They bumped this episode out by 10 minutes on the hour to cram in 20 minutes of ads.
Better that than cutting out 10 minutes to accommodate the ads.
