Reading reviews around the old Bubble today it's amazing how many (white) people seem to think the racism came out of nowhere at the end, when it's quite obvious to people who do experience these sort of behaviours every day.
Still, it is funny that we're going from this to next week we get an episode set in the magical Bridgerton-esque past where racism doesn't exist.
They had to put some clunky dialogue in at the end to make it explicit, because until then it was heavily on a “young people who use social media too much are all (a) arseholes and (b) camp as a row of rainbow tents” the same way the this-season-obligatory “oh the dead person went to heaven!” line in to make them also a religious group.
If it didn’t have the lines to make it explicit, any negative reaction to the Doctor could easily be read as not liking authority figures or interruptions to their inane nonsense.
Sure, you can look back and go ‘oh, there’s no black faces in the bubble screens’ but not sure many people would have actually been looking, and it’s not like TV in an eighty percent white majority would be *looking* nor that that couldn’t be a subtle dig at the kind of Mickey Mouse Club TV the whole lot seemed to have escaped from anyway.
Which could have been done as more of an actual point, and if they hadn’t rushed the ending, could have been an actual exploration of racism, as opposed to relegating it to ‘the twist at the end’ and not really doing anything with it.
Capaldi was given more of a point about it in a two minute scene with a literal punchline, and McCoy had the beautiful scene in the cafe in Remembrance, and now a Black British Man is finally the Doctor, and while he goes full bore in his five minute scene, there’s *nothing there*.
And frankly I don’t think RTD has experienced racism, or been at the edges of it even, because it is *insidious*. It isn’t something throwaway. It is so much more unpleasant and complex than this made it out to be — and as (possibly, I haven’t sat through all the Chibnall stuff yet) with Rosa, and it’s Space Racist, Who is here presenting a world where that kind of bigotry exists in far stronger and basic a form, for far longer a period of time, than seems likely in real life or even usefully to the story in the show itself.
It’s taken a serious subject, that absolutely could and should occasionally be dealt with in Who (and was better done in Remembrance of the Daleks thirty five years ago) and used it for a gotcha moment, with no depth, and no reason.
But, we’ve had a lot of ‘reason lite’ episodes this season.
Who didn’t used to insult the intelligence of its viewers quite so often.
And the presentation and production style didn’t work half as well as when The Happiness Patrol did it on the cheap.
