Doctor Who Series 11: 3 Ups & 2 Downs From 'Rosa'

1. The Emotional Impact

Race has been mentioned before in NuWho, but nothing like this.

So I’d heard we were getting the scene set for us right from the off and those early hints we heard about the episode before airing weren’t half kidding. Ryan gets slapped across the face by a white man after he tries to give a white woman her glove back, which she unknowingly dropped. It’s brutal and something we’d never thought we’d see in Doctor Who.

It highlights within society how far we’ve come, but still how far we have to go. It brings a mirror up to our face and shows us a reflection of the past, and one of the present. It doesn’t blow anything out of proportion, nor does it hold back either. We’ve travelled through time with the Doctor for years, but now we’ve seen it. This happened.

We’ve seen historical events before, thrown way out of proportion by wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nonsense, but this remained relatively untainted and it hit home for a lot of people.

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Honestly, I’m not sure what else to say about this episode. It was executed brilliantly, it’s powerful, relevant, and will stick as one of the most important episodes of Doctor Who ever. Scratch that, one of the most important episodes of a television series, ever. The means of getting The Doctor to these particular events was a little flimsy, but that pales in comparison to just how good Rosa was overall.

I was worried this wasn’t going to be very ‘Doctor Who’ going in, but once it was finished, it turned out that this was the most ‘Doctor Who’ Doctor Who has ever been. Sydney would be proud.

Let us know what you thought of Rosa in the comments section down below.