I feel like Legends went from being the worst of the superhero shows to the best (not including Black Lightning which is an awesome league of it's own). It's silly fun, but it's not trying to be anything else.

This is what I mean about Chibnall being a crime drama writer - his focus on exact where/what/when is BIZARRE for Doctor Who in general, and in particular here, because the thing about planned protests is they can be rescheduled.

One of Doctor Who's staples is taking the TARDIS and smashing into an established genre, and I am down with the notion of mashing DW up with a crime drama - but no, this wasn't it. Though now I'm picturing Krasko planning to follow Rosa Parks and ensure through a perpetual series of wacky, contrived coincidences that she never boards a bus again in her life.

I can't help thinking, The Doctor doesn't have a Prime Directive, or any moral/ethical/social rules he has to follow at all, only their own. Why does he have different rules for Earth? Just because we look like their race, I guess. I'd have a soft spot for a dumber species that looks human, probably. I mean, I like bonobos.

Yeah, DW has never really found a comfortable explanation. It starts way back in The Aztecs in the very first year. The crew lands in Tenochtitlan where Barbara gets mistaken for a reincarnated high priestess, Yetaxa, and she resolves to use her authority to end human sacrifice. There's a fantastic confrontation between her and the Doctor about it:

Barbara: "Oh, don't you see? If I could start the destruction of everything that's evil here... then everything that is good would survive when Cortez lands."
The Doctor: "But you can't rewrite history! Not one line!"
...
The Doctor: "Barbara, one last appeal: what you are trying to do is utterly impossible! I know, believe me, I know!"
Barbara: "... Not Barbara; Yetaxa."

Their initial solution was to claim that changing history was literally impossible. (And Barbara fails to change anything.) Not really sustainable given the wild abandon with which the Doctor interfered on every other planet. In the next season, they have the Doctor being responsible for burning down Rome during the reign of Nero. So now they can affect things, but only to make them match our history books.

That season ends, however, with The Time Meddler, in which another Time Lord is actively trying to change Earth's history. (It's set in 1066, he's trying to destroy Harald Hardrada's invasion fleet so a fresh Harold the Saxon will defeat William of Normandy at Hastings. Just for the lulz, apparently.) They stop him, of course; but there's never any suggestion that his plan is impossible. He could easily change the whole course of human history. Which means the Doctor could too. (The first ep, by the way, has some great dialogue, as the Doctor deals with a sceptical new companion. For instance:

"That is the dematerializing control, and that over yonder is the horizontal hold, up there is the scanner, those are the doors, and that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me."

[Steven does not accept a Viking helmet as proof that they have travelled through time] "What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow?"

Doctor Who had done six historicals before then, and initially this adventure looks pretty much like it'll be "Doctor Who and the Saxons", until the first ep cliffhanger, where the Doctor discovers that the chanting monks of the local monastery are actually a gramophone record. After playing the first six historicals completely straight, that would've been quite the surprise, I think. There were five more historicals, the last in 1966; For the entire remainder of the classic series, the whole issue is just nullified. Of the subsequent 128 adventures, I count only 14 set in (or involving) Earth's history, and all but one of them have the Doctor defending the past from an alien threat.

It's not until the new series that it's addressed again. Davies basically came up with the idea of "fixed points in time" - there are occasions of particular significance where changing history would cause tremendous damage to the timeline, and that's why the Doctor doesn't meddle in our established events. (The first series' ep Father's Day indicates dire consequences should that happen.) Moffat was more laid back about this, but it seems Chibnall is down with it.

It's a pretty inadequate explanation. Ultimately the real reason the Doctor doesn't go back and topple the Nazis/end the slave trade/stop any of history's wars and massacres is that it's not something Doctor Who as a show can do. And that's fine, shows are allowed to have limitations. But maybe it's not the savviest move to go drawing attention to them.

I feel like Legends went from being the worst of the superhero shows to the best (not including Black Lightning which is an awesome league of it's own). It's silly fun, but it's not trying to be anything else.

Speaking of changing timelines...

After this week's Arrow, I have done a 180 on the flash-forwards. I like them, mostly because I like William. It turns out I just don't like present-day kid!William. I'm curious how far in the future this is -- over on io9, they said 20 years, but William seems too young for that.

I'm still loving Black Lightning, but this week's episode crammed in WAY too much stuff and it felt like a lot of stuff happened off camera that we had to make assumptions about. Like, Black Lightning confronted Khalil and tried to get him to give up Tobias, and then the police ambushed Tobias. But based on Jefferson's reaction to Handerson telling him that they caught Tobias, clearly Khalil didn't tell Black Lightning where Tobias was. I'm assuming it was Khalili who dropped a dime on Tobias, but...to the police?

And it was really jarring to introduce this psychic lady (who I assume is a meta), who we've never heard about before. I mean, I understand why they didn't tell Jennifer (though that was pretty shitty), but I feel like that's something the audience should have known about ahead of time. Are there other metas out there with convenient super powers that Jefferson (or maybe Gambi?) knows about but hasn't mentioned, that they'll suddenly introduce when the plot requires it?

Still loving the show overall, though. I can't imagine what their budget is for the music, but it's perfect.

I did a lot of handwaving for this episode ... I'm hoping that there will be explanations.

And Legends ... they left out all the MUD!

I'm still loving Black Lightning, but this week's episode crammed in WAY too much stuff

Agree, but since I'm watching for the family dynamics I generally just let the plotty bits wash over me and if I happen to understand what's going on, bonus.

The best part of this week's Doctor Who was the Banksy jokes.

Do you know how hard it is to explain Legends of Tomorrow to someone who comes in in the middle of an episode?

The best part of this week's Doctor Who was the Banksy jokes.

I did like the Banksy jokes. For me they tie with the Doctor's expression when Graham puts his arm around her. It's the little things, you know?

One of the earliest goes that Doctor Who took at racism was a Third Doctor adventure called the Mutants. In the future, Earth has colonised a planet whose oppressed native peoples have started turning into insectile monsters. The colonial oppression is ridiculously oversignified, taking in markers of the British Raj, South African apartheid, Southern segregation and Nazi genocide.

At this point in the show's history, the Doctor is exiled on Earth and can't get the TARDIS to work. But the Time Lords send him on occasional missions, and this is one of them. But it is the strangest mission. The Doctor is basically carrying a message from the Time Lords to someone on the planet, but doesn't know who. When he finds the right person (a leader of the native people), we find that the parrcel just contains interesting tidbits about the planet's history. The show's resolution is wen this leader evolves past the insectile form into some sort of rainbow angel superhero and destroys the evil Marshal. I mean, great, but just why the Time Lords decided that (a) they should interfere, and (b) then do so in the most ineffectual way possible, is beyond me.

Anyway, it's an interesting foray, and for 1972, does surprisingly well in spite of itself. The White Saviour trope runs deep in Doctor Who, at least from the Second Doctor on, and the Third Doctor is pretty much peak White Saviour. But in this adventure, although he keeps himself quite busy, it's hard to see how the resolution was at all reliant on him. For an adventure so heavily laden with markers of racism, they did well to leave it up to the local people to win their own freedom. It also contains a very early example (for Doctor Who) of truly colour-blind casting. There's a pair of everyman soldiers who have reasonably beefy roles, and one of them is played by a black actor, for apparently no reason other than that there's no reason not to. (It's undercut by said actor being atrocious in the role, but marks for trying.)

Anyway, Rosa put me very much in mind of this past adventure. In both cases, there are things it gets right, and manages more deftly than one might have expected given the production limitations. In both cases, the resolution is left up to the oppressed people, with the Doctor at best providing space for them to do so. In both cases the villains are cartoonish and the plot seems ever more bonkers the longer you think about it.

In one area at least, The Mutants outdoes Rosa. Being set in the future on another planet, and with a regime that seems to encompass Racism's Greatest Hits, we actually can and do end the ep by burning it all down. That feels rather more satisfying and triumphant than "They named an asteroid after her! She changed the universe!"

I'd advise everyone who isn't a fan of the Jillifonts to take the title of this week's Who extremely seriously.

Yeaugggggghhhhhhh

I would be so much more into this episode if it were about giant killer mutated literally anything else.