So after having a day or so to think about the episode, I thought I'd put my two-penn'orth in.
So, when I first heard they were going to do a Rosa Parks episode, then I thought of all the ways it could go wrong. I mean, they're lining up to do a "historical" episode. Something that the show hasn't really done since William Hartnell did the first series, Patrick Troughton made "The Highlanders" and Peter Davison made "Black Orchid" in the 80's.
In terms of doing a historical episode, I think it works pretty well. Whilst the events are written from the point of view of the Doctor and her friends, the ultimate decision whether or not to give up the seat comes down to Parks and she has to make that decision alone, and I think the episode played that moment really well.
There were a few moments leading up to it that I thought were clunky. At one point part-way through I thought we were going to end up in a situation where Graham was driving the bus (he is explicitly presented as an ex-bus-driver in episode 1, so it seemed a fair interpretation part-way through) and that could have lead onto some nice character development for Graham if he had been forced to report Rosa to the police against his will. However, they dodged that situation by recovering the actual driver from a fishing trip (really, I said to myself at that point!!).
To be honest, the idea of having Graham be the driver really relates to some of my pre-season expectations that at least one character in this season would not regard travelling with the Doctor as being an unqualifiedly good thing. Graham seemed the most likely candidate for that role, but hasn't lived up to my expectations on that so far.
In terms of the sci-fi, the whole plot involving Krasko seems incredibly weak and almost as though it was tacked on as an after-thought. Ok, there needs to be a reason to get Team Tardis out of the Tardis at the beginning of the episode and he indirectly serves that purpose. But, he has an ill-defined, rather flimsy, motivation for doing what he's doing and whilst there's a nice fan reference to the Stormcage Prison - which is where River Song was held - he's otherwise pretty much a non-entity that's too-easily dispatched. Again, if Krasko had just gone and temporally displaced James Blake, then that would have created an actual problem for Team Tardis.
Ultimately "Rosa" seems to me to be a piece of pure drama, which works very well on its own but is inconvenienced by the time-travel concept and the necessity to shove some sci-fi ideas into it.
Oh, and on the science fiction ideas, I really don't think the new Tardis control-room set works. I'm not entirely sure whether that's because the set is badly-designed or whether it's because the director of this episode, Mark Tonderai, is also the principal camera operator. However, all of the shots inside the Tardis control-room seemed to me to be really badly composed. In most cases on tv the director is not the camera operator and I wonder whether that contributed to the poor composition on this episode. It will be interesting to see what the next few directors do with the set and how it looks going forward.
In response to a couple of previous posts:
Basically, I think we've had a case of every other episode of Who we're ever going to see from now on. Who arrives, baddy is up to no good, or turns up to try to interfere in an event,
I mean this is the basic story structure of the show since it was created. Where have you been? Practically every classic serial ever made starts with the premise that something is going on, the Doctor arrives for whatever contrived reason and then takes out the baddy. Most (although admittedly not quite all) episodes of NuWho are built around the exact same idea. Why is this a surprise to you?
The story pretty much removed any agency on Parks' part, and made it all about the characters from the future.
I don't agree with you. Parks has absolute agency in the scene where she refuses to give up her seat. It's her decision and nobody else's. Whilst she may have been manipulated into having to make that decision and whilst there may be some dramatic looks between the Doctor and her friends with an accompanyingly dramatic musical score, the decision is basically hers and hers alone.
Perspective on the civil rights movement.
Ok, so I'm not going to finish this post without commenting that, in the history of the civil rights movement in the US, Rosa Parks's arrest and legal case did not end bus segregation. In fact, her legal case went nowhere. The segregation on buses was actually ended by the case of Browder v Gayle - where "Browder" was Aurelia Browder, and "Gayle" was the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama.
Aurelia Browder was arrested for violating the segregation laws in April 1955 (well before Rosa Parks was arrested in November of the same year). She was convicted for a criminal offence and fined. In January 1956 she (backed by the NAACP) filed a lawsuit in the US federal court system challenging the state's segregation laws. In July 1956 an all-male and all-white Federal District Court ruled by a 2-1 majority that Montgomery's segregation laws were a violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. That decision was challenged by the City of Montgomery and the State of Alabama. They lost when the US Supreme Court ruled against them in November 1956, and then they lost again in December 1956.
So, whilst Rosa Parks may have been (and may continue to be) a great media figure. The real victory in this story is Aurelia Browder's. And I don't think she has an asteroid named after her.