If there's anything wrong with Whittaker as the Doctor it's way behind the problems with writing and overall direction of the series.It's been near impossible to tell whether Whittaker is good or bad because- ironically, given the talk of strong independent women etc- she's been saddled with too many companions and fluff taking up too much time in case she isn't any good and with writing which has made her a Smith/ Tennant derivative with no scope for establishing herself except as being a female version of them. They can't even consistently settle on which of them she should be emulating.

'Preaching' comes from the writers and show runner, there's very little an actor can do about it and if you do you can end up like Chris Ecclestone; so opinionated and with such a bad rep that you're effectively blacklisted and have to go and do a GI Joe movie (that you then complain endlessly about having had to do, my heart bleeds for you and your seven figure pay cheque Chris). 'Preaching' is also something Doctor Who has always done, it's just been a lot better at wrapping the moralising up in an interesting story or having it be a bet better disguised than Trump Bad! Rosa Parks Good! Partition Bad! Killing Bad! Starving to death, uh, Good? Under Chibnall it feels like they started off with the moral they wanted to tell and worked the story back from there with plot being secondary. And that makes the episodes feel both over padded with fluff and simultaneously far too short on story itself. It's not even any good for actually getting the moral message across even if they weren't simplistic since it fails to be engaging enough as entertainment.

The absolute fundamental problem with Chibnall's Who is not that it's been bad, nor is it that it has a woman lead or is preachy. It commits the one cardinal sin that you have to avoid, being forgettable and unremarkable. At least the bad episodes in earlier nuWho seasons were memorably bad or had some redeeming features; and there were always a couple of very good and memorable episodes per season.

Exemple.

Take the message : "High tech gizmos, modern entertainment and individual screens are alienating us and preventing healthy interpersonal communications".

Watch "Resolution" (Season 11, Holiday Special)

Watch "Midnight" (Season 4, episode 10)

Compare.

It's a good example. It not just no messages, it's about being smart about it. A lot of great T.V. is filled with messages. There was the long-running series here called M*A*S*H* based on the Korean War and a hospital unit (where the name comes from). Almost every episode had a message whether it be the hardships of war or bureaucratic red tape, tolerance of those who are different including sometimes one's enemy. It covered gay rights and racial intolerance but the message didn't seem contrived. It was the way it was presented. The story was clearly written around it, but it still came off as sensible and believable. When it's done well, presented in a way that seems realistic (for its genre), it can be a powerful thing.

Let's take the episode Rosa for example. With some tweaks, it's a much better story. Start with a backstory for the interference with events that makes any sense. (I'm avoiding details to avoid spoilers.) Balance the displayed bigotry of the era by showing that while many (and I'm fine with them portraying most) in the 50's of Alabama were bigoted, it wasn't absolutely everyone. Now you have a much more powerful and truthful history backdrop to your story and it wouldn't seem quite as unnecessarily preachy.

As to the framing of the story itself, maybe get away from the hectic running around and stopping the bomb at 00:01 trope which they overuse. The running all around and back and forth to save the day just in the nick of time didn't seem to fit very well. They seemed to be running through unnecessary "plot hoops" because the writers couldn't come up with a better story to lay over the setting and message. As a result, it made the Doctor look more lucky than good at what she does. This isn't the only episode this series that had this problem. A lot of the episodes resemble a Benny Hill montage. It's one of the bigger reasons this Doctor isn't coming off as very credible. Almost every episode is survived by a lot of luck and very little skill.

Actually, "Rosa" story is not just preachy. It's backwards preacy. Because it basically says that the future will be racist. ;)

Vote with your wallet. If you don't like something then don't buy it and it will go away if others do the same.

Do you remember the first time Martha Jones travelled to the past? She was worried she'd be sold as a slave, then the Tenth Doctor laughed it off and told her to relax.... Turns out there were black ladies in Shakespeare's times (not uncommon in a BBC show).

This is another example where not taking oneself too seriously works better. In that episode, the racism issue is dismissed in less than a minute and then we jumped straight into the story. In Rosa, everything is about racism, which is a big change in tone (more educational/political/preachy/whatever you call it). It's not necessarily worse, it just depends on how you write it. But I enjoyed this one less. It even seems that the whole cast of companions this season was designed specifically for this episode (two non-whites and a bus driver), while neglecting their personality traits.

If it helps, I haven't watched (and definitely paid for) even one episode of this last season of Doctor Who. Or any of the previous seasons for that matter, as this show apparently has never been shown here, or then I've simply missed it.

The premise sounds quite idiotic anyway. Something about some kind of "doctor" travelling in time.. in a telephone booth? What the heck? Next they're probably going to make a TV series around a talking car called K.I.T.T., or some life guards running in slo-mo on the beach.

Or they could make a comedy about a concentration camp, or a show about trivial events in everyday life such as waiting in line at a restaurant or entire series about people stuck on an island trying to find a way to get off. Who would want to watch shows like that!

To be honest, I don't think that would be such big of a deal anyway. Black girl in that time Europe would be exotic thing for sure, but there would be no prejudice like in America at the time of slavery or segregation. It's pure US of that time shtik. In other parts of the world white slaves were not that uncommon, so there were "black=slave" mentality there.

The problem with "Rosa" is that it is supposed to be about racism, but in reality it's just about shaming white people. "Look how you mistreat poor blacks, shame on you" - that's all you see in the episode, it doesn't even try to tackle the questions of what racism is, or why it exists, or how to end it.

In fact, it got it all wrong. Rosa Parks was not the first black person, who protested against segregation, nor she was someone important in a grand scheme of things. Martin Luther King organized boycott campaign to support her, but he could really do that for any other case instead. He was really just "flexing muscles" in social activism back then, his most prominent campaigns were years later.

And again, if you start to think about the white guy from the future, it all falls apart. Why he was hating black people anyway? As I've said racism against blacks was purely US thing, so why someone in the future would be bent on stop (or rather postpone) movement against segregation? Wouldn't it be completely pointless with all the African nations taking their place in humanity political scene anyway?

I read an article some time ago that claimed that Rosa Parks' act of rebellion was indeed a staged publicity stunt (they planned it so they could start the campaign). I don't know enough about the topic to tell if that was indeed the case or not, but I always feel bad for the other black woman who did exactly the same thing a few weeks (months?) before and didn't get any recognition. I can't even remember her name.

One would think in a time where humanity is in contact with thousands of alien races, the least of their worries would be the skin color of own of their own.

Exactly. It's like today someone would be against hedheads. Because in middle ages people with red/ginger hair considered to be a sign of wickedness and connection to Devil.

What's next? Lesbian?

According to History.com:

Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's black leaders prepared to protest, until it was discovered Colvin was pregnant and deemed an inappropriate symbol for their cause.

Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.

Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon, a prominent black leader, who bailed her out of jail and determined she would be an upstanding and sympathetic plaintiff in a legal challenge of the segregation ordinance.
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Not taking anything away from her actions. There certainly was no guarantee anything would come of this protest and certainly there were risks to being in the spotlight. I just think the actual truth is better than letting "History be written by the victors".

It just goes to show that the premise of the episode, that this was some essential point of time, is most likely hogwash. If she didn't get on the bus that time, she could have tried again the next. And if it weren't her, it would likely have been someone else. It was an unfair law, obviously unethical, and was going to fall eventually as the holes and inequalities of the idea of segregation were getting continually exposed.