Now that the Doctor looks like Whittaker, acting like she owns the place is no longer enough. Far more than in recent years, Season 11 has allowed the Doctor to be helpless, especially in the face of injustice. The most striking example was the episode “Rosa,” which took the Doctor and her friends, Yasmin (Mandip Gill), Ryan (Tosin Cole), and Graham (Bradley Walsh), to 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, where they endeavored, in the Doctor’s words, to “not help” Rosa Parks. The hour—which the new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, co-wrote with the author Malorie Blackman, the show’s first-ever black writer—saw Parks in the crosshairs of a racist criminal from the future. Unable to kill her, the criminal intended instead to change just enough about Parks’s day to derail her protest on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955. As the Doctor and her friends worked from the sidelines to get history back in order, they played no role in inspiring Parks’s protest and were equally powerless to stop her arrest. Rosa Parks’s choices were left entirely in her own hands.

In the past, Doctor Who has imbued historical turning points with larger-than-life significance by suggesting that events were fated to play out as they did. In Season 4, Tennant’s Doctor was unable to stop the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a “fixed point in time” that could not be averted. The episode nodded at the scope of the tragedy but viewed it through the Doctor’s eyes; the pathos of the hour comes as much from his loss of agency as from the loss of life. But “Rosa” presents Parks’s moment in history as decidedly unfixed, precariously dependent on one woman’s bravery. And by showing Parks propelling the civil-rights movement forward by choice rather than by fate, the episode paradoxically empowers the Doctor to do the same: Her act of heroism is to let someone else take the lead.

As a woman, the Doctor has more cause to pull strings without drawing attention to herself than she did as a man. During a trip to the 17th century in the episode “The Witchfinders,” she initially flatters King James I (Alan Cumming) and gains his favor by allowing him to underestimate her. But she abandons that approach as the sexism she encounters gets more overt. Being accused of witchcraft motivates the Doctor to interfere with history more vocally than she had all season. Although earlier incarnations of the character might have been able to simply talk prejudice out of existence, the fact that Whittaker’s Doctor can’t do the same isn’t presented as a function of her gender. Her inability to find a quick fix for pervasive social problems is just a result of the show’s increased willingness to actually engage with those problems—the same ones it once hand-waved away with a “Just walk about like you own the place.” That commitment to change was also evident behind the scenes, where Chibnall assembled the show’s most diverse slate of writers and directors yet, in terms of both gender and ethnicity. Under the new showrunner, the Doctor wouldn’t be fixing the world until Doctor Who fixed itself.