With Doctor Who’s second season having now passed its midpoint, I’m ready to say it: This is the strongest run of episodes the show has seen in years. It’s an opinion I find a little frustrating (where was this consistency last season when the show really needed it?), but one I’m hearing from casual viewers in the real world as much as hardcore fans online.
Written by Inua Ellams, “The Story & The Engine” is an equally vibrant, exciting adventure, and one that shows the potential of Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor as the TARDIS lands in Nigeria. So far, any mention of the Doctor’s race has largely been used as a pejorative by prejudiced societies, à la “Lux” or “Dot Or Bubble.” Here, we see what happens when the Doctor is fully allowed to shine, his African identity also providing a basis for the fast-paced plot with its focus on intergenerational storytelling and the magic of the barbershop.
It’s within that hair establishment that most of the action takes place, although this isn’t a full-on bottle episode. It might be called Omo’s Palace, but as we enter, Omo (Sule Rimi) is the one in the chair for once, having been ousted by a figure whose face initially remains unseen. Omo tells stories to the fellow customers, and they are brought to life as animations in the window frame before him. These stories are “feeding” some kind of creature, yet it’s clear whatever it is is unsatisfied.
In the TARDIS, the Time Lord, dressed in a colourful shirt with his hair grown out from his usual buzz cut, tells the homesick Belinda he can boost the vindicator in Africa’s communication hub in Lagos. It also happens to be the home of his favourite barber. Of course, the TARDIS technically sorts out his hair, but, he tells Belinda in a tender moment, this is his first time being in a Black body. In Lagos, in Omo’s Palace, he is “accepted.”
Who could hear a story like that and say no? Belinda, desperate to get home, tells him to go, and the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS solo and into the vibrant hustle and bustle. The scale and sheer number of extras here are extraordinarily impressive, the Doctor weaving through the color while being embraced by all. Yet as he turns off towards Omo’s, that color drains away. A sign outside warns him to turn back, and when he enters the barbershop, a deafening siren wails and red lights flash within the TARDIS, assaulting Belinda’s senses.
Omo embraces the Doctor, an old friend he first met in childhood, then introduces him to the “new management.” The mysterious dreadlocked man from earlier known simply as the Barber (Ariyon Bakare), is cutting another man’s hair while the customer talks, only for an alarm to sound, a light to turn from red to green, and his hair to grow straight back. This isn’t the Doctor’s same beloved barbershop—that much is clear—and the window where their stories appear rippling beneath his touch.
Omo explains how the Barber has trapped them there with his magic clippers, and they must tell endless stories to feed…well, who knows what. The customers are trapped. The only ones who can come and go are the Barber and his so-called assistant Abena (Michelle Asante), who has a face the Doctor recognizes but can’t quite place. The men beg the Doctor for a story until he agrees to get in the chair. His bravery is ill-judged, however, when the gown is laid and a painful current passes through his body.
Convulsing, the Doctor begs to be released. Yet the men implore him to speak, so he tells them that there is “nothing more vivid than an ordinary life” and about a generic day for Belinda working in the hospital. The story has great power, Abena notes excitedly, filling the batteries up but leaving the Doctor weak. Omo tells the Barber that he should just use the Doctor’s stories and let the other men go, and it dawns on the Doctor that this is why he has been brought here.
Hurt, betrayal, and anger flash in the Doctor’s face all at once; I’ve not had a problem with Gatwa’s tears in the series so far, but here I’m really glad we could see other, more nuanced emotions intermingle. “I trusted you with both of my hearts, with everything that I am,” he tells Omo. But when he tries to break them out of the barber and opens the door, a powerful force threatens to suck them away as it’s revealed that the shop is traveling on a giant spider.
“What the hell is this?” shouts the Doctor before yanking the door shut. Inside, the Barber explains that the shop is both in Lagos and in space simultaneously and that what he saw was the Nexus (or as it was cheekily named at one time, the WorldWideWeb). As if to prove a point, Belinda bursts in from the streets of Lagos, in search of the Doctor after the noise in the TARDIS threatened to pop her eardrums. She instantly identifies the men from the missing-people posters outside, while they recognize her from his story.
Having had enough of the Barber’s glowering (you can feel the power of Bakare’s leering glare through the screen), the Doctor brands him a “coward” and even takes aim at his “awful haircuts.” In response, the Barber tells him that he is many different gods, the corresponding art works on the screen showing Anansi, Bastet, Dionysus, even Loki. “I have been them all in many cultures, in many worlds,” he darkly roars as he violently chops off his own hair. “This is my domain.”
This could seem like a scary addition to the pantheon of gods were it not for the Doctor and Belinda bursting into shared laughter. The Barber is lying, the Doctor says. He knows those gods; he once lost a bet to marry one of Anansi’s daughters, and has even watched Marvel movies (a cheeky inner-Disney nod) with another. “I know the gods; you are not them,” he says.
Now weaker and struggling to maintain eye contact, the Barber concedes. He did create the gods—sort of. The man was once a human with a penchant for storytelling, and the gods grew out of this oral tradition, so the Barber built the Nexus to connect their stories. But when it learned to work without him, the gods threw him out. The Barber was only able to salvage the story engine and now is desperate for vengeance.
Other questions hang in the air: What’s Abena’s role in all this and how does the Doctor know her? The Doctor connects the web strands in his mind, as she tells him that she is the daughter of Anansi who previously hoped the Doctor would have helped her escape her tyrannical father only to be left behind. As the camera pans between Abena’s head, Gatwa’s Doctor is replaced with Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, who speaks to Abena directly.
So much has been written about Martin’s character in the Doctor Who canon since she first appeared on the show in 2020 that doesn’t need repeating here. But love or hate the character, you can’t deny the power of Martin(the first Black actor to play the Doctor in any form) appearing briefly alongside Gatwa (the first Black actor to play a main iteration of the character) in an episode containing an almost entirely Black cast. “I was a fugitive back then,” she tells Abena, apologizing while teasing that her own story may be finished one day.
In the here and now, however, the Barber reveals his planned final act of retribution: to sever the gods from the web. The Doctor warns Abena that doing so would lead to the destruction of the gods completely, with devastating ripple effects for humanity. “A world without stories; how would they pass on tradition?” he asks, as Belinda tries to appeal to Abena with that classic self-help adage that hurt people hurt people, adding that “the difference between good and evil is what we do with that pain.”
Finally realizing the Barber can’t be trusted, Abena picks up his clippers and pushes the Doctor into the chair. On his scalp, she weaves intricately patterned braids (a look Gatwa, of course, pulls off) while recalling how, in the age of slavery, freed slaves would go back to liberate others by secretly braiding escape route patterns in their hair. “Mothers to daughters, slave to slave, plantation to plantation,” she says, as she makes one such map for the Doctor, who admires her work, then points his screwdriver in the air and makes a dash for the door with Belinda.
Running his hands over his scalp, an act that connects him with his human ancestors, the Doctor guides them to a door behind which lies a cave of books, idols, and skulls. The aforementioned story engine centres around a wooden brain, and, upon touch, it opens like butterfly wings into an intricately stunning set of lungs with a glowing blue heart in the middle. But the Barber, having trapped Abena in the barbershop, isn’t far behind them and catches the Doctor and Belinda just as they’re pulling out wires to destroy it.
He says it’s too late to stop him from cutting off the gods. So the Doctor offers him a new story: a six-word one inspired by a run-in the Doctor had with Ernest “Hemmy, baby” Hemingway. We’ll ignore the fact that said “baby shoes” story is said to be misattributed to Hemingway, as the Doctor offers his own: “I’m born; I die; I’m born.” A screen near him lights up as footage of all the Doctor’s previous forms, proving himself to be the ultimate never-ending story. “My body is like a barbershop, all of them inside telling their stories, bickering. I will not fail them,” he states, defiantly.
The Barber is initially delighted that the engine is now connected to the Doctor, but it’s too much power; the thing will blow up. The Doctor orders him to release the people from the shaking barbershop and he does so, but refuses to leave with the Doctor. Never one to let a reformed villain die, the Doctor implores him to follow. “I want you to live,” he says. “Don’t let this be how your story ends.”
Back on the streets of Lagos, the missing men, Abena, and Belinda run out of the shop and wait with baited breath outside, until the Doctor and the Barber finally burst out. The spider threatens to follow them too, but with a blast of the Sonic it is sucked back inside and engulfed in flames within the Nexus. The men lay before Abena’s feet in thanks, then run off to their long-lost loved ones, while the Barber crouches on the floor, a shell of a man.
Deeply ashamed of his behaviour, Omo apologises to the Doctor who, of course, forgives him. The pair share a snappy handshake, and Omo pays that kindness forward, giving the Barber his shop and even telling him he should choose his father’s name to go by. It’s a satisfying ending, tight and well-timed, with the Doctor promising to return for a haircut in the future. Who knows how many stories he’ll have collected by then.
Stray observations
- • A major criticism of the Mrs. Flood mystery is that we don’t know enough about her to really care about her identity, so I’m torn by her barely notable appearance in this episode. Like, I don’t particularly want to see her, but we probably should have more of her than this. Is anyone else conflicted?
- • The kid spotted by Belinda outside the barbershop then brought up again to the Doctor feels like it’s going to be relevant. The Doctor said it could be “stories leaking out.” Mysterious….
- • Again, you have to give it to the production-design teams here. The scenes on the streets of Lagos might have been short—and granted, I’ve not spent any time in Nigeria—but they felt so fully realized.
