What’s the Episode? The Story and The Engine
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor lands in Nigeria so he can go hang out in a barber shop with his friend Omo (Sule Rimi), leaving Belinda to cool her heels in the TARDIS. The barber shop has, however, been taken over by The Barber, who has abducted Omo and a few others. The barber, alongside a woman called Abby (Michelle Asante), is using them to power a mysterious engine with the power of stories which the abducted men are compelled to tell. Trying to leave the shop, the Doctor discovers it is both in Nigeria and on the back of a giant spider simultaneously. Fed up of not being in the episode, Belinda eventually arrives and gets caught too.
The Barber reveals he is a storyteller who spread stories of the Gods but received no credit so now wants revenge. The Doctor also figures out that Abby is in fact Abena, someone he met (and abandoned) when he was the Fugitive Doctor – she’s also looking for revenge. The Barber wants to reach the centre of the spider’s web to cut off the gods from the web and killing them, which the Doctor things will destabilise all human culture (or something). Abenda changes her mind on the revenge thing and – via braiding – gives the Doctor a map to the engine’s power source. The Doctor links the engine to his story which overloads it, the Barber is persuaded to let everyone go free, and everyone escapes. Omo retires, the Barber gets the (now normal) shop and Abby goes and gets on with her life.
Is It Any Good? It’s effortlessly the most inventive story we’ve had this season, that’s beyond doubt. There are some real efforts to push at the boundaries of what Doctor Who is capable of doing and that’s always something to be applauded. The story is far from perfect but it has a range and ambition that’s all to rare in this incarnation of the show and it makes a big difference when watching these episodes in sequence.
Visual storytelling isn’t something this era of Doctor Who has been especially good at but “The Story And The Engine”‘s “magic window” – telling stories in animation – is a real revelation and demonstrates just what can be done when the show thinks outside the box. The pre-titles scene of the Doctor turning up to put out a fire, all delivered in voiceover and animation, is a terrific sequence, and immediately gives the impression that this story is going to go about things differently. While the sequence isn’t without precedent (“Can You Hear Me”, from Jodie’s second season, does pretty much the same thing) it’s still bracingly fresh, and it’s used just the right amount in the episode – enough that it really adds to the flavour of the episode without being overused or screaming, “here’s our gimmick!”.
And the Barber, also, is a pleasingly different type of villain and is gifted with unusual motivation, always the sign of a good opponent for the Doctor. He just wants credit for his work – no universal domination, taking over planets for the sake of it or whatever. This does boil to wanting revenge but at least there’s something interesting behind it. Sule Rimi gives a terrific performance throughout the episode, by turns terrifying, pitiable and, finally, even likeable or at the very least understandable. It’s a fantastic turn and one that could very easily have fallen apart into either scenery chewing or who-cares but Rimi handles it expertly.
And the Barber’s desire for revenge parallels Abena’s, though she wants revenge on the Doctor for having been cast aside. It’s kind of fascinating to get a little Fugitive Doctor cameo here (especially the way she casually remarks that she’s busy being in someone else’s story) and probably not what anybody expected. For the few seconds she’s on screen, Jo Martin is as wonderful as always, and if the Fugitive Doctor is one of the best innovations of the Chibnall era, which it’s probably fair to say she is, then it’s great to see her revisited here. A little goes a long way. Now, if you want to say Abena’s change of allegiance to save the Doctor is a little plot-convenient then that’s not unfair but she’s still a strong character that comes over well.
As with “The Well”, Ncuti benefits from a more tamped down performance as well. His friendship with Omo feels like it has a bit of depth to it, though obviously this isn’t a character that we have come across before, and Gatwa does a good job of making the relationship feel lived in. He gets a few moments that carry real power – such as when he attaches the Doctor’s story to the Engine – that give him the chance to feel properly Doctorish (and get a series of clips into the bargain). And the Doctor unexpectedly laughing in the Barber’s face when the Barber claims to be a succession of different gods, from Anasi to Thor, is another fantastic moment from him, immediately subverting the supposed seriousness of the situation but in a way that feels entirely consistent for this Doctor.
It’s worth mentioning the setting as well. Nigeria – and the city of Lagos – isn’t somewhere the show has ever gone before and it’s pleasing to see this expansion of locations. Doctor Who has been fairly Africa-averse – unless you want to count something like the first couple of minutes of “Pyramids of Mars” or a bit of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” but let’s not – and seeing the show expand the range of Earthbound locations can only ever be a good thing. The recreation doesn’t extend much beyond a few streets and a barber shop but it still looks great and feels of a piece with this era of the show in the same way that visiting India in “Demons of the Punjab” feels right for that era. When the Doctor was meant to have forged this friendship with Omo is perhaps a question best not lingered on (after he hastily moved on from Ruby at the end of Season One to hang around with someone more interesting, perhaps?) but the setting really adds something to the episode.
So yes, there are plenty of good things to be found here. It’s not all perfect, as we shall see, but when this episode works it really works. There’s attention, care, and time put into making this feel like a convincing location, the Doctor (and Gatwa’s toned-down performance) fit well, and Belinda, though largely sidelined for the second episode in a row, is still perfectly fine. Good acting, good setting, interesting villains, and a novel way of telling stories – should all be great, right?
Would You Recommend It? Yes but there are definitely big caveats to that. Because despite all the positivity above, there are big flaws here as well that stop it from quite becoming excellent. And one of them is the basic premise – a story about stories. It always rings alarm bells when writers start talking about the importance of writing. Even putting aside how self-serving that is, “the power of stories is the real power” is pretty hacky and a lot of this episode feels very Neil Gaiman in a way that probably isn’t helpful these days, given what he’s been accused of (the invocation of Anasi here is especially unhelpful/unfortunate in this regard, though it’s a lot more appropriate for episode writer Inua Ellams to be invoking Anasi than Gaiman). It’s not even especially unusual in the world of Doctor Who – recall Matt Smith sighing, “we’re all stories in the end” – which undercuts at least some of what the episode is going for.
Another massive problem with the episode is what’s not in it, which is queerness. That the episode is set in Nigeria is great – a genuinely new location for Doctor Who. However, Nigeria is also one of the worst places in the world for LGBTQIA+ people to live. Homosexuality is outlawed, some parts of the country have the death penalty for gay people, and conditions are, at best, horrific. This version of the show has been extremely queer-forward and yet when it goes to somewhere where that forwardness might really matter, it’s entirely absent. This is, to put it mildly, terrible. The show simply drops its progressive politics when it gets in the way or when it might a real opportunity to have bite or comment on a situation. That has the unfortunate implication that the rest of the “agenda” really is just virtue signalling, to be quietly put away when it’s inconvenient. We know this isn’t the case – it’s RTD, after all – but it’s an appalling decision not to mention or refer to it at all. And from this Doctor? Who declares repeatedly how “welcome” he feels? It’s horribly jarring.
(As a small sidebar, some fans have mentioned that as there was a Sex Education episode about this, with Gatwa’s character having to hide his sexuality when visiting Nigeria, this somehow means that Doctor Who doesn’t need to address the issue. Er, no. Aside from the fact you shouldn’t rely on another show to do the heavy lifting for yours, it also presupposes that a general audience would be aware of that. Which isn’t the case, including this reviewer.)
Gatwa’s performance noticeably also carries much less of his usual queer signifiers – “honey”, “darling” and general camping it up – and while a more restrained performance is to his benefit, he still managed to slip some of that in to the otherwide-more-serious “The Well”, so it’s possible for him to be a little more restrained without losing those elements of queerness within his performance. It’s all deeply frustrating.
The episode also really, really wants you to buy into the whole Gods thing. Which, if you do, is great because there’s a sense of the episode trying to have at least some understanding of why this matters. Unfortunately, all the talk of gods in this episode isn’t ever really linked to the Pantheon the era keeps banging on about. Is Anasi in some way related to Lux? Maybe Sutekh? Don’t go looking for answers here because you won’t be getting them. Which is also frustrating – this episode is literally about drawing connections between stories, made physical by the spider’s web. Yet we have the Pantheon on one side, the gods of this episode on the other, and nothing to join them except the vague sense that they ought to be and the word “gods”. In truth, the show isn’t coming close to landing any sort of interest in the Pantheon and while as an episode this is a step above a lot of what we’ve had, there’s still the same lingering sense that this just isn’t quite territory that suits Doctor Who.
No, that’s not quite right. This episode suits Doctor Who and indeed rather well. It’s not a million miles away from, say, “Amy’s Choice”, “The Doctor’s Wife” or even “Warrior’s Gate”, all of which use abstractions and metaphor to tell their story. As a one-shot, this would be considerably better. But it’s all dragged down in an era that seems determined to push Doctor Who into Actual Fantasy rather than science fiction. I don’t want to get completely get into the argument about whether Doctor Who is science fiction or fantasy here but generally, Doctor Who has always erred on the side of science, if not science fiction. That’s how the show started, with little scientific nuggets for kids thrown into the Hartnell era, for example. Think of the Third Doctor rejecting magic wholesale in “The Daemons” or how the Fourth Doctor taught Leela to believe in science over superstition.
But, with gods and spilled salt at the edge of the universe and whatnot, the show is now explicitly invoking magic in a way it’s never done before. If this were some exploration of Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and how that works in the Doctor Who universe that would be one thing but we haven’t had any hint of that. We just have gods and magic and are expected to take it at face value. And while we probably will get some explanation for all this (and Mrs Flood’s fourth-wall breaking and mavity and the rest) at this point it’s a baffling choice. The Pantheon just cut against the grain of what Doctor Who has been – Sutekh was explicitly not a god in his original appearance, Doctor Who has general taken a von Däniken approach to gods in mythology, Azal in “The Daemons” isn’t a god etc. Even the Gods of Ragnarok in “The Greatest Show In The Galaxy” never refer to themselves that way and are so abstracted (they’re clearly a stand-in for both the audience and BBC executives) as to actively require a misreading to take them as literal gods. The Doctor doesn’t understand what The Beast is in “The Impossible Planet” / “The Satan Pit” but the implied conclusion is that it’s a creature the Doctor just doesn’t comprehend – it’s not literally supernatural or an actual Devil.
You get the idea. The question is, how far does a show have to drift from its original conception to not really be the same show any more? And while Doctor Who hasn’t quite reached that point yet, it’s starting to nudge up against it. I think that’s why there’s been such disquiet among longer-term fans of the show with this era – because it’s slowly but surely jettisoning the things that actually make Doctor Who the thing Doctor Who actually is. The sins of the Chibnall era are easy to elucidate – patchy writing and stupid fanwank, for the most part – but it never drifted this far from the core of what Doctor Who is. Maybe we’ll get a rollback of this, maybe it’ll be some great, grand master plan (but hopefully not a Master plan) and it will be all resolved in a way that actually makes sense but I’m not confident. Also, at least so far, the problem with the Pantheon is simply that they’re boring. And much worse than galactic domination or whatever it is they want (what do they want?) that’s the real sin that can’t be forgiven. They’re not interesting. They’re not intriguing. And they barely feel like they’re even part of the show, despite one of them being the Big Season Finale.
So look, none of that is this episode’s fault. In isolation, this episode works fairly well. There’s a few other flaws, like the Doctor’s initial fury at Omo because he’s been “betrayed” when that’s clearly not what happens, or the fact that apart from Omo none of the other people caught in the barber shop have any real distinguishing features whatsoever. And the whole “world wide web” being a spider web is just fucking stupid when it’s trying to be clever. But fine, it’s Doctor Who – you can roll with those sorts of things. But seen in sequence, this seems like another attempt to link in with this era’s “theme” and it’s as fumbled here as it elsewhere.
So good, and yes on its own fairly easy to recommend. Which is more than can be said for the show itself at this point.
Scores on the Doors? 7/10
JG Judgementally Comments... 