The Interstellar Song Contest: Ranking n/a (but #140ish)

 

 

 "Interstellar Song Contest, The” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 6, Dr 15 with Belinda, 17/5/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Juno Dawson, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director:  Ben A Williams)

Ranking: #N/A but #140ish reviewed 18/5/2025

 

‘Hello and welcome to the two Ranis. In a fully packed programme tonight we have the genetic scientist who was late to work because he was too busy making up his mind…and topping it up with some Tetrap brains [ta boom thh!] What did the genetic say to her experiment’s chromosomes? You need to get in line and follow the correct sequence! [ta boom thh!]  What do you call it when a neuroscientist is about to unleash a really successful plan to take over the world one gene at a time?  A cell-abration! [ta boom thh!]  Next, Mrs Flood in a sketch where she brings death upon the whole universe. Wat-er way to go!...  

Greetings ladies, gentleman, Alpha Centauris, Doosbury Giants and others, to the greatest show on Earth, the Intergalactic Song Contest! Wait, what’s that? Everyone else is at the Interstellar Song Contest? You could have told me! Now I’m not saying Russell T is copying me or anything but the Eurovision is such a perfect setting for a scifi series I had the idea too  and wrote ‘my’ version five years ago (quick plug: it’s ‘Insurgence’, book two of the ‘Kindred Spirits’ series and if you happen to be reading this the day or the day after this review goes up then it’s still available for FREE! amzn.to/4bZ1VOR Along with another seven scifi-romance-comedy-adventure-philosophy books to read. Well, a writer’s gotta keep himself in Dr Who DVDs somehow!) After all, they’ve let Australia join in nowadays, it’s not much of an extension to involve aliens from outer space too. Russell T Davies no doubt saw the same things in it that I did when he commissioned this story from new writer Juno Dawson: the sense of competition and conflict overlaid with a veneer of unity and fun as nations come together for one night, the sense of drama of not quite knowing what will happen, the fact that music and arts bring out the best in humanity and hopefully in other aliens too, allowing us to transcend barriers of language and politics to come together. It’s the time when, for one night a year, it feels as if the world is working properly the way it should, as we judge each other not for the way we look or dress or think or what our politicians demand, which is so very Dr Who. It’s like Christmas without all the tinsel and having.

Yet we’ve had a slow invasion lately. Eurovision managed to ride above politics successfully for its first fifty odd years – no matter who was at war with whom everyone tended to leave their war of words, swords, pistols and anti-matter ray guns at the door – but the past decade things have changed. With such a big platform (the biggest global outside that doesn’t revolve around sport) it’s a target for splinter groups to make their squashed voices heard and nowadays you’re as likely to come to the end of a Eurovision night relieved that everyone is still here (as much as the fact we didn’t score nul points again). Wars between Russia and Ukraine and one hand and Israel and Palestine on another have brought Europe as close to outright war as it’s been in the history of the competition. In 2018 UK singer SuRie had her performance interrupted and for a second we all expected the worst 9something sped in this year’s competition by Estonia’s ‘mock’ stage invasion while Tommy Cash sings a deliberately harmless song about the wonders of coffee). It’s a night when peace should reign, but war is more often than not waiting in the wings these days, despite anything political being banned in song (even so we got an awful lot of songs about being depressed and lonely and scared this year, while the UK entry was an escapist song about getting drunk to forget your problems and missing a shoe, or something. I don’t know, I was too busy grooving to Latvia. Ireland – with a very Dr Whoy song about Laika the dog the Russians sent into space – were the true winners but were robbed and didn’t make it out the semi-finals).

Things are changing in Europe so quick that even our night of fun feels infected these days. How do you solve a problem like this? Well, in my universe the different planets come together to form an intergalactic peace orchestra that raises the issues that ordinary people can’t see peacefully, with a series of protests led by a filibustering Clandusprod (Okay, I’ll stop plugging my own work now, honest). In the Whoniverse, though, even the Doctor struggles to patch things up when a group of horned Hellia take over the space station and decide to evict the people watching into deep space and use a signal to kill the ‘three trillion’ people watching at home (they’ve clearly been watching ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ where The Wire planned to do this in one poxy country with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which is hardly in the same league. Although that said three trillion people really isn’t very much at all if the whole universe is  meant to be watching. The viewing figures must be in a terminal decline the next few thousand years to be that low). Everyone appears to die, including The Doctor at first and Dr Who goes impressively far for the supposedly ’jokey’ episode in pushing that button. Think again, it pleads to any viewers watching who wants to put politics above fun or people who inflict cruelty on others, because this is where it ends up. It’s a theme that’s been running across series two of the Disney years, that cruelty begats cruelty and that if you hurt someone they often feel they have no choice but to hurt someone else to feel more ‘powerful’. That cycle has to stop somewhere or things will just go on for perpetuity getting worse, the trick being to thaw the ice someone puts in your heart rather than stabbing someone else with it in a warm fever of anger. That’s why Russell created the bi-regenerated Doctor, to allow Dr 14 to spend a lifetime healing and take away some of the Doctor’s darkness and angst. So far Dr 15 has been merrily breezing through life for the most part, yet still things keep happening to make him angry and this story is where he finally snaps, with a darker nastier cruel streak to this Doctor we’ve never seen before and, even if his actions are justified in some ways, we’re in ‘The Runaway Bride’ territory all over again as The Doctor only stops when someone else stops him. In the face of so much anger, so much hate, so much callousness, even he forgets his Doctory vow to do no harm and ‘The War Doctor’ from the time wars peeps uncomfortably out from behind his shoulder all over again. The real crux of this story comes when the terrorist Kid is told ‘You’re a monster’ to which he retorts ‘That’s what people have said to me my whole life -  I’m only doing the things you expect of me’. It’s the same when migrants are parked into the edge of towns and told to be lucky they’re living in slums and excluded from society – one day one of them is going to lash out at the unfairness and injustice of it all. If you get told you’re bad just for existing and it doesn’t matter how much good you do then of course a number of people are just going to be bad. In other words putting perhaps the two campest television programmes together doesn’t make for the big party fans were expecting, but instead kind of cancel each other out.

To understand how we get here, though, first a history lesson – two in fact. This story makes most sense when you realise that, for a second story in a row, Ncuti was pushing to make it or at any rate suggested it. His family come from Rwanda and fled to Britain when he was small when genocide broke out there. The local caste known as the Tuthi were all but wiped out during a two year attack that left the world in horror (it’s one of the first times post WWII that showed up how powerless the rest of the world was, not wanting to intervene in a ‘local’ conflict that could easily have broken into all-out war. I remember lots of charity singles and fundraising but not much practical political help). Ncuti isn’t acting when he taps into the darker side of this Doctor as he is so disgusted by seeing murder firsthand, he’s remembering, which gives his performance an extra power this week (all the more for coming after a scene where he’s saved himself by using the burst from a confetti canon – a homage to the equally unscientific scene of the 5^th Doctor using a cricket ball in ‘Four To Doomsday’ but somehow more atheistically pleasing). The story also makes more sense when you know a bit of Eurovision history. People have debated long and hard whether Israel should be allowed to compete after their ongoing war (genocide?) of Palestine when Russia were (rightly) kicked out for invading Ukraine. Like all these things, it’s complicated. This wasn’t a sudden unprovoked war the way the Russian one was but one that’s lasted longer than Eurovision or indeed Dr Who. Where do you draw the line? Pro-Israelis will also tell you that it’s because Palestine caused the biggest amount of casualties in one go (the October 7 massacre) and this story makes so much more sense if you remember that that was another music festival, when Israelis (and guests) were enjoying themselves and thinking about peace not war (though whether a music festival should have been held so close to the frontlines of a war is another matter; even so, that’s the organiser’s ‘fault’ not the attendees). Even so, after Israel retaliated in such a colossal way, all but determined to exterminate all Palestinians, it’s made their attendance at a music festival meant traditionally to promote peace a little…uncomfortable. All the more so when you learn that one of Eurovision’s biggest sponsors is MorroconOil, an Israeli company. Who wiped out a grove of Palestinian olive trees to dig for oil, just as the poor Helions’ world is destroyed for crops .

So what we have is a metaphorical story that explores complex politics in a very Dr Who way, that doesn’t just have one point of view but juggles several at once. At first it’s obvious: the Helions are bad, pure and simple. All those poor innocent people who were only trying to enjoy themselves! And it’s a horrible way to go times two, either freeze-dried in the unforgiving echelons of space or destroyed with a delta wave (last seen in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’) while watching your TV Of course the terrorists are wrong. And just look at them, they even have horns! That Kid is clearly a horrible being too, unforgivably smug and righteous. And then he does something that terrorists aren’t meant to do: he freezes for a second when he gives the final order and suddenly he looks like the little ‘kid’ he is (a really clever name choice, making him both innocent and like Billy the Kidd, who was a mass murderer despite the romantic image), before screwing up his eyes and clearly remembering what ‘the Humans’ have done to him and going ahead with it. The more we hear of his background, too, the more we understand: his people had little anyway but even that was taken away by conquering forces. His own mother was killed by these interlopers before she even had time to give her son a name, which is why he’s just a ‘kid’. They’re exactly the sort of people The Doctor would help overthrow their tyrant masters had he met them earlier in their story (‘Colony In Space’ is perhaps the best match). Things get even more complicated when sweet kindly Cora, who really looks after Belinda when she thinks The Doctor is dead (something that seems to be true for so long you really begin to wonder…) reveals that she’s a Helion who had her horns cut off and everyone treats her differently because of prejudice. So even though we’ve been willing The Doctor on to go take revenge and stop all this killing, when he finally gets there and goes into peak ranty mode, talking about the ice that’s in his heart, you’re conflicted. And then, when The Doctor starts attacking Kid, physically giving him pain, you don’t know where to look. I mean, you understand and everything but, not like this Doctor. You don’t understand. You don’t know the full picture.   
To quote this year’s UK entry ‘What the hell just happened?’

 And that’s where this story works best, by making you sit up and think when you weren’t expecting to, showing that sometimes when Humans make things complicated for themselves there is no right or wrong, or at least only wrong that begats wrong that begats wrong. It’s the tale of quite a few stories this year from the spurned boyfriend Al to the Midnight monster to the UNIT-baiting Conrad, though this story makes it even more explicit than usual. For how far back in the Israeli-Palestine conflict do you go? The first stone thrown in anger? The first injury? The first death? The war keeps going and escalating and one day we’ll wake up and three trillion people will be dead. I’ve seen a lot of fans complaining that this scene with The Doctor made them sick and uncomfortable, that it was jarring, as if it’s the product of bad writing. But you’re meant to feel like that. This is a timelord who thinks he’s the last of his kind (even if we seem to see more timelords around in the modern series post time war than we did in the old when Gallifrey was still around!) The Doctor hates feeling like this, the same way he felt watching his people die. But he’s only ‘Human’ for lack of a better word, he’s going to get triggered like anyone else. To him the Helions are just the Daleks all over again and nothing is worth death. It’s very clever. At last, after decades of wanting to see something like this, Dr Who is doing a ‘political’ story in a ‘Blake’s 7’ way (the sister series created by Terry ‘Dalek’ Nation) where what one side calls ‘terrorists’ are really ‘freedom fighters’ to the people they’re trying to save, neither good nor bad (I mean, Servalan is wickedness personified, the love child of Putin and Thatcher if you can imagine such a thing, and the empire are under tight control, but at least they’re safe and fed. You cheer for Blake and co rescuing political prisoners who merely pointed this out but, nevertheless, for ‘goodies’ they don’t half create a lot of headaches and supply problems for the majority of people just trying to live their best life).  It’s done a bit clumsier than it perhaps could have been in places (I wish Belinda had pulled a Steven or an Ace and properly told The Doctor off, passing some of that same anger on to him and physically clawing him off Kid; talking about how scary he looked for a second doesn’t cut it as deeply. Equally I wanted Kid to break, to call for his mum, to say after The Doctor’s attack he knows firsthand now how his family felt, something to change The Doctor’s mind and make him uncomfortable). Yet equally, of course The Doctor’s anger is justified: he nearly died, his friend was nearly stranded, so many people around him died. No cause is ever ever ever worth another death, even if its revenge for a death caused to someone close to you. Dr Who has never believed in an eye for an eye so to see the Doctor turn his cheeks in flared anger you know how far he’s been pushed. Above all else it’s exactly what Dr Who is for, exaggerating and explaining what is going on in our everyday world in a way that doesn’t not take sides but takes every side in turn and it’s incredibly brave for the BBC to not only agree to put this sort of controversial story out but air it directly before their own Eurovision coverage when it’s such an obvious parallel. ‘It’s just a bunch of songs’ says medic Mike. ‘It’s so much more than that’ says Gary. They could have been talking about this story. Douze points for courage this week then.

If you’re a Eurovision fan then it’s also heartwarming to see the attention to detail that really does make this feel like your typical Eurovision contest. They get the endless arm waving and goofy smiles worn by almost every contestant spot on. There are cameos by a freeze-dried Rylan Clark and Graham Norton – the former is a well known paid up Whovian who’s made no secret of wanting to be in the series playing something, while the later has interviewed all the Doctors since the comeback and has a notorious reputation amongst the fandom (when a trailer ‘rehearsal’ for a rare ‘live show’ went out accidentally during the opening seconds of all-important comeback ‘Rose’. Graham apologises for it – again – in this week’s ‘Unleashed’ even though it was a technician’s fault not his and says he’s grateful he didn’t accidentally swear). Both are fine, though Graham seems an odd choice for an exposition-giving computer programme  (is this a joke about Norton anti virus filters? In which case I did that gag first too in an April Fool’s Day issue over on sister site Alan’s Album Archives) though Ryan steals the show with his deadpan humour which sounds exactly like something he would say, especially the self-depreacting line in humour (and I’ve been following his career since he used to get scared of ghosts doing ‘Most Haunted Live’). I really like the idea that they’ve been cobbled together from people’s memories of Earth (because of course surviving Humans are going to remember pop culture like this more than anything else). The little pods that the different alien groups sit in are exactly like space-age versions of where the contestants sit now (a more interesting detail than you might think: the design makes it easier for security to see if a protest has broken out and if need to be to shut down a certain portion of the studio to save the majority in case of a full terrorist attack). The two contestants we do see too are superb: the entrant from the planet Lizzoko looking like a cross between a teletubby and one of the delegates from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, gives a wonderful performance of a very Eurovisiony song ‘I Love you but my heart says nooooooo!’ while the Flamingo-like ‘Dugadoo’, a cross between The Birdie Song 'Agadoo' and the Macarena, was the best interstellar entry this millennium! 

The one thing I wish is that there had been so much more of them and many other contestants too. I kind of know why – a combination of budget, time and the fact that when they tried doing this sort of thing with the music festival in ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’ it ended up as one of the stupidest and most hated Who stories of all (what are the odds that two stories in a row should steal plot elements from that unloved, wretched story?) But this is different: the darker elements of that story were shoe-horned in at the end whereas in this story it would have punctuated the serious moments, been light relief and a reminder of the fun people gathered here to have. The terrorist attack takes place more or less at once before the viewer has had tie to settle in and acclimatise. With the Disney money and shooting these episodes so far in advance (this one was made at the start of 2024 so they’ve had nearly eighteen months to edit) they could have really pushed the boat out and filled the place with aliens. It could have been like ‘The End Of The World’ with even more money and more aliens! Plus it worked really well when Dr Who tried this before. Because, yes, this isn’t the first Dr Who Eurovision crossover strange as that might seem. We’ve included the details in the ‘prequels’ section below, but ‘Bang-Bang-A-Boom!’ is pretty similar all round to this story, with tales of a terrorist attack and a walking bomb, even if it’s all handled in a much sillier manner. The best thing about that story, though, wasn’t the plot it was all the different planets we meet or see again for the first time in long time, the charming little cameos that really sold the fact we were in a future where millions of planets had come together (the voting must go on even longer than the original!) For all the clever CGI, multiplying the usual number of extras to make  it look like a giant dome-full, you don’t get that same sense of scale with ‘Interstellar’.

I wish, too, that more had been found for Belinda to do. She’s been rather badly served this series so far she’s been shunted to the side in ‘The Well’ and ‘The Story and The Engine’ and barely featured in ‘Lucky Day’ at all, while her appearance in this story resulted in a sweet story about staying up to watch Eurovision in her pyjamas (me too, Belinda, me too), a bunch of hysterical sobbing and a tiny bit of nursing. She doesn’t get any one big moment and even her joyful reunion with The Doctor feels a bit under=-sold compared to what it could have been. If this is the end of the road for her after the finale and assuming she appears properly in that (not a given) then that’s precisely four stories she’s played a proper role in, the first two and the last two. Even Ruby fared better than that. And talking of which I’ve wondered  for a while how sudden Mollie Gibson’s leaving really was. The fact that she got the starring part in ‘Lucky Day’ suggests there’s no problems between her and the production team and yet, since ‘Lux’, Belinda sounds far more like Ruby than the character we met in ‘The Robot Revolution’.  Never more than here either: Ruby is the emotional music fan who would love the idea of seeing other alien cultures through their songs. Belinda is a hard-nosed Doctor travelling reluctantly. I mean, people can be more than one thing at a time, but some of this sudden interest comes from nowhere. There’s also absolutely no reason why the Tardis should land here on its way to getting Belinda home – even when The Doctor fiddles with wires there’s nothing that particularly relates to this song contest he needs, so why the stop off? Go to a garage planet, there must be lots in the Whoniverse!

Then of course there’s the two big reveals for which the story is bound to be remembered above anything else, both of which ‘Interstellar’ fumbles to a degree. Look away now if you don’t want spoilers…First up, The Rani. This wasn’t really much a of a surprise. Fans had been talking about Mrs Flood being her since she first appeared and the link of ‘Flood/Rain/anagram of Rani clue seemed to make it ever more likely. Me personally? I thought that might be too obvious and that the fact she was cosplaying as The Doctor’s companions Clara and Romana suggested a return for them or River Song or some future meta God watching Dr Who that we hadn’t met yet (that might still happen, in which case you read it here first. Well, second as I think I put as lot of this in another review): I admit I’d forgotten about the Rani dressing up as Mel in ‘Time and The Rani’ (but then, shudder, who hasn’t tried to wipe that scene from their mind?) The thing is, Mrs Flood has never for a second acted like The Rani. Shes a hard-nosed scientist, uninterested in The Doctor or Earth beyond the use for her experiments. She doesn’t have the burning life-long feud with him The Master has – to her the Doctor is a bumbling idiot who gets lucky a ‘prefect’ type who keeps telling her off for being naughty. Her beef isn’t with him, she just wants to rule the universe. It’s not as if she can only rule it with The Doctor removed either: in her arrogance The Rani always thinks she can defeat The Doctor with a hand behind her back (The Master might say something similar but the difference is she believes it deep down; he’s just paying lip service). In other words travelling round the universe watching The Doctor and laughing is completely out of character for her from anything we’ve seen so far. As for the biregeneration – when it happened to The Doctor in ‘The Giggle’ it was a natural extension of that story, sold to use as a rare event that could never happen again. But if every timelord we meet is going to go through the same thing now  it robs it of its original power. Plus it feels like a copy of ‘Empire Of Death’ where the big bad we’ve been following for two series now ends up a patsy to someone else. It’s also a bit random as a reveal goes: mid-credits with The Doctor not around to witness it. Why does Mrs Flood choose that of all moments to turn schizophrenic?  I have an awful feeling, too, after watching ‘Unleashed’ that Russell didn’t know who Mrs Flood was when he wrote her and ‘gave the fans what they wanted’ after reading the fan forums. This idea of ‘clues’ is Russell’s weakest aspect as a writer. He’s trying really hard to copy the ‘didn’t see that coming’ revelations of Steven Moffat, but that’s not his strength as a writer. He’s better at emotions and delivering ‘justice’ than mystery. Once again the return to Dr Who has been bad for him as a writer if only because he has so many more toys that he wants to play with, rather than re-shaping the series to his own image as he did in 2005.

For instance, while the Rani was always the series arc that writer  Juno was asked to write to, he himself added the sudden jarring re-appearance of Susan because he felt the scene of The Doctor waking up in space needed to have something to fight for (please say The Rani doesn’t out to be the biregeneration of Susan…) On the one hand it’s very welcome and overdue – Carole Ann Ford is eighty five now and more deserving of a re-appearance than anyone. Weirdly she’d never actually met Russell before her invite to the ‘Star Beast’ premiere re-launch in 2023 and unlike some other ex companions she’s always been keen to come back, jumping at the chance when Russell offered it to her. They did well to keep this quiet too: there have been a few other leaks and spoilers this year but this was something they managed to keep entirely quiet (unless I just never came across that a particular leak). It really is a surprise and sort of works, both as a ‘life passing through your eyes’ moment for The Doctor and for appearing in an episode about a ‘family’ event like Eurovision. the thing is though, The Doctor wouldn’t remember Susan the way she is ‘now’ and it’s handled ever so weirdly: is the Doctor remembering or is it a hallucination or a message? He never stops to tell us even though that last conversation with Belinda at the end would have been the perfect time. I hope to goodness we do see Susan again and that wasn’t it too because at the moment it seems like a colossal waste of her time and ours (though she might well be in the finale to come).

Overall, then, I admire this story more than I love it. The central idea is so strong and so courageous that I can forgive ‘Interstellar’s flaws but they are very much there and do get in this story’s way a little (though the BBC might well have chickened out of letting Ncuti speak as our official UK votegiver, with the actor announced and pulled within the same week, perhaps out of fears of what a no-holds-barred actor might say about Israel’s participation. Although he or somebody close to him might just be sick to be fair. He was replaced by singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the daughter of Janet Ellis, who was in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, so at least it’s kept in the family. Sort of). The pacing, for instance, is super weird: every scene takes too long and the story is resolved with a full fifteen minutes ago, time we could have spent seeing more music at the beginning rather than messing around with The Rani. If we’d had more sense of the horror of being lost in space, or the anger of the people returned, or a pre-credits scene of Helios being harvested for flavouring (why did they burn the planet? Don’t the corporation  want to grow more?), how Kid ended up the way he did, or more Cora (I really like Cora: you should be cheering her on singing despite the prejudice against her much more than you do) or more time spent trying to find the Tardis that have it materialise happily on an asteroid (again?!)  this episode could have been the best of the year – instead it’s another of the Disney era ‘nearly’ stories, a re-write away from greatness. Watching it felt, indeed, not unlike the Eurovision proper and the weird voting system which means everyone gets scored twice, once by a jury and once by the public, so the entire first half hour of scoring can be made null and void in an instant: it seems fun until the end re-writes everything you thought you knew (the public have no taste: every year I agree with the jury and think the public vote is hopelessly out of touch, although it might just be me that’s out of touch instead). There’s enough to keep the central story ticking over though and there’s some really good acting this week, from Ncuti’s switch from fun and games to dark brooding anger (so McCoylike!) to Freddie Fox making Kid more than just the pantomime villain he could have been. Some nice lines too: of course The Doctor was there in 1974 when Abba won with ‘Waterloo’! Rylan being asked for ‘awe’ and going ‘aww’. Though Kid’s favourite genre being ‘pop’ just as the dome opens is crass not funny and not in character and the Doctor’s cheesy comment ‘I thought it was my ‘Waterloo’ but it turns out it’s my ‘Rise Like A Phoenix’ was so bad it had me throwing things at the telly). I have to say next week, with the ‘screaming sound of May 24^th, was deliciously scary and one of the series’ better end-of-story-clidffhangers. The overall score from the Alonsy Aliens Archives jury then? Huit points – enough to put this story bronze for the season so far, in the top half of Who stories without being amongst the true best. Oh and if you want to know who won the revised Interstellar Song Contest when they ran it a week later Lux won it with a lovely rendition of ‘Love, Shine A Light’ closely beating The Tractators with ‘Diggy-Loo Diggy-Lay’, The Face of Boe’s ‘Satellite Five’ and Cliff Richard’s duet with Servalan, who’s ‘Maximum Power To All My Friends’ was so bad it accidentally created a hole in the universe that caused the deaths of ten trillion people.

POSITIVES + Dugadoo is Murray Gold’s masterpiece. No, seriously. He came up with this fab little catchy ear-worm on his own time, after delivering ‘hearts Says Noooo’ as the episode’s centrepiece and sent the soundtrack to everyone’s inbox for a joke. Murray is always at his worst when up against it and feeling the pressure of having to score a big emotional scene but here he sounds genuinely inspired. The decision of the production team to invent a whole race for this song is fabulous too: we need more fun aliens like Dugadoos and it looks just alien enough to work, yet also recognisably to Flamingos what Terrileptils are to turtles or Karvanistas are to dogs. If we’d entered this as our Eurovision entry we’d have won easily.  Although there would have had to have been a century delay while we terraform a planet and breed sentient flamingos.

NEGATIVES -  That’s a second ‘Space Babies’ reference in a row and yet it seems random in the extreme. What have the babies to do with honey? It also fails to follow on from the random sight of Baby Poppy in ‘The Story and The Engine’ which hasn’t been explained at all. It could be that Russell is writing the series finale around the space babies, perhaps having their storytelling machine the focal point of this year and spreading them across the rest of the Doctor’s recent history ‘Bad Wolf’ style. In which case…No. Just no. Please don’t have the biregeneration be because the Space Babies want stories. Or that the ‘timeless child’ is a Space Babies creation. If you do Russell Im going to spit my dummy out and wah wah wahhhhh [carries on for another six paragraphs] .  

BEST QUOTE: Gary: ‘To do that you’d need to be some sort of insane genius’ ‘Hello, I’m the Doctor!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: All stand please for the Earth national anthem! (How did we ever get it together long enough to pick just one?!) For no, this is not Dr Who’s first rodeo with Eurovision. It was also the backdrop for a lovably eccentric 7^th Doctor Big Finish audio ‘Bang-Bang-A-Boom!’(2002), #39 in the main Dr Who range. Co-written by two of Who’s funniest writers Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman it’s rather different in feel though the plot is still close to what we got on screen, despite dating back to those happy far-off days when political voting meant giving your nearest neighbours douze points so they didn’t invade you, rather than working out which country you were at war and cutting an arms deal with. Like ‘Interstellar’ it takes part on a space station (Dark Space 8 – as close as they can get to the Star Trek name, with lots of jokes at the franchise – such as Dr Harcourt’s longwinded ‘captain’s log’), with Mel (of course it’s Mel!) asking to go see it. Once again the Tardis turns up at just the ‘wrong’ time, as the story is a sort of Whodunnit where people keep dying, with the McCoy Doctor trying to work out whether it’s a terrorist threat, a rogue record company or a music hater. The difference is that they contestants are all so nasty you’re kind of cheering them on as the writers offer up lots of cheeky caricatures from the then-new idea of music reality TV shows, with a Simon Cowell soundalike, a smug popstar (the Doctor and Mel are the only people in the cosmos who haven’t heard of him, apparently) and lots of irritating contestants talking about their ‘journey’ and so on. The main threat comes from a contestant who’s swallowed a bomb that will go off if he gets too nervous. Ooerr! Oh and The Doctor’s in love with a contestant. A real life Valkeryie with body odour issues (it’s his last romance before Dr Grace and Rose, so not sure what that says about his tastes!) There’s a cameo appearance by ‘Logan’, an impressionist who is a future Terry Wogan in the same sense that hologram Rylan and Graham  are playing caricatures of themselves. Best of all though: lots of very alien aliens and the sort of thing you can only do on audio (my favourite is the Golos, a big ball of sentient candyfloss! The biggest surprise: the Drahvins from ‘Galaxy 4’ make a surprise appearance with their song ‘Clone Love’!) It’s all good fun, even with the same serious message underlying it all of the minority spoiling things for the majority and Bonnie Langford especially is having a whale of a time, while McCoy gets to show his earlier silly side once again before turning dark and channelling his inner Poirot for a typical ‘I’ve gathered all of you suspects here today’ ending. You’d never call this story great art or anything but as comfort food audiobooks go it’s right up there with some of Big Finish’s best. 

Previous ‘The Story and The Engine’  next ‘Wish World/The Reality War’

 

 

The Story and The Engine: Ranking n/a/ (but #290ish)

 

 

"The Story and The Engine” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 5, Dr 15 with Belinda, 10/5/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Inua Ellams, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson**  and Vicki Delow, director: Makalla McPherson)

Ranking: #N/A but #290ish reviewed 20/4/2025

 

How the other Doctors would feel about getting their hair cut:

‘1^st Dr: ‘Just a trim please, I like it long’

2^nd Dr: ‘No thankyou, I’ll just do my usual, walk in front a hedge being trimmed’

3^rd Dr; ‘I was just talking to my other hairdresser, lovely little chap. Napoleon something or other. Bony, I said, I want a ruffle just like my shirt!’

4^th Dr:  ‘Hair? Cut? You mean it can be cut? Well I never. Would you like a jelly baby?’

5^th Dr: ‘No Adric, I will not let you ask the barber to give me a Mohican. Brave heart, Doctor…’

 6^th Dr; ‘Cut? Me? Hair? I’ll have you know Peri that my luscious locks are the delight of the universe, why on Alpha Centauri they’d pay a fortune for just one curl from the top of my head and…[carried on ad infinitum for three episodes]’

7^th Dr; ‘Yes, you’d like me to get my haircut wouldn’t you Fenric? I know your game. But I’m more than just a time lord and this is about more than just hair’.

8^th Dr: ‘Grace! I’ve just seen my self in a mirror. Aren’t I fabulous? Wanna kiss?!?’

9^th Dr: ‘Mind the ears…If you can! Ooh, fantastic!’

10^th Dr: ‘I’m the oncoming storm, the bringer of darkness and I’d like a short back and sides please. Leave the quiff at the front’.

11^th Dr: ‘Do I really have to take my fez off? Fezzes are cool, haircuts are not!’

12^th Dr: ‘Call that a haircut? A rusty Dalek with a bunged up eyestalk could do it better!’

13^th Dr: ‘I’d like haircuts for all my fam, please. I’ll just watch from here’.

14^th Dr: ‘I was the oncoming storm, the bringer of darkness…Yes, still got the quiff. How dare you, I’m not going grey!’

One of the things Russell T Davies regretted from his first stint as showrunner was not doing enough to foster new writers. The turnaround on Dr Who was so large that he just couldn’t take the risk on entrusting stories to writers who didn’t have TV experience and mentor them the way he wanted. However it’s a different matter with Disney - shorter seasons, fewer episodes and a longer gap between filming meant that everyone could breathe a bit more the second time around. However finding those writers could be hard – Russell had only ever worked amongst other TV writers and didn’t know where to go. However the creation of this story was serendipitous, in a very Jo Grant manner. Not long before Dr Who came back Russell found himself in the theatre really enjoying a play called ‘The Barbershop Chronicles’ by Nigerian writer Inua Ellams all about the importance of storytelling to communities and found himself thinking what a good story it would make, but knew Inua was really a poet who did plays on the side with no background in TV and thought that Dr Who would be too complicated a concept to explain so thought no more about it. During the making of season one, though, when he got to know Ncuti better and asked the actor what he wanted to see most he mentioned that Inua was his favourite writer and how much he would love to see a writer with that ‘feel’ on the show. Without knowing any of this Inua sent a direct message to Russell saying how much he loved the 2024 series, never expecting to hear anything back; Russell replied, surprised, saying he was thinking of contacting him. Actually Inua was a lifelong Dr Who fan who had happy childhood memories of watching 4^th Doctor stories with other local children on a projector screen in a local community hall (the big missing episode recovery of 2012, ‘The Enemy Of The World’ and ‘The Web Of Fear’, were both rediscovered in Nigeria after being screened in just this way. Which makes you wonder if a giant spider rented them out for his projector). Not being a visual writer though Inua struggled with the commission before Russell encouraged him to go back to basics and effectively put the Doctor in the middle of his play – one that even casts the same actors in similar roles.  

On paper ‘The Story and The Engine’ is exactly what Dr Who should be doing, the first time ever that Doctor Who has a story with an all black cast, while it also has a black writer and black director. After sixty-two years with most of those years made up of all white casts and production teams, it’s about time. What’s more it’s a story that makes good use of all of this, telling a story that couldn’t be told the same way by a white writer, from a different point of view. The Doctor might have been invented for English TV but the whole point of him has always been that he belongs to all of us. The best thing about the Chris Chibnall years was the way the series began to tell stories from beyond the English home counties and made the show feel global. The idea of storytelling being so important and central to our lives is a theme that goes beyond any one country too and fits well with past stories about romps in the Land of Fiction and how ‘we’re all stories in the end’, not to mention the running series arc across series two about storytelling Gods. However, as this story says, the way you tell a story makes a great deal of difference to how that story is received and it’s on that score that ‘The Story and The Engine’ falls apart, with a clunking return to the Chris Chibnall years in all the worst ways too. A static slow-moving and deeply confusing episode with yet another ‘Timeless Children’ reference that makes no sense, it’s treated like a strange cross between a stage play (with 95% of the story set in one location) and a poem (with a surreal feel to the pacing that goes for style over substance). It sticks too close to the source material, with The Doctor and especially Belinda appearing like afterthoughts that act out of character and a rubbish spider monster that’s meant to be the big baddy of the story but barely features. Watching it all in one go is a confusing experience, returning to ‘Flux’ levels of storytelling to the point where it feels as if you’ve wandered into the episode partway through and the plot points keep being thrown at you before they have a chance to breath. It’s at the point five minutes in when the baddy whips out a razor and out of nowhere natters on about Yoyo Ma your heart sinks and you go, oh…it’s going to be one of those stories.
This is one of those stories that benefits slightly if you stop watching it and stop to think about it instead, from a perspective outside the usual English one. Go into a barbers in Britain and most people won’t chat beyond a bit of opening small talk: it’s a place of quiet, something you have to do rather than something you want to do. It’s not like that in Nigeria though: the barbershops are the hubbub of the community, the place where you get to meet your friends, gossip and connect with people. The barbers aren’t like English barbers, librarians with scissors, but more like a meeting with the town crier couples with your ancestors, a place to pass down oral traditions (as storytelling is much more audible in Africa than visual). Traditionally, too, while English children were being tucked up in bed with milk and biscuits and a good story (and children’s radio programme Cat’s Whiskers in my case) in Africa it’s a tradition for mothers to braid their children’s hair while getting them ready for bed, while telling them oral stories. You can see, then, why Inua would have connected hair with hearing a good story and why he wanted to bring that sense of community and stories to both the stage and to Dr Who in a way that an English writer wouldn’t necessarily (our equivalent story would be making awkward small hat about the weather for hours while crickets feed off our tut-tutting).  

This is also a story about belonging and being dispossessed. The idea came from Inua talking to a French friend who happened to mention that the French for ‘ghost-writer’, someone who does all the work and gets no credit, is ‘Negre’. This made the writer think about all the African stories that are never told. The barbers are also the thing that a lot of my African friends end up missing most about home, the moment they realise they are a stranger in a strange land. English barbers don’t know how to cut my hair properly (it’s a cross between Tom Baker’s and a brillo pad – I have lots of existential crisis at my barbers too) and certainly don’t know how to cut African hair, which is especially tough and takes special scissors and a knowledge of curls. Though things are getting better, you still have to live in a big city to have enough trained staff to get your hair cut by somebody with the right training anywhere near the way it would have been back in Africa, while even then the lack of storytelling and community comes over as a shock. After all, nothing represents your personality in your body more than your hair as it varies so much and it’s the one thing you can control over length and colour etc (that’s why concentration camps and some tough prisons shave hair: they say it’s for lice and cleanliness but really it’s to take away your identity and make you easier to control). It’s another reminder that you don’t really fit in, that you don’t quite belong, that you’re a long way from home. Someone else, of course, has no home to go to anymore and is a refugee living in a world not built for him too. It’s revealed in this story that the Tardis cuts the Doctor’s hair for him (a neat revelation: we’ve often wondered, or at least I have, particularly when the 12^th Doctor sported a different length cut for each of his three series – not that timelord hair necessarily grows in the same way, even though a time machine would be perfect for keeping appointments – you could just hop back when they’re free) but he goes to the barbershop in Nigeria due to old friendships (he met Omo in Inua’s rather good prequel published on the Doctor Who website) and because it’s a rare place he feels as if he fits in. It’s quite the shock, as indeed it’s meant to be: The Doctor once fitted in everywhere and was at home with rich, poor, man, woman, child, human, alien and robot alike, but now he’s a minority group because of the colour of the skin he regenerated into. It’s a whole new worthy area for Dr Who to go into and I for one am glad they’ve taken the trouble to actually look at what the change in casting means, rather than just acting as if it’s business as usual (the way they did with Jodie Whittaker’s female Doctor for the most part). The best scene in ‘Story’ comes when The Doctor has discovered that someone he thought was a friend has betrayed him (albeit in order to save the Earth from giant alien spiders) and he challenges Omo about being tricked. It’s a betrayal that cuts deeper than any razor could: The Doctor felt safe with these people trusted them with his stories, felt they were his friends. The Doctor isn’t angry in the way you’d expect though – it’s that Omo should consider him ‘expendable’ for not having a family or a home, as if his life doesn’t matter, because he’s far from home when as a fellow member of a minority group he really should know better what that feels like. Omo replies that he has nowhere else, that’s he’s homeless, with nowhere to go outside the barbers, the one place where he can be himself. However if so there’s a big problem at the heart of this story: we’re not following Nigerians in an English barbers, we’re following Nigerians in Nigeria. Where everyone is black. So these same rules don’t apply. If it had been the only Nigerian barbers in London, say, it would have made a lot more sense (and made this story sufficiently different to its source material). Even so, it’s no ‘Dot and Bubble’ in the racism stakes: you don’t feel outrage on behalf of someone else so much as feel that you’re watching an alien world that no one’s explained to you.

I do wonder too if there’s another hidden theme at work here as there’s an interesting quote from the writer that’s just casually dropped in at the end of a sentence during the tie-in episode of ‘Dr Who: Unleashed’, that might explain why this story is very much set in a unisex barbers rather than a multi-gender hairdressers per se. Nigeria has a horrific human rights record, especially against the LGBTQ community and seems like the last place both the Doctor and Doctor Who should be going. I know it’s upset at least one good friend of mine that an openly gay actor playing a Doctor who takes after his mannerisms should talk about ‘feeling safe’ in a place where he could be sentenced to fourteen years in prison for calling someone ‘hun’ and flirting. After Inua talks about the barbers being a place for community and stories he drops in the line that ‘it’s the only place in Nigeria where men can touch other men’. Is that what this story is really about then, about safe havens where you can briefly be yourself for ways other than skin colour, smuggled in a way that only a few people would pick up on it? That would fit with why this story is about feeling dispossessed and homeless and why Russell was so happy to let such a story through. Although it would be a first: for all the talk in the papers about a ‘gay subtext’ to Russell’s Dr Who work by old-fashioned writers clutching at their pearls the first time round it only really amounted to Captain Jack’s character (and believe me, that wasn’t a subtext, there was nothing subtle about that at all).

You kind of have to read subtexts into the story because if you take it on face value there’s just nothing there. In the end it adds up to The Doctor getting a haircut, getting trapped and saving the world with a story – the sort of plot that either needs a severe trim or hair extensions. The pacing is all wrong: every time it feels like the story is going somewhere and making a point it breaks away for a bit of storytelling on a screen (and it’s worth noting that it is a screen,  not a TV, given how the writer first experienced television). Being stories they’re basically flashbacks, which messes up the linear structure order too: one minute the world’s about to be destroyed, the next The Doctor’s telling a brief tale of Belinda working overtime at the hospital where she diagnoses a poorly patient, then has to stay and miss her Gran’s birthday (seriously? Of all the many stories people have told him this is the most interesting? It feels more like an excuse to get Mrs Flood in to be honest, though it would have been more fun if she’d been in the next door salon getting her hair permed). Why doesn’t the Doctor tell one of his own? Because he’s saving it for a finale that could have come a lot earlier if he’d gotten on with it, that’s why. The ending, when it comes, is a bit of a mess: he projects some old Doctors to say some old favourite quotes and then the barbershop explodes. Nowhere do we actually see them tell a relatable story. If the story had linked into the idea of the Memory Tardises from all the ‘Tales Of The Tardis’  that would have at least made some sense (though maybe that’s to come?) In terms of this episode though: nothing.  It’s such an anticlimax for a story that kept suggesting the good bit was going to come as soon as the barber puts down his scissors, but nope. You’re meant to feel this was a really ‘close shave’ (yes, sorry about that) but honestly the Doctor could have solved this story half an hour earlier and there’s no build  up to the finale, it just sort of happens.

Unfortunately what should be a powerful story however you read it is let down because you don’t really know what’s going on half the time. The backstory is so vaguely sketched in that you don’t know why this alien spider has come to this planet at all or why it feeds off stories. How does that work exactly? While I like the pun about a worldwide web (that settles it, Russell T is definitely reading my work, as my Big Finish submission once was ‘The Worldwide Web Of fear’ about the Great Intelligence taking over the internet – and I have an intergalactic song contest in one of my ‘Kindred Spirits’ books, just like next week’s episode!) it’s all so sketched in that aspect of the story doesn’t have time to breathe. We also never find out why  a storytelling God decided to take human form in what, by a huge coincidence, is the only barbers in the entire universe that The Doctor has ever entered. Was the first thing it decided on taking human form ‘what’s all this hairy stuff on my head?’ So unlikely is the outline that at first you think that someone has set a trap for the Doctor to gain all of his stories (rather like what happened at the end of ‘Rings Of Akhaten’ – actually this story still follows the end of ‘Akhaten’ to the letter and you know you’re in trouble when Dr Who is recycling from its worst stories). But no: Omo knows how many stories the Doctor has to tell but the worst thing he does really is not to tell The Doctor to leg it when he first steps into the shop. The problem, too, is that Omo never feels like an old friend: they don’t share jokes, or a ‘what happened to you?’ moment while The Doctor never asks about Blue (see the prequel) the way you’d expect. The rest of the ‘barbershop quartet’ are worse and sketched in even more vaguely still: who are these people and how much do they know about what’s really happening?  They don’t feel like The Doctor’s old friends and even the one that knows him best seems to have a ‘skin deep’ friendship (you wonder how they’d treat him if he walked into this barbershop in a whiter regeneration). The real issue perhaps is that none of them react the way you’d expect: the God doesn’t act all pompous and Godlike (and, once again in series 2A, I really struggle with the idea of magical Gods with special unexplained powers in what’s predominantly a scientific, possible universe), he’s just a bit gruff and stomps around giving people bad haircuts, played by Arlyon Bakare in the exact same way he played  Landro in ‘The Woman Who Lived’.    The moment when he reveals all the Gods he used to be and the Doctor laughs in his face is also so weird and out of character: The Doctor asks as if this can’t be the same person because he’s met them, but he should know more than anyone how Gods can change faces. As it is the Barber God’s long list that even includes the line ‘I am the voice in the entry to the void’ sounds so much like John Pertwee’s single ‘Who Is The Doctor?’ (‘I am the voyage across the void…’) that a generation of Who fans can’t watch this scene with a straight face. Talking of past actors Sule Rimi as Omo appeared in the very first scene shot for Dr Who’s comeback, as a soldier extra in the ‘space pig’ scene in ‘Aliens Of London/WWIII’, so he’s used to being in Russell T’s weirder stories (he’s another of Who’s occasional success stories, actors who got their first break on the series, though don’t hold your breath looking for him – he doesn’t even get a line). Inua himself gets a brief cameo as a trader in the market sequence, after he made a quip during production about how they might have such trouble finding Nigerian actors maybe he should be in it! The other humans? Nothing. Can’t remember a thing about them. The humans never take the time to look scared or surprised or – if the spider has been here for a while – that mixture of disgust with being resigned that comes from being trapped somewhere for too long.

As for the spider, it would be more of a threat if we knew anything about it at all: back story, a name, even a species. We never get to see its threat of taking over the world or any super-powers it might have: for all we know it’s just  a common or garden house spider that got turned supersize after being bitten by a radioactive Peter Parker. Though they look better than the spiders in both ‘Planet Of’ and ‘Arachnids In the UK’,  being  CGI creation rather than a prop or a puppet, as a threat they’re weaker than both. Once again, though, the spider makes more sense when you go away and think about it: while English spiders tend to be small and do nothing more than eat flies and make cobwebs they’re a real danger in Nigeria, where they can grow to really huge sizes and there are quite a few species that are poisonous. I can totally see why a superstition would have built up whereby the only way of keeping a spider’s web at bay was by spinning a web of stories yourself, while those of us on both sides of the world can agree that getting one caught in your hair is not pleasant. You can throw in the lies and manipulation too to an extent, as this God weaves a tangled web of deception. However what this story should have been doing is driving that point home: if there had been a single line about how The Doctor has to remember where he is every time he sees a spider because they vary by country and planet (with a quick check for any blue Metebelis crystals) that would have helped the story a lot. Instead people just watch this story and go ‘where did that spider come from? Looks a bit rubbish doesn’t it?’ (because even as the best spider so far Dr Who just can’t do spiders convincingly).

It’s not a great episode for the regulars either. One other way this story harkens back to the bad old days of the Chibnall years is that only at the end does he get up and actually do something: for the most part the Doctor is a passive participant listening to the people around him natter on. Even allowing for the fact that this appears to be the real low budget episode of the series (where did all the Disney money go again?!) they should have had him pacing up and down, rattling at the locked doors, up in people’s faces. Instead Ncuti looks lost, trapped between taller actors, without enough thoughts in the script to be seen passing across his face. He does get some good Doctory speeches in and Ncuti’s happy-go-lucky walk through the market is a delight (I’m amazed they managed to recreate Nigeria so well a studio in Wales! The only parts actually shot in Nigeria are some quick establishing shots taken by drone) but there just enough for him to do. If this really is one of the last episodes Ncuti’s in, as the rumours have it, then it’s a shame another episode wastes his potential on the back of last week. Poor Belinda fares even worse: there’s no reason why she should be left back at the Tardis the way she is, while her ‘a day in the life at work’ scene is over before it’s started. She doesn’t do anything when she gets to the barbers either  except stare on (and even she doesn’t act the way a real person would, even one that’s just seen an animated cartoon come to life). People aren’t talking about those two anyway: they’re too excited by the ten second reappearance of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor (Russell’s suggestion), someone who’s always welcome to have more screen time but who pops up in such a confusing way, mid-sentence, having apparently tackled the God’s daughter (shouldn’t it be her dad given how long ago it must have been? And how does this Doctor remember her enough to project it? Nice camera pan though – she really does seem like an extension of Ncuti as she says it). Why bring her baxck just for ten seconds though? If she’d had a full scene it would have been more use – as it is it’s just a weaste of her time and again makes the viewer feel as if they’re about to get a far more exciting story than the one they get. One super annoying contradiction they should have picked up on too: the opening scene has Dr 15 establishing that this is the first time he’s regenerated with this colour skin. But we see the Fugitive Doctor a mere few minutes later, in this exact same episode! Fair enough if he’s forgotten being her – but this sequence suggests he hasn’t. Is the Doctor meant to remember her past lives nowadays or did she lose it when the Master did weird things to her brain? I’m so confused…  

The idea of an ‘engine’ powered by stories, too, is a promising idea that doesn’t go anywhere. We’ve already had a similar example of one of these that didn’t make any sense either (the AL-generator in ‘The Robot Revolution’) but at least that one was on an alien planet where the normal rules don’t necessarily apply. We don’t know why this engine runs off stories and while I can see why, given the writer’s experience of television as something projected by a machine rather than people inside a box the way most of the Western world experiences it, the story turned out like this there’s no attempt to link it into the wider Whoniverse. You also have to ask how a God who’s meant to be above such things gets an actual physical machine like this and how they get it to Earth. Is it mass produced? Did it come from a shop? Are there more out there? We need to know. Because that story is a hell of a lot more exciting than Yoyo Ma moving away from mass produced music (the Doctor should have told the story of Wings recording ‘Band On the Run’ in Lagos – that’s enough to save galaxies in one go) or Belinda having a hard day at work. You could, of course, see it as an metaphor for Dr Who itself, an industry that’s driven by stories that have to be inserted and told, giving jobs to lots of people – something that would fit the meta feel of a few stories this year (particularly ‘Robot’ and ‘Lux’). That would also explain why Belinda sees a random ‘space baby’ in a truly head-scratching cameo that might or might not make sense after the finale. But we need something to go off now: is this a real machine? If so how can it possibly run off stories? Better too, surely, to have had the machine more like the generator in the prequel story, a mass of smoke and pollution that’s clogging up Nigeria as capitalism takes even something as precious as family stories and mass-produces them. It also feels tone deaf that the Doctor chooses this of all stories to start quoting Hemmingway (not the most inclusive of writers it has to be said) with his six word story solution (in case you’re wondering the six word story the Doctor challenged him to write was ‘Fore Sale: baby Shoes. Never worn’. Which is a lot more interesting than The Doctor’s ‘I’m born, I die, I’m born’. Why are short stories better? (erm, in case you hadn’t guess by now I rather like longer word counts, you get more time to tell a story properly). Why saying these particular six words makes the spider explode goodness only knows.

I mean, I’d like to see it as a metaphor for how Dr Who defies the spiders on our back that feed off our limitations and how this series’ ability to regenerate itself keeps it fresh means that the show can puncture tired stereotypes and prejudice for each successive regeneration. That The Doctor’s ability to avoid death or stagnation allows him to embrace new stories rather than grow stale. That the barbershop represents Dr who as a safe space for all people from all communities where we can come together and share stories, only outside influences have tried to hijack and control for their own ends while demanding to be constantly fed with stories. Except that this story reinforces half of these stereotypes and feels like a storytelling device several decades out of date, while the only people hijacking the stories are an arachnid and a God disguised as a black human. Plus even I’m not that pretentious. Not to mention that we’ve done it before in a truly alien setting: like ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’ the story just asks us to run with the concept of a God feeding off metaphorical stories. And I just can’t. That made absolutely no sense at all in that story and it doesn’t make any more sense now. At least there’s no awful singing this time though. That’s a plus.

There’s something really odd about the way the Gods work in Dr Who at the moment too. Apparently Dr 14 accidentally let them through into this universe after spilling some salt in ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ – oops! But it’s not a straightforward case of ‘there’s a pantheon of discord now, deal with us!’ The rules keep changing. One time the Toymaker was in charge. Next thing you know old monsters like the Mara (a pink snake that lives in the mind) and Sutekh (specifically an alien, not a God in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’) have come out to play and apparently Sutekh is bigger than all of them. But where does his apparent demise in ‘The Empire Of Death/The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’ kick in? We’ve been able to ignore all that before now because only ‘Lux’ has linked himself to the pantheon this year and he might just be out of date (I can see that a cartoon would be last to learn about Godhood). But now ‘The Story and The Engine’ wants us to believe in an anti-God, someone who was a Human barber then turned into a God, then lies about being lots of different Gods, but who was secretly betrayed by the Gods and turned back into being a human again. Eh? How does anyone make a God do anything against their will? I’ve never been keen on the idea of Gods in the Whoniverse anyway (it turns it from science fiction, which could plausibly happen, to fantasy, which everyone knows can’t) but at least when they all played ball and followed certain ‘rules’ (even if the God who set them keeps changing) it made some logical sense. Now they can promote humans and then take those powers away, though, it’s getting silly. Another issue is Russell’s decision to throw the timeless child arc in there, which adds another level of confusion we don’t need: the hint seems to be that the Doctor once fought these beings ‘before’ he was The Doctor, back when he was ‘special’. But if so how can he remember them? How can they play a part in any of this story? How did he defeat them in the first place? It’s getting way too confusing and the arc just isn’t interesting enough to be worth our time following. Let’s get back to the aliens, who are much more interesting and much more what this series is about.  

The one part of the story that does come off is the idea of forgiveness, with the humans agreeing to leave the God-turned-human alone and let Zygons be Zygons…whoops sorry bygones be bygones, though even this scene goes on far too long. The idea that ‘hurt people hurt people’ and that how you react to being hurt is the diference between good and evil is a strong one (and again Russell is totally reading my books as I use that phrase a lot…) and fits back into that idea that we’re all of us carrying around our ancestors with us and living out their stories.  However the damage caused to us has to stop somewhere or we’re just perpetuating the same old cycle over and over, so it ought to be up  to us to offer forgiveness for those who wronged us instead of carrying our hurt around with us everywhere we go and passing that down to someone else. It’s a theme that fits in well with The Doctor too, who has all that rich history and very much carries his past selves around with him (as seen in a brief, confusing yet fan-warming projection at story’s end; weird no 7^th Doctor though, unless I missed him. Maybe he’s the one regeneration who doesn’t do forgiveness? It’s also weird that The Doctor thinks of the Weeping Angels given that ‘Time of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’ says that they can kill even from images. I was hoping for a spider on Angel action story). In the context of this being the first all-black Who story you can see it as a metaphor for something deeper too: rather than dwell on the past that can’t be changed we should be looking to work together to make a fairer future for everyone a very Dr Who message. Alas, again, that only occurs to you after you’ve finished watching the story: on screen you see people who have been hurt and betrayed by a vengeful God basically turn round and go ‘all good?’ No one stops to ask if the God will simply rise up again or see if he’s really learned his lesson (another scene at the end, of the Doctor returning in a few years and checking he’d kept his promise, would have helped a lot. After all they set this story in 2019 rather than present day for a reason: I totally expected a tag in 2025 or the nearest equivalent the Tardis can get to anyway. And if the Tardis can land on Earth that close to the date that’s giving it problems then you’d think that would be something weird enough for the Doctor to comment on).

The result, then, is a total mess, a story that ends up being about a massive spider that’s powered by stories over a web so that a human turned into a demigod can get revenge for the way he’s been treated – anyone of these strands might have been possibly, but doing the whole lot at once is asking too much of our imaginations. The idea itself is sound, but not the ways it’s told,. Basically it’s just Inua’s (rather good) play with the Doctor and a spider randomly inserted without explanation and there’s a difference between a good play and a good Dr Who story. There’s been no attempt to mould this into the Whoniverse or find any common ground. Just because something’s cutting edge doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good and this story breaks too many storytelling rules without seeming to understand why they were there in the first place. If you’re going to tell a story that incorporates telling other stories inside it you have to make them interesting and this story is too convoluted to be interesting. It does, for the most part, look fabulous: I hope we see director Makalla McPherson again as there’s definitely a unique ‘look’ to this one, but there are only so many ways even the best director can make having your haircut look scary (and as keen as I am to see every day events become scary in Who again, like the plastic mannequins of old hairdressers were never going to be that scary. We don’t have the same relationship to them we do with teachers, politicians or policemen, they just don’t have that level of power or other-worldliness). It’s hardly hair-raising this story, with no sense of real drama or tension or what could go wrong if the Doctor fails, it’s just some dude with scissors and his pet spider. That’s not enough to get me hiding behind the sofa now is it? The scariest part of this entire story is when the Tardis roundels start flashing red and the latest update of what’s presumably the cloister bell’ sounds but even that makes no sense: the Tardis is clever and all but how dies it sense the Doctor is in danger when it can’t see him? Is there a spider sitting on it’s head or something? There are lots of little clunky plotholes like this throughout, which don’t normally matter if the overall story is strong enough to hold your interest, but this one is just a muddle of ideas. ‘Story and Engine’ feels to me like a first-time TV writer who doesn’t actually know how TV works and how it’s different to other mediums and the onus should have been on Russell to help him with that, to add a final draft that was much more Dr Whoy than this. Yes, the story makes slightly more sense when you stop watching, put the remote down and think about it, but who of us has time for that? (Apart from me?) We’re too busy doing everyday things like, um, getting our hair cut to spend the time. 

The result makes you feel as if you’ve sat through a really boring play where nothing happened and, ironically enough given how important storytelling turns out to be to the world, as if you weren’t actually told a story. There is a place for a piece like this in Who and experimental stories can work (‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ both broke far more rules than this and are brilliant for it) and there’s room, too, for a ‘Roots’ type story of family history and the important of keeping family stories alive within you in the present day, of honouring the people who died so you could live (I really liked the part about slaves braiding maps into their hair to help each other escape: if Dr Who had been brave enough to tell that story I’d have been all over this episode). But not told like this: the trailers all led us to think we were getting a Dr Who equivalent of ‘Sweeney Todd’ with a demon barber but it ends up being a more symbolic metaphorical episode than that, or even a ‘Sweeney Ood’ by the time the Dr Who monster got added in, but it turned out more ‘Sweeney Odd’. Once again, as with ‘Demons Of The Punjab’,  Dr Who does the ‘right’ thing by going to the home of so much untapped culture going and then tells the most boring story from that culture possible, with all the interesting things happening off screen. Let’s just call it a nice idea that really didn’t work and move on…

POSITIVES + The cartoons are rather lovely. They’re very different to the ‘Lux’ Warner Brothers/early Disney model and more like the sort of drawings you see in Medieval folk tales brought to life. I just wish there had been more of them and that they’d been on screen for longer – and that the Doctor’s flashbacks could have been treated the same way, rather than a budget-saving series of flashback clips that have been used so many times before.

NEGATIVES – This story has given us a black writer, a black director and a black cast so I was hoping along with the rest of the Chibnall-era we might go back to a black composer. I really admired Segun Akinola’s work on the 13^th Doctor stories where it was often the best thing about each episode and his calmer, more dignified style would work well with the older Russell T Davies I think. Instead it’s back to Murray Gold who delivers a score that seems to be fighting the action this week, as if it’s been badly edited over the top. The big ending, especially, when he ought to be letting his hair down and really going for it, the music doesn’t do much at all. Usually I get sick of Murray’s scores telling me how I should feel in every scene, banging me over the head with a tuba with every plot point but here his music works away from everything. The plot goes tense and dark? He’s playing some light air. Nice and jokey? That’s when the dark violins come in. This is a story that changes moods faster than hair can grow so it needs to be spot on and, for all my issues with some of his scores, Murray’s generally more reliable than this. So what happened? Did he compose to an earlier edit that got whittled down?

BEST QUOTE: ‘I’m born. I die. I’m born’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Proof that Inua Ellams really can write comes in the shape of ‘What I Did On My Holidays By Omo Esosa’ an exclusive prequel prose story released on the BBC’s Dr Who website in the week leading up to the broadcast of ‘The Story and the Engine’. It’s a longer version of the story Omo tells at the beginning of how he met The Doctor  when aged nine in 1965, told in the format of a school essay. It’s a clever tale of being dispossessed and helpless, but unlike the TV version it’s straightforward and all the more powerful for it. The young lad has been sent to Edo State outside Lagos to live with his grandparents and hates being away from the family barbershop, where all the community drops in and its always filled with gossip. However Omo stumbles across an oil refinery pumping great plumes of pollution into the atmosphere. He befriends a local girl nicknamed Blue who tells him that they need to stop these strangers who have invaded their country and taken over their land, plundering resources to send back to the West. So she shows him a secret she’s found, that if she pours stones into the big generator machine it stops. Omo eagerly takes part and is soon throwing whole shirtfuls of stones into the machine when suddenly, whoosh, the engine has burst into flames and Blue is injured. Omo tries to be brave and save his friend but he’s out of his depth and knows she needs a good Doctor…when Ncuti steps out of the Tardis and looks after her, the start of a firm friendship as The Doctor asks where to go for answers and is told about the family barbershop. It’s a really clever visual tale that you can picture in your mind’s eye and has lasted longer in my imagination than the TV story even with visuals while Omo is believable both as a nine year old boy and as someone the Doctor would admire, trying to do the right thing without quite knowing how. Way more actually happens in this short tale too. It’s also clever the way the tale weaves in the ideas of community and how important it is when it’s the only thing you’ve got and how lost you feel in another land without it, as well as how it feels to be a statistic in someone richer’s story and the interlocking symbolism of ideas combining stories and machines. Had more of this story made it into the start of ‘Story’ so we could have seen a bit more of the Doctor fitting in it would have helped it no end. 

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