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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