At the end of Gatwa’s first season, it was hard to shake the concern that the show was retreading certain aspects of the character’s emotional journey, with a return to portentous ‘Last of the Time Lords’ melancholy. Not only would that have felt stale, but it wouldn’t really make sense with Gatwa – the actor can certainly do angst, but his portrayal of the Doctor is primarily defined by a bubbling, irrepressible joy.
This episode manages to find the point where the two approaches intersect, with the Doctor expressing his fundamental loneliness not through moping around the TARDIS and gravely intoning “There was a war”, but by throwing himself wholeheartedly into companionship and community, making friends with ordinary people and hearing their stories. It feels new, whilst also being quintessentially Doctor, fully in the lineage of Tom Baker declaring “homo sapiens – what an inventive, invincible species” back in 1975 (the Doctor’s tribute to Belinda’s everyday heroism also feels of a piece with Peter Capaldi’s “human progress isn’t measured by industry, it’s measured by the value you place on a life, an unimportant life, a life without privilege”). And it gives “The Story & the Engine” some dramatic meat, allowing Gatwa to convincingly sell how betrayed he feels by Omo, and his later contrition at allowing that hurt to get the better of him.
The Lagos setting also helps the episode to feel fresh – and not just visually speaking. It might have felt like tourism in the past, but there is a real specificity to how the city is portrayed and the culture is baked into the story in a tangible way, from throwaway lines about people not making appointments, to the particular role the barber shop plays in their lives.
It’s worth talking here about writer Inua Ellams, who makes a strong impression with his Doctor Who debut. Born in Nigeria, Ellams is a highly accomplished poet and playwright, which shines through in the episode, from the conceptually rich, magical realist bent of the story, through to the relatively contained setting. It’s a companion piece of sorts to Ellams’ play Barber Shop Chronicles, which weaved together stories from six barber shops in six different countries over the course of a day (actor Sule Remi, who plays Omo here, also appeared in a National Theatre production of the play). In a 2020 Guardian interview, Ellams said that “barber shops, for British black men, are a safe, sacred place where they can go to relax, escape racism and talk freely”, a potent and profoundly humanistic idea to explore in Doctor Who.
But far from being a retread of his previous work, Ellams makes the barber shop integral to the story, turning it into a bizarre, threatening environment, almost TARDIS-like in its refusal to obey the laws of physics. It’s a fascinating inversion, taking this sanctuary where men can freely share stories and twisting its positive qualities into something more unsettling. The concept of a ship powered by stories, with a brain inside a heart at its core, propelled by a giant spider through what Alan Moore might call ‘Ideaspace’, is one of the most delightfully batshit premises we’ve had in Doctor Who, and the visuals are sumptuous. From the design of the spider and the heart brain engine, to the windows that respond to the stories being told, it all looks wonderful, and gives the episode its own unique feel.
As delightfully bananas – and resonant – as all these concepts are, the episode doesn’t always succeed in grounding them. The stakes sometimes feel a little abstract, and beyond the easy-to-grasp idea that these trapped people need to go home, it’s not totally clear how all these big ideas coalesce into a set of tangible consequences. The Barber is brilliantly played by Ariyon Bakare, who finds many different shades to play in one of the more complex villains the series has had lately, but apart from being a charismatic and imposing presence, it’s not entirely clear what threat he poses. We never get a sense of what the consequences would be for the men if they simply refused to sit in the chair and tell stories – the red light and alarm are an effective initial signifier of danger, but the episode doesn’t develop the threat beyond that. We could almost have done with a sacrificial character to illustrate the threat, though that might have made it harder to redeem the Barber at the end.
