Mark Harrison | On 12, May 2025

This review contains no spoilers for this week’s episode of Doctor Who. Already seen it? Read our Doctor’s notes at the end for additional spoilery observations. For more on Doctor Who, see our Whoniverse channel.

“Doctor, tell it for us, it will be easier for you… A big story.” We never get to see the Doctor’s days off. True, there’s plenty of precedent of them going somewhere for a nice trip out, only for there to be running and screaming and monsters, but we can’t think of anything quite like The Story and the Engine, which effectively opens with Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor going to see his mates in Lagos, Nigeria.

Upon arriving in 2019, the Doctor makes a beeline for his favourite barbershop but, on his way, he discovers that its proprietor, Omo (Sule Rimi), has gone missing, along with several customers. To his horror, he finds his safe space has been violently co-opted by the mysterious Barber (Ariyon Bakare), a powerful figure who demands stories to fuel an audacious revenge scheme.

Primarily, this episode is about the importance of community and, after last week’s UNIT-centric episode, it’s nice to remember that the Doctor’s real friends aren’t just the guys who shoot baddies for him along the way. And the difficulty of community in the TARDIS is that it doesn’t travel so easily as stories do.

Conversely, stories go far here. There’s lip service to Lagos being a modern communications hub, but we see the journey of stories in action as Rashid sits in the Barber’s chair and tells a story about Yo-Yo Ma recording music by a shaman in Botswana. This is adapted from a 2020 poem by Ellams, which itself is based on an anecdote by Bobby McFerrin. And, as Rashid tells it, there’s an animated visualisation of it in the window of the shop.

Meanwhile, as episode titles go, Doctor Who itself is both story and engine – the TARDIS is character and setting at once, a generator of conflicts and sometimes the object of them. Here’s the barbershop serves the same role for metaphorical purposes. It’s about capitalism, colonialism, communications and, as seen in all the trailers, it’s more specifically about all of these things being strapped to the back of a gigantic space spider on a quest for revenge.

Born in Nigeria, Ellams is a multi-disciplinary artist, best known for his poetry and plays, who first saw Doctor Who aged 10. That makes him a Sylvester McCoy kid, and the dense, rich storytelling of his first script (for the show and for television in general) have drawn favourable comparisons to 1989’s Ghost Light, a haunted and haunting chamber-piece about the evils of Victorian values.

The McCoy era’s later boundary-pushing stories weren’t fully appreciated by fandom until later, due to their proximity to the show’s 16-year hiatus, and if the doom and gloom surrounding Doctor Who and its impending renewal or cancellation isn’t just an in-universe gag, we suspect the same might go for this season. But what Ellams has done here is a whole other story.

It’s a ridiculously late first for him to be the first Black man ever to write for the show, but it goes some way to explaining why The Story and the Engine feels so original. Where Ghost Light is one of umpteen stories before and since set in Victorian England, this also marks the first episode set entirely in Africa. Granted, Lagos has largely been recreated at Wolf Studios in Cardiff and it has Murray Gold Murray Golding all over it as usual, but director Makalla McPherson and company evoke a sense of the setting out of the production realities.

The cast are on top form too. Gatwa doesn’t often play the old beast incarnation of the Doctor, that ancient amateur who played chess with gods, so all the different dimensions of that make this a standout episode for him. This side comes out more easily when Belinda isn’t around but, as ever, Varada Sethu shines when balancing her growing endearment for this guy and her continuing healthy scepticism.

In the barbershop itself, Rimi’s Omo has several great scenes with the Doctor and Michelle Asante reveals unexpected depths as the Barber’s sarcastic assistant Abby. As for the Barber himself, Bakare’s imperious performance goes to an unexpected approach to the usual conflict-of-the-week. He’s not your typical Doctor Who villain in means or motivation and, even if the climax is more expected, the ending isn’t.

Perhaps the other characters are not so fleshed out, but they’re all well-acted and the script never loses sight of their importance, what makes them different and what they stand to lose if the Doctor doesn’t save the day. Like a lot of this season, there’s some meta-business baked into the premise, but it’s all meaningful rather than mysterious.

Long story short, The Story and the Engine is all of Doctor Who and yet unlike anything it’s done before. Not content to be “the one in the barbershop” or “another one with a bloody big spider”, Ellams’ story takes a holistic approach to the show and its meaning. That includes some of its baggage and more formulaic points, which ultimately distract from the narrative. Ultimately, it’s also as poetic and ambitious as both the show’s best outings and most admirable failures, and we can’t remember the last time a new Doctor Who writer made the show their own quite like this.

 

 

Doctor’s notes – contains spoilers

– We’ve met various gods in the Pantheon of Discord across the last two seasons, but The Barber is the first demi-god we’ve met, effectively a scribe to the gods, who’s peeved at being written out of their glory. It seems as though he wants the Doctor to take his place so that he can ascend to godhood (a little reminiscent of the villain’s scheme in 1968’s The Mind Robber), but he actually wants the power to destroy the web-like Nexus of stories that bonds gods and humanity, destroying the former but irrevocably damaging the latter too.

– Abby turns out to be Abena, daughter of trickster god Anansi, who the Doctor unwisely brags that he won in a bet. Asante is not the first could-have-been companion that we’ve seen this year, but it’s a surprise when the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin) appears to her, suggesting this dalliance with gods and magic came a long, long time ago. In the present though, there’s also a brilliant use of a story about how slaves communicated, as she weaves the way out of the shop into the Doctor’s hair.

– “I’m born. I die. I’m born.” We mentioned baggage and this is only the latest episode in which playing clips of old Doctor Who stories (now available on iPlayer!) ultimately contributes to the resolution. It’s wonderful baggage, but the one thing baggage always does is take up space, even in stories as otherwise unburdened as this. This tension between looking backwards and pushing forwards will probably be one of the defining aspects of Russell T Davies’ second tenure as showrunner.

– And the Fugitive Doctor’s cameo is somehow not the most surprising comeback of the episode – that would be Captain Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) from Season 1’s Space Babies. You might not clock until the closing credits that she’s the girl Belinda sees on her way to the barbershop. The Doctor reckons stories are colliding and leaking into each other… but where are they going with this???

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