The Story and the Engine Review
The problem here—if you even want to call it a problem—is that absolutely none of the plot beats are earned or make a goddamn lick of sense. Abena is almost wholly swallowed in the mix, the Barber is wildly too complicated a premise to justify in the time allotted, none of the characters in the barbershop are fleshed out, and the plot is little more than a bunch of themes gesticulating wildly. I’m sure that, if I were to bother looking up other people’s reviews and reactions, I’d see loads of complaints about the plot holes, just like last week when an unusually large number of people apparently noticed that UNIT stories don’t make any sense for the first time.
The truth is, I have any amount of sympathy for this view. As an actual watch this was uneven; I’m not actually sure I enjoyed the experience more than last week. But reviews are about more than whether or not you liked something. Really, they’re barely about that at all. Honestly, my brain forms the thought “what will it mean to like or dislike this” as quickly as “do I like this.” I’ve got ideological positions to establish. So what do I want to think about this episode?
I find myself going back to Ghost Light. The complaint with that episode is that it doesn’t actually cohere. And I largely dismissed that complaint back in the day, pointing out that all of the components of the story were pointing in the same aesthetic direction, and that this helped paper over the gaps—an argument I’m pretty sure I stole from Miles and Wood. You can flesh that out a bit by saying that Ghost Light has too many ideas for three episodes, and so doesn’t quite manage to join all the dots, even as it’s clear the dots can be joined. Indeed, that’s part of Ghost Light’s charm—the way the story is bursting at the seams with ideas. Here we have something similar, except that instead of cramming too many ideas into a seventy-three minute container we’re doing forty-eight minutes, leaving everything even more jammed in.
Is that a bridge too far in terms of compression? Probably, actually. But it’s where we are on Doctor Who these days. It’s certainly not interesting to take ambivalence about the current format of Doctor Who out on an individual episode, and even if I were going to do that, I wouldn’t pick the one by a Black writer set in Nigeria with an almost completely non-white cast to suddenly do it, even if it does offer a clearer illustration than most of just how overstuffed the show is these days.
But look, what’s the alternative? A show that doesn’t take big conceptual swings, doesn’t tap playwrights from diverse backgrounds to write scripts despite their lack of TV experience, doesn’t treat its apparent limitations as challenges to meet? We could have a nice tidy procession of bases under siege and alien invasions and land comfortably within the realm of what the show can do. Or we could go nuts and accept that the price of getting The Gunfighters or The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or The Beast Below is that they’re uneven as fuck.
Nothing in the Gatwa era save perhaps Dot and Bubble has tried this hard or aimed this high. It could have missed by a lot more than it did and it would still be worth loving.
- And there is, to be clear, quite a bit to love. For all that it’s overstuffed, there’s a nice deliberateness to the build-up. The Barber and Abena having cryptic villain conversations about the plot had a genuinely charming classic series energy. Loved the way the Barber sat just off-frame for the first part of the episode, and much of how he lurked on the edges of the space. And it’s nice to see the show roll up its sleeves and put in the work on making a believable Lagos—a task they clearly spent a pretty penny on given how much of the episode is then shot on a single decidedly unflashy set.
- The one beat where I found the story to not just be eliding steps but actually not quite adding up was the Doctor’s anger at Omo. It’s not actually especially well set up—it’s emphatically not the beat upon which the previous Doctor scene ended—but more to the point, it doesn’t square away with the actual plot. It’s not as though Omo sent a distress call for the Doctor and lured him into a trap. He just showed up. More to the point, since when does the Doctor throw a strop at saving his friends? The lines about the Doctor feeling like part of a community are important and worthwhile, but this was probably the part of the episode that most fell outright flat.
- I also wish the “I want to be credited for my work” beat had been fleshed out a little more, because it’s a really nice bit of character work on an otherwise slightly inscrutable villain. Ellams has a line in one of the bits of press he did about this story being in part inspired by the realization that the French term for a ghostwriter is “le négre,” which, also great. Then again, follow this thread too long and you end up creating a Mind Robber prequel, and honestly who wants that.
- Jo Martin’s return was… I mean, look, I still hate that entire plotline with the fury of a thousand suns, but I did appreciate the series openly snarking about how that plot is horribly unresolved. But… why does the Doctor remember that adventure in the first place?
- I like Belinda. Quite a bit. But I could do with not hearing her insist “you need to get me home” in the exact same intonation every episode.
- I quite like the barbershop, with its vast maze of passages out the back and its conspicuously polygonal heart. And the Doctor Who credits playing out on the window. Just an absolute simp for this stuff.
- As unexpected developments in Doctor Who go, “creepy visitations from Captain Poppy” ranks impressively high.
- I may have undersold just how charmed I am by the villain motivation “I want to kill all of the gods,” and doubly so for the plan being “by destroying the very notion of stories,” which has some deeply solid theological foundations. I also appreciate that the value of stories is rooted in culture—there’s that line about passing down traditions, which is a much more grounded “magic of stories” take than one usually expects.
- Which of course brings us to Sága. There were some suggestions a few weeks ago about Mrs. Flood turning out to be Sága, and I really can’t express how deeply miserable they made me. I don’t really want my goddess to become Doctor Who fanfic. Indeed, I find the idea skincrawlingly repulsive. I got rid of all my random Doctor Who merchandise and stuff ages ago because, frankly, I don’t want to make Doctor Who my personality. It’s both my job and something I love deeply, but that only reinforces the degree to which having boundaries around it feels important. And that definitely included having Doctor Who and my spiritual life intersect in any sort of substantive way.
- On top of which, for all I joked last week about Davies reading the blog, I also just don’t want to be that entwined with the series. Doctor Who made in my image has never been something I wanted. If the series actually did “the Doctor is from the Land of Fiction” I really think I might just turn it off and never watch it again. Besides, I’ve definitionally seen my own ideas before.
- All of which said, a throwaway line about the Doctor having hung out with Sága once is broadly delightful. And I can 100% confirm that Sága does not like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Ranking
- Lux
- The Story and the Engine
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
May 10, 2025 @ 6:28 pm
there’s a reasonably successful Polish writer who got his start in the early 00’s writing urban fantasy heavily inspired by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. his flagship series tells the story of Loki who, following the decline of the Norse gods, becomes a fixer/assassin serving the Christian angels.
that series ended with Loki, in order to save the world from the anti-Christ, destroys all of the gods, angels, everything – and with them imagination, leaving humanity as cold, rational, disenchanted zombies essentially
i liked The Story and the Engine much, much better
May 10, 2025 @ 6:32 pm
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt an episode was so delightfully Not Made For Me (a white guy) as this one, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can’t wait to rewatch it in a few days.
May 10, 2025 @ 6:54 pm
This isn’t the first episode this series that I’ve liked – in fact I’ve found it a fairly solid run so far generally, probably the most enjoyable since way back in the Capaldi era – but it is the first where I’ve found myself immediately thinking “I need to watch that again!”. Funnily enough, I was also put in mind of Ghostlight while watching it.
Hopefully it won’t fall apart for me on a rewatch, because I really enjoyed it, right down to even enjoying not “getting” all of it straight away.
It felt to me like there were elements of something I hadn’t seen before in DW, and that’s always welcome – and I’m not referring simply to the casting or location, although I found that refreshing too.
May 10, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
Really, really messy – you can practically spot the join between Ellams’ work as a playwright and all the “Doctor Who arc” stuff – but my god wasn’t this poetic and beautiful? Loved the new take on mythology and spiritualism, thought the atmosphere was impeccable. The story of Belinda was heartbreaking. I will always love Doctor Who that takes wild swings and shows me something I’ve never seen before.
Mrs Flood being aggressively normal was almost more sinister than her being mysterious. No idea what to think about Poppy showing up; what on Earth is going on there.
It feels very obvious to me that this series is ending with the show itself being undone – we’ve had The Robot Revolution, in which Belinda is forcibly made a character in someone else’s narrative, Lux, in which the fourth wall is danced all over, Lucky Day, in which the basic premises of the show are called into question by a villain who rejects them all, and now The Story & the Engine, in which Doctor Who is an endless, ongoing narrative that is one amongst many. What narrative collapse could be better than one in which the show itself is erased and replaced with a different programme altogether..?
May 10, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
The only time I can immediately recall the Doctor getting mad at saving his friends is with Wilf in the End of Time
May 10, 2025 @ 7:22 pm
Ghost Light was exactly what I thought of watching this, and the better episodes of the classic series in general, honestly. It’s filled with symbols and pointed ideas that evoke conceptual associations in the mind, and I’d much rather watch that kind of thing than a hypothetical “cleaned up” version of this episode.
To dig in to some of the obvious stuff, the Story Engine is of course the TARDIS. A dimensionally-transcendent magic box that crosses space from story to story; it’s just that it only lets you watch them on the wall, rather than letting you actually enter them. It’s honestly striking (in contrast to Davies and McTighe) that the story never makes a huge obvious point of it, never has some big reveal where the Doctor “works out” using (brushed-over) logic that the Barber and Abena are mirrors of the Doctor and a companion, etc. The story actually gets to be about a thing, in a way where it’s obviously deliberate without it caving in to pointing it out in the dialogue. That’s really refreshing.
May 10, 2025 @ 7:25 pm
When Saga got mentioned in the list of gods I hit pause & went “F me, El Sandifer is influencing the show”. Because if I didn’t read this blog I’d have had no idea Saga existed. The MCU line made me howl with laughter. The list reminded me of the boast of Dai Greatcoat from In Parenthesis. The Jo Martin appearance worked for me, as did McGann being one of the clips on the tv. Because it’s nice to not just trot out the usual favourites. Afterwards my first thought was to wonder what you’d think of the episode, partly because of the Saga bit, but also the focus on the value of storytelling
May 10, 2025 @ 8:20 pm
Same!
May 10, 2025 @ 7:49 pm
Much as I disliked the whole Timeless Child crap, I’m kind of okay with Jo Martin acting as visual shorthand for ‘a long time in the Doctor’s past,’ instead of a CG Hartnell or something. Having said that, I’d be open to the return of the spinning mannequin heads from ‘Dimensions in Time.’
May 10, 2025 @ 8:53 pm
This is a really solid point: we’ve had now multiple actors doing Hartnell impersonations of varying levels of quality and I can’t say I was ever looking forward to seeing who the next one would be. If the only real consequence of the “Timeless Child” story is that Jo Martin gets an irregular but hopefully useful paycheck to occasionally play “the Doctor from long ago” that seems like an entirely cromulent outcome.
May 10, 2025 @ 8:56 pm
I agree. While the whole Timeless Child plot was awful, I thought Jo Martin herself was good. And in this particularly case she helped with a niggling worry I had when a line led me to infer that this was the first time the Doctor had been Black. And of course, there is the understated normalisation of a same-sex relationship in the legend told about the bet. Funny, though, that my ignorance of Nigerian myth, and appreciation of Skunk Anansie, had always made me think of Anansi as female…
May 10, 2025 @ 9:03 pm
Well, that just frankly charmed the socks off me. If I were in a nit-picky mood there was no lack of nits to pick, but sometimes you just carry it off on style and swagger and this had both in absolute spades. “The Doctor goes to Africa” in any other era would have been cause for anything from serious concern to outright panic, but this made me think… what took so long? And maybe we should go back soon?
May 10, 2025 @ 10:11 pm
Technically there’s a couple of scenes in Pyramids of Mars set in “Egypt”. The character of them may answer the question of why they oughtn’t to have done that during that era of televisionmaking
May 10, 2025 @ 10:34 pm
And that one episode of The Chase (Ghana, apparently) + ancient Egypt in The Daleks’ Master Plan, one scene of Nefertiti being horny and another of Rupert Graves in a tent on “the African Plains” in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, the Côte d’Ivoire for one scene in Spyfall, Madagascar in Praxeus… but these are all either dubiously orientalist or just window dressing technicalities.
May 10, 2025 @ 10:37 pm
Definitely felt like this one had a lot of ideas that anyone could argue needed room to breathe – but I liked all the ideas in it and I thought they told a nice story and I think the magic of screenwriting is you can paper over a lot of gaps/etc. with some visual language. Great episode. Will be happy to rewatch eventually.
May 10, 2025 @ 10:50 pm
I feel like this episode works better than any other this series as a mirror for what people want from their Doctor Who, or from TV in general. Largely, this was Doctor Who made for me – high strangeness, secret histories, big wild weird-looking things, a campy villain, the Doctor being extremely Doctory, and a low proportion of action to plot. I largely prefer stories that are mostly people talking with the Doctor at the center of it, talking his way to unraveling the mystery and defeating the villain. While Doctor Who has nice action set pieces from time to time, I tend to think almost everything action-oriented does action better than Doctor Who, and with such short episodes and an abbreviated series, I would prefer to have Doctor Who does what it does best, which is to be a show with the Doctor in it – and this might be the best showcase so far for Ncuti’s Doctor, getting to do very Doctory weird things but in a way that no other actor would play the Doctor; being the Doctor is largely about controlling the room, and Ncuti finds a new sort of energy for doing that that I don’t think I’ve quite seen from other Doctors. And for all the talk of fitting in with humanity, he feels very alien here once he starts confronting the Barber.
I do feel like there must have been a few things that were cut, or a few weird takes – clearly the episode means to tie the “stories keep us going, stories keep us alive” thing to the need humanity has for what it sees as gods, and that severing those gods from humanity makes us wither because of some sort of reciprocal meaning, but they never quite might that explicit enough for it to be a confident reading of that moment. And in a series in which the Pantheon is so prevalent, you really need to differentiate that it’s not some cosmic power than these other gods are exerting.
The biggest criminal of the episode was Murray Gold, with the sound mixer as his accomplice. The music was very unearned, and I found it very difficult to understand the cast over the hammy score.