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 11, 2025 @ 10:24 am
One small thing though— “narrative consistency” is obviously not what anyone comes to Doctor Who for (or if they do, they are likely to be disappointed), but still… the Doctor’s objection to the Barber’s plan made reasonable sense in the context of just this episode: humanity needs the gods, because we need to tell stories, that’s how culture is transmitted, etc etc etc. The only problem here is… the Doctor has spent the entire last year and a half murdering gods with abandon! It’s been the throughline of the entire RTD2 era! Seems a bit cheeky for him to start objecting now just because the Barber wants to get rid of them all in one go rather than piecemeal…
May 11, 2025 @ 11:06 am
The Doctor’s been fighting the gods of one particular pantheon, which does not actually seem to be associated with a specific Earth culture and whose members regard humans as empty toys to be played with.
May 11, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
Yeah I think there’s a preeeetty clear distinction between “a specific group of malicious trickster figures from outside the universe called the ‘Pantheon of Discord'” and “the gods of actual human mythology in our real lives”. Technically they can both be called “gods”, but I feel like the audience SHOULD be trusted to work out the difference between “Odin, etc.” and “the bad guy from 1966 Doctor Who episode The Celestial Toymaker”. (Although Sutekh’s involvement in this is needlessly confusing.)
May 11, 2025 @ 3:07 pm
I noticed that last year, they were pretty plain that Sutekh was not a “proper” god, but one of them there “powerful aliens” who got elevated to godlike in his power set (but is not bound by the same rules as the patheon and is, in the end, much less weird than they are), but when they mentioned Sutekh this season, they lumped him in with the patheon in a casual way that seemed very clear that he was along the same lines as Lux and the Maestro.
May 11, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
Well, his Harbinger also called him “the mother and father and other of them all”, which kinda suggests that he created the Pantheon after evolving to their status. Easy enough to headcanon away as “Sutekh is full of himself”, but even Maestro calls him “the Oldest One” earlier. I hate to dismiss it but it sorta just doesn’t make sense, at least from what the characters say.
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.
May 11, 2025 @ 1:47 am
I want more like this. Engagingly strange “wtf is going on” stories influenced by cultures not my own. I’m not given to close readings, so I don’t generally see structural issues unless I rewatch. Give me more.
Shades of L. Miles, I thought. The idea of the barber’s shop being like a TARDIS, but not actually one, like the time travelling tent in interference book 2.
BUT there is some metafictional cancellation arc going on, nononono Rusty, just don’t. If there’s any form of Bobby Ewing walking out of the shower telling me it was just a dream reset, then ugh. I care nothing at all for Mrs Flood, who makes even less sense that Susan Twist. Nothing she does adds value. I’m longing for an anthology season of standalone with maybe some thematic through line.
May 11, 2025 @ 5:39 am
I think I can promise you that there is absolutely zero chance that RTD, or most professional writers, really, would execute these themes the way that fandoms always frame it and are eternally, troublingly, fascinated by (“what if all the episodes I didn’t like were actually FAKE EPISODES to TRICK the doctor into being in bad stories!!!!!!”).
May 11, 2025 @ 3:18 am
I absolutely adored this episode. I watched it when it hit iPlayer in the morning, was on a high all day then watched it again on broadcast and enjoyed it a second time.
I love the way this is unquestionably a new voice emerging into Doctor Who and the story goes to new places and does new things, and they feel as naturally Doctor Who as Silurians and quarries. It doesn’t make the show different, it reveals it always had this space inside it.
I was thrilled by Jo Martin’s appearance. It felt entirely right for this episode that she be nodded to. And I don’t fear it means a return to the Timeless Child storyline. She’s just “the Doctor has a mysterious, mostly forgotten past” now. A grace note that can be played where it adds something, and it felt hugely appropriate that she appear here, in an episode pushing for a weirder universe and that is partly about the Doctor being in a black body.
It’s odd that in a story that energised me with how fresh it felt, Ncuti Gatwa finally got a “Murray Gold goes bananas in the orchestra while Doctor Who blows up the baddy’s control room” climax and that was tremendously welcome. Everyone mentioned the Saga namedrop but this also moment featured Patrick Troughton peering out of a television screen and ‘Doctor Who being a better story than everything else’. Plus a literal act of narrative substitution – reaching out to the villain with an offer to substitute their story of vengeance with a new one.
In all, a brilliant bit of Doctor Who from someone who feels like they have a deep affection for the show but a different angle than the standard professional fan. It’ll be a crime if we don’t hear more from Inua Ellams.
May 11, 2025 @ 3:37 am
My dad, being somewhat interested in the show but not enough so to actually watch it, sometimes asks me for a rundown of the latest episode. This time I was unable to give a complete summary of the plot without sounding completely unhinged, which is as good an indicator as any that this was a very good episode of Doctor Who.
May 11, 2025 @ 4:15 am
As far as 15 remembering Fugitive goes, my pet theory is that part of 14’s therapy that 15 benefits from involved remembering and reintegrating forgotten past selves – hence Shalka Doctor in Rogue. 14 had ample free time post-Giggle to go poking around in the TARDIS interior, find that pocketwatch, and open it once they felt ready.
May 11, 2025 @ 4:28 am
I just think that now we’re a few years on from the Chibnall Timeless Child Masterplan, the show is freer to play with the elements it finds interesting without being beholden to the whole mechanical plot.
Certainly in the past the Doctor has remembered things they shouldn’t, that don’t quite make sense. McCoy’s lines that hark back further than the show’s fictional history were never resolved or explained on TV. This is already within the grammar of the show. I don’t think it demands Explanation.
May 11, 2025 @ 7:27 am
I don’t think it requires explanation, but neither of us require ice cream. Sometimes it’s nice to make your own ice cream.
May 11, 2025 @ 1:37 pm
In this case, my “ice cream” is that in a story that explicitly acknowledges that the Doctor is a story, he can remember what he needs to for the purposes of this particular story. Though before I hit on that I did have a moment of “I guess maybe the Doctor opened the pocket watch off-screen, okay fine.”
May 11, 2025 @ 4:38 am
I hugely admired this episode. The visual aesthetic was perfect; I’m loving the strong theme this series of animation and art being inextricably bound with story-telling. Because of this, I was sometimes getting vibes of Vincent and the Doctor, which also has in common with this story the role of human connection as an essential adjunct to, shall we say, loftier ambitions? I spent quite a bit of the episode genuinely not being sure if they had filmed it in Lagos or not, so convincing were the sets and atmosphere.
A lot of my favourite types of Doctor Who are the dream-like, surreal stories that leave plenty of room for one’s own thought or interpretation (Ghost Light, Kinda, Warriors’ Gate, Heaven Sent), and this felt a very contemporary and thoughtful follower in that tradition.
However, whilst I hugely admired it, I didn’t particularly enjoy it (which tallies with my experience of Ghost Light). The point about how necessary it is to enjoy an episode as opposed to being interested in an episode is itself very interesting to me. It comes down to what one’s own needs are as a viewer, I guess. For this viewer, the lack of space and moments of “nothing happening” – which are, in fact, where the development of understanding and narrative coalescing can occur, in both real life and drama/fiction – are, as I keep coming back to, a major issue, one that’s nearly impossible to overcome in a 45-minute single TV story.
The biggest offender? Probably the constant music. I try, oh I try, not to be bothered by this, knowing it’s just the way of modern TV production. But I feel so overtly emotionally-manipulated by it, that my viewing becomes perilously close to being a chore. Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive fan of incidental music. Some of the Classic Series scores are works of genius that I regularly listen to. But the clue is in the nomenclature – incidental, not primary. The best music enhances the dialogue and action, not runs alongside it. If it’s a musical, fine. But in the medium of drama, all a continual music track does is engender a sense of insecurity in the writing and acting.
In the current pattern of eight 45-minute episodes per series, I think I would find four stories of two episodes each a more palatable experience. There’d be room to breathe, and room for character, plot, and motivation to develop at a pace that doesn’t necessarily require more than a single viewing. Funnily, it’s the stories that are more accessible on a single viewing that I rewatch more than the compressed, overloaded ones. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a demanding, complex, multi-layered, or intellectual story that is also accessible. But I think I need a certain level of “Doctor Who familiarity” when I view the show? (Perhaps “escapism” is what I’m getting at.) And most of all, I don’t want a massive overload of hyperactivity (although some is fine!), as I get that in so many other areas of life!
May 11, 2025 @ 5:06 am
This makes a fascinating double-bill with Sinners: both stories about a threat to a black cultural ‘safe space’ which became explorations into the erasure/assimilation of black voices.
And how great that this exists in Doctor Who! I’m not sure there are many episodes that so clearly harness what I love about the show – its agility and ambition and refusal (at its best) to not keep doing the same thing again and again. As El says, it’s easy to accept the unevenness when the thing as a whole crackles with ideas and emotions.
May 11, 2025 @ 5:09 am
I mostly enjoyed this episode but there was one great big thing I felt it was missing and I was acutely aware of it while watching. And it’s that the big camp queen of practically every other Gatwa episode is entirely absent in the episode set in Nigeria. It’s great that the Doctor gets to do this kind of story where he feels “welcomed” at at home and it’s incredibly refreshing – invigorating, even – to see the Doctor go to a part of the world that Doctor Who just doesn’t normally visit. But at the same time he feels “at home” somewhere where homosexuality is criminalised, gay marriage is outlawed, there is capital punishment for being gay in some regions, and it is one of the worst places for an LGBTQ+ person to be. Sure, the barbershop crew seem nice – for whatever limited characterisations they have – but really? It wasn’t touched on, alluded to, or mentioned even once. I know one episode can’t embrace EVERY political concern but given just how LGBTQ+ friendly this iteration of the show has been (and given what’s coming next week…), it’s a glaring, obvious, and conspicuous omission.
Othewise, a nicely ambitions piece and a very refreshing change of pace. I give not one single toss about either The Pantheon or Mrs Flood and have no sense that either will come together even slightly but though this was clunky in places, it’s light-years better than the drab nothing of Robot Revolution and its ilk and shows more ambition than almost anything else in the era. Plus Jo Martin! Always happy to see Jo Martin.
May 11, 2025 @ 5:39 am
I would agree except for “not even once”: he clearly does his more familiar queening out line delivery for “don’t be scared” to Obioma, the most obviously masculine and macho of the barbershop guys, before turning on a dime and delivering the next couple of lines with a much more Nigerian cadence. It’s just after Belinda has entered the barbershop and just before the Barber tries grandstanding about who he is.
I could also make an argument for “I look so good I could kiss myself”…
And this IS the episode that also queered the Fugitive Doctor.
May 11, 2025 @ 4:13 pm
Ncuti Gatwa has already done the ‘queer in Lagos’ episode in Sex Education, so I imagine they wanted to give him new material and show a different side to the country.
May 12, 2025 @ 8:01 am
I definitely didn’t need the whole episode to be about it but some kind of more direct acknowledgement would have been appreciated. It didn’t need to be the whole of the episode but a couple of lines would have gone a very long way and just unceremoniously dropping the queer positivity when it’s inconvenient is… less than ideal.
To Einarr’s examples above, I don’t think they really cut it – the queering of the Fugitive Doctor happens so quickly and so low in the mix I missed it on a first viewing (and I was looking out for anything). And Obioma… maybe but it’s still a blink-and-you-miss-it. I remain unconvinced (though if that worked for you, then great!).
May 12, 2025 @ 10:37 am
Oh, I wouldn’t say it “worked for me” in the sense that it was plenty and we didn’t need any more / that more wouldn’t have been welcome – just pointing out that “not even once” is maybe a bit strong, even blink and you’ll miss it examples are still examples. But yeah, more would’ve been nice, for sure.
May 12, 2025 @ 9:07 am
I imagine queer people in Nigeria still have places they feel at home, relationships they cherish and get their hair cut.
Indeed, a black gay person of Nigerian descent would have a complex relationship with the place: in some ways a place they can feel at home in in a way they can’t anywhere else. In other ways a place they can never be wholly comfortable. I don’t think the only correct way to deal with that ambiguity is to make every positive representation of it also dangerous and miserable.
To reactivate a phrase from comments on a previous episode: it’s expecting a 45 minute story to contain a whole moral universe. It’s a story set within the black solidarity and community of the barbershop. I think it’s a bit the wrong kind of online to come at it with “Aha, I’ve found the thing it failed to consider and now it’s bad”
May 11, 2025 @ 5:57 am
When Saga was mentioned I thought “Hey, I know about them from Elizabeth Sandifer!” and felt very pleased with myself. Then Anansi was mentioned and I thought “Hey, I know about them from Neil Gaiman!” and felt considerably less pleased with myself.
May 12, 2025 @ 12:52 pm
I’ve not read that NG material. But as an aside, I do remember children’s educational TV (by which I mean programmes specifically written for classroom use, not Watch with Mother, or the early-evening material before the 6 o’clock news) did mention Anansi. From my own experience I must have watched some of the stories sat crosslegged in the assembly hall in front of the single monochrome large screen CRT TV, and that before 1974. I remember very little detail of the stories after 50 years, except the jingle “Anansi the spider man, he’s the smartest one in all the land”. In retrospect, early attempts at diversity in programme making. Maybe I’ll go look them up and see if they are pasted to youtube. The memory cheats…
May 11, 2025 @ 9:06 am
I am very confused by this episode. I really like the idea and the theme, but not so much the execution and several plot points. I really like the idea of the actual creator of gods going back to fight them. I also like the spider walking on the web of nexus, has some seriously occult/Jungian connotations. However, the episode is pretty much a huge exposition dump. We don ‘t get to really see how the doctor started going to the barber shop, why he cares for the people there. The doctor being angry at Omo also feels quite out of character. The doctor at any incarnation is THE person to solve a situation like this. Any doctor would willingly get in and save everybody and would at least be somewhat sympathetic to the people that called him. Also, about that: I don ‘t understand how tf he was summoned. He went there randomly and I guess they didn ‘t prevent him from entering? He forced open the door ffs. If the story Omo told somehow “summoned” him, did he say a story about Belinda to summon her? If so, why? In any case, things should be explained better. A ship-in-bottle episode can be very good (see Midnight), but this was like doctor who characters narrating exposition dump that is also incomplete.
Also, why did Belinda ‘s story superpower the engine? Of course the story of a modern day first-world citizen is much more powerful than the imaginative musings of the african side characters. Can ‘t have an episode without weird bootlicking/colonial undertones these days it seems. This may seem like a nitpick, but it really bothers me. The Doctor would be a perfect storyteller because he would say very fantastical tales that are also real (and this could work as an anthology of doctor who ministories if done right). But no, I guess the african people were toο stupid to just talk about their day and overpower the engine themselves.
The drama about Abby also falls quite flat because we just hear about it. The doctor could start recounting the story that includes her and then the whole concept could work better (let me tell you the story where I almost married the daughter of a god or something like that). Bottom line: RTD level of good idea, Chibnal level of execution. Chibnal bad
May 11, 2025 @ 9:33 am
Did this cohere? Not really. Did I love it? Hell yes! Definitely my favourite of the season, and in company with the top two of the previous season. My biggest complaint is that Belinda has been sidelined for two episodes in a row (though I did enjoy the contrast between the Doctor’s instant welcome to Lagos as an old friend and hers as a “rich tourist”). I could list niggles till the cows come home, but I’d rather not as it does nobody any good and goes against the ethos of the story.
The Barber’s backstory immediately made me think of Storytime by Nightwish: “It was the night before/When all through the world/No words, no dreams, then one day/A writer by a fire/Imagined all of Gaia/Took a journey into a child-man’s heart”. That also fitted rather neatly with the heart-within-a-mind metaphysical engine reveal.
The episode also wins points for the resolution being based on kindness and forgiveness being cast in all directions, which is all too rare in any form of drama. Plus, everybody lives (assuming the spider-vehicle was not a living thing). Two thumbs up.
May 11, 2025 @ 9:40 am
Incidentally, the paralleling of this season and the previous one still stands. This is in the Dot and Bubble niche…
Supporting cast predominantly of a particular race.
The fact that the Doctor is black is relevant.
It’s about the mechanisms by which cultures craft narratives and a sense of belonging (oral storytelling traditions from the dawn of humanity to the barber’s chair on the one hand, twitter and other toxic socky meeds on the other).
The Doctor implores someone to let him save them, despite the fact that they’re opposed to taking that help.
There’s some really major differences too, but differences which are flat-out inversions and therefore still kind of count as links.
This was set in the heart of a Black community, Dot and Bubble was set in the heart of a Nazi one.
Dot and Bubble was about an incredibly new means of communication, this was about a form of communication that’s almost certainly as old as humanity and very likely dates back to the proto-humans that the modern species descends from.
In Dot and Bubble, the supporting cast are all implied to die. Here, just this once, everybody lives!
May 11, 2025 @ 9:50 am
I was reading the episode as implying that the Doctor and Omo were in a relationship and so the Doctor’s anger was less about having to save them and more about the Doctor feeling like he was being taken advantage of by someone who knew him intimately.
May 11, 2025 @ 10:11 am
Omo certainly seems to know much more about the Doctor – Time Lord status and all – than you’d expect from “kid he met briefly once, and then whose barbershop he frequented whilst trying to fit in and be human and accepted somewhere”, doesn’t he?
I am sure Big Finish are already brainstorming castings for Young Omo for the eventual audio dramas where he’s a companion/boyfriend.
May 11, 2025 @ 4:03 pm
https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features/read-an-exclusive-prequel-to-the-story-the-engine-from-writer-inua-ellams
May 11, 2025 @ 4:04 pm
Though I see what you mean, that this is just the first meeting
May 11, 2025 @ 4:17 pm
I felt that plot point didn’t land because Gatwa was doing his best with the emotional beat but the actor playing Omo wasn’t giving him anything to push off. Not guilt, defiance, shock, nothing.
May 11, 2025 @ 9:13 pm
I understand the Doctor’s anger: not just that his friend helped trap him without warning, but that this was a space where the Doctor didn’t have to be the “saving people” Doctor. His safe place was made dangerous and he was angry about that. There’s more to be said about connection there, too, but I’ll just observe that the Doctor got past that.
I loved the story.
Two stories to tell you all: when I was younger, my local PBS station aired omnibus Who episodes at 10 pm Saturday. I’d lie in bed, record the episode on VHS as I watched, then switch the TV off and go to sleep. Ghost Light was completely baffling. I should have rewatched at once, but it was late and the deal with my parents was that I could stay up until the story ended.
Sometime later I was home sick in bed. I often watched Doctor Who in that situation. I watched Ghost Light again and was baffled. This time, though, I rewatched again immediately. Maybe I had a mild helpful fever, but many of the pieces fell into place even if they didn’t all perfectly connect. And the story made a stronger impression because I had to fill in the gaps myself, weaving the strands to hold everything together. Which is why this episode made sense to me, because it is about what it invites, or demands: a welcome can be an injunction if you care strongly enough.
The second story is only four words long. It’s not my story, and I didn’t write it. I found it in a museum as a tag on an item, not meant to be a story. But it is. I’m working on my own words, and I have doubts about my likely brevity, but here’s someone else’s story. I can’t say whose for obvious reasons. But since the Doctor mentioned Hemingway’s, I feel compared to share this one here:
Klan robes. Anonymous donation.
May 11, 2025 @ 9:28 pm
The word I said to my daughter after we finished watching it was “overpacked.” But “overstuffed” works too.
Kind of a mess, but a good mess.
May 12, 2025 @ 2:00 am
“Then again, follow this thread too long and you end up creating a Mind Robber prequel, and honestly who wants that.”
This was basically “Mind Robber 2,” but as a thematic sequel rather than a literal one, and that’s probably the best possible approach. Explore the idea in a different way rather than get bogged down in how the Land of Fiction works or repeating that story’s beats. I probably won’t hate it if the Land of Fiction appears in the finale, but this is way more interesting.
May 12, 2025 @ 6:51 am
This one was an absolute dream and I loved it. Not in the “It was all a dream, I’m back in Kansas” sense (even though I’m not ruling that out for the finale, Russel T Davies! See below) but in the dreamlike way this story feels less concerned with coherence than with illustrating the sheer enthusiasm of storytelling as an ongoing, performative act. The bright, oddly playful scenes varied wildly in tone and had a deliberate looseness that was rewarding both visually and emotionally. The spectacular work of both playwright Inua Ellams and director Makalla McPherson did a fine job of contrasting the cinematic and the theatrical.
This week’s fourth wall break came not from Anita Dobson. An old white lady would have been conspicuous amongst the Nigerian cast (I was somewhat concerned she might have blacked up, surely not a possibility in Nu Who but still…) but from the opening and closing titles being projected on the wall of the barber shop. Speaking of which –
“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.”
Its looking more than likely your misery will continue. As you will know, in Norse myth Saga lives in ‘Sökkvabekkr’, which roughly translates as ‘flowing waters’, a metaphorical representation of the continuous flow of stories. Or perhaps a flood.
May 13, 2025 @ 9:13 pm
Finally found time to watch it (I know, I know, I’m not pulling my weight in the ratings game). Kind of a mess, but a lovable one. Definitely needed another draft or two, I’d say.
It was great to see a setting that has never been really been done in Doctor Who, but in a way simultaneously exotic and cozy. I think most of us are very familiar with the notion of the traditional barbershop as an important social “third place”, especially but by no means exclusively in Black communities. The notion of the Doctor wanting to have a secret place to relax and be accepted reminded me of some of the 7th Doctor New Adventure novels.
Loved the parallelism between the Doctor/Belinda and the Barber/Abena and between the TARDIS and the barbershop. And following up on the 7th Doctor comment above, there was something about the Barber that felt pleasingly ’80s to me. Not sure if it was his hair or something about his costume, but he kind of felt like a throwback to the McCoy era somehow.
I don’t know about just casually dropping in the notion of the gods as real physical entities. You’re just gonna establish that as stuff the Doctor has been doing without telling anyone. (Actually, that was probably my biggest problem with this story – it was way too much of a sequel to multiple unseen stories, which is rarely a good idea. Remember Timelash!) Though I do like the mythic concepts here of gods like Anansi as depending on human stories for their existence. Very Neil Gaiman though (sorry, too soon).
But my biggest quibble with this episode of all! How about you going to do a Doctor Who story set in Nigeria, and make the whole plot revolve around the mythic nature of the Doctor as a wellspring of stories, and even bring in significant amounts of archival Doctor Who footage to illustrate that plot point… and not make even a tiny reference to the recovery of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear!!! I mean, really!!!
May 17, 2025 @ 5:04 pm
Found myself thinking halfway through about El’s start to the Lux review where she said it was nice Gatwa got a perfect episode; will have to see how it fares on an eventual rewatch but for me I’m not sure I’ve been that rapt watching a Doctor Who episode since Hell Bent. Possibly since Caves of Androzani. Ariyon Bakare absolutely magnetic to watch.
May 20, 2025 @ 11:24 pm
I also really wanted to like this one, and certainly it had some great elements, but I feel like it’s kind of condescending to decide to like something regardless of its actual merits, just because it’s from a marginalised voice. It’s almost like saying you don’t think you can hold art by Black creators to as high a standard as art by white creators without sacrificing your ideological positions, which I don’t think is right.
There was a bunch of stuff here I liked a lot, but I think the episode could have benefited greatly from another editing pass or several – lots of themes and elements that maybe could have cohered but just didn’t. I was disappointed when the beautiful art that made the stories come alive was replaced by bog-standard high-definition live-action video for the Doctor’s tale, especially since it was immediately and uncritically treated as better – that feels like a beat worth teasing out a little for what it implies about the “true” expression of feelings and experiences.
May 20, 2025 @ 11:40 pm
“I feel like it’s kind of condescending to decide to like something regardless of its actual merits, just because it’s from a marginalised voice.”
Good thing I didn’t do that then.