Counter Culture

Doctor Who: The Story and the Engine

Season 2, episode 5 reviewed

Overview

The episode was written by Inua Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, after he was recommended to showrunner Russell T Davies by Ncuti Gatwa. Davies rejected Ellams’ first idea and suggested he instead base the episode around his Barbershop Chronicles play. This had been developed by the writer as a celebration of Nigerian barbershop culture, and had been based on real conversations Ellams had taped in barbershops. Davies had seen this play and liked it.

Aside from one white woman who appeared very briefly, the story featured an all ‘people of colour’ cast, and has been described by RTD as a companion episode to episode 6 of the last season, Dot and Bubble, which, aside from Ncuti, featured an all-white cast.

‘Nigerian barbershop culture’ doesn’t immediately sound like a great premise for a Doctor Who story, but if you locate the barbershop simultaneously in Lagos, capital of Nigeria, and mounted on top of a giant spider travelling through the ‘Nexus’, have it powered by the stories of customers, and you throw in a few gods, both Nigerian and non-Nigerian, then I suppose it can be. At least, it can fit into Doctor Who in its present Science Fiction-lite, Fantasy-heavy incarnation.

It didn’t offend me politically on the scale of Lucky Day, though I do have political issues with it, as we shall see. If I were to sum up the episode in a few words, then ‘tedious,’ ‘pointless,’ ‘convoluted,’ ‘tell not ‘show,’ and ‘irrelevant’ to the main season arcs would be high on the list of words featured.

Positives

I don’t hate the idea of a story derived from oral storytelling traditions, of Africa or anywhere else, and this did have a recognisably different voice as far as script and performance go. This was a mildly refreshing, if somewhat stagy, change after the last two episodes. The Well had been co-written by Sharma Angel-Walfall. Lucky Day was ostensibly by Peter McTighe. But, in both cases, Davies was unmistakably present in both, almost as much as if he’d written them both alone. Here, the dialogue had a very different feel in places, and that made for a refreshing, if somewhat stagy, change.

It was again a reasonable performance by Gatwa, and the main supporting cast did well, with credit particularly due to Sule Rimi as Omo and Ariyon Bakare as The Barber.

Visually, it had some nice features. The Nigerian market looked authentic, before we settled down into another single location ‘bottle’ story within the barbershop. The giant spider looked good on the two occasions we saw it, especially the aerial shot of the barbershop mounted on top of it. I also liked the painterly-style animations that accompanied some of the stories, and the beating heart inside the brain, as well as the screaming head that appeared briefly, and rather mysteriously, beside it towards the end.

Negatives

Politically, there’s nothing wrong in itself with the idea of an almost totally non-white cast, but for a show that is so keen to combat homophobia to have an episode set in Nigeria with no indication at all of the difficulties gay people can find in that country seems hypocritical. In a scene with Belinda in the Tardis, we hear the Doctor declare that now he has found himself in a black body for the ‘first time’ (see below), there are places on Earth where he no longer feels welcome. Ncuti is a very camp, gay man who, wrongly, in my opinion, plays the Doctor in a way that closely reflects this. I wonder how welcome he would really feel in Nigeria, a country where overt displays of homosexuality can bring a sentence of fourteen years in prison, as well, almost certainly, oppression from within their own community. As a gay man himself, RTD will be well aware of this, as will the writer. It is perhaps not simply down to cost as to why the episode was filmed entirely in London, not Lagos.

On the issue of race, I very much regret how much attention is being given to the current skin colour of the Doctor. The character, remember, is a Time Lord, perhaps thousands of years old, who has travelled through the furthest reaches of the universe, at all points throughout its history. He’s fought aliens such as the Daleks, the Cyberman, and many others who are bent on the elimination of all difference between species. He’s a lone wolf well accustomed to being an outsider. To have him so focussed on his current form and to be so pre-occupied with how that form is received in certain parts of twenty first century Earth, diminishes the character, and is part of the wider problem mentioned in previous reviews, that of the Doctor now being written and played as if he was a mere human, specifically a black, gay, male human.

I’ll add that Ncuti Gatwa’s parents are from Rwanda and left that country because one tribe of black Rwandans was determined to genocide their tribe of black Rwandans. He grew up in Britain, has succeeded in becoming rich and famous, and is now in the fortunate position of being the lead actor in an iconic British show. I have no doubt he’s faced racism and homophobia in his life, but is he really a victim or a success story? Would he have done better to have remained in Africa, where he feels so ‘at home’ or in the ‘racist’ West?

Moving on to the episode itself, the only note I made during my second watch was ‘Full of stories we haven’t seen, featuring characters we don’t know.’ These stories were made all the weaker by the fact that they were largely told to us in pure exposition, without even the animations as illustration for the most part.

The worst of these stories featured a character called Abby who, if I’ve got this right, had been a friend, or a companion of the Fugitive Doctor (see below), who’d somehow lost her hand in marriage through in an il-judged bet by the Doctor, Ncuti’s Doctor or the Fugitive Doctor. As we’d never seen or heard of the girl before, it’s difficult to know why we should care.

As viewers, we were expected to take a lot on trust. For a start, we were expected to believe that the Doctor, at least since he manifested as a black man, and maybe previously as a black woman, or in general, had spent a lot of time hanging out in this Lagos barber shop, was known and loved by all, and was expecially close friends with Omo, thus setting up a later ‘I’ve been betrayed’ bout of Gatwa overacting. As I struggled to recall any mentions of Nigeria, Lagos, barber shops or Omo through the sixty-two-year history of the show, this was too much of an ask for me.

One of the main problems with the episode was that it took us even further down the road of Fantasy, this time inserting a mixture of African and Western pagan gods into the plot. I learnt that the Nigerian god of stories was called Anansi, and took the form of a woman’s face on a spider’s body, so that explained, sort of, the giant spider that was transporting the barbershop through the Nexus. But where did Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and dancing and theatre and stuff come into it? Did the Doctor’s comment that he’d got drunk with this god mean that the deities of the Greek Mythos now have temporal existence ‘in-universe’? What about the Roman Pantheon, or the Egyptian, or the Norse? And how do these fit with RTD’s own beloved Pantheon, with Lux and Maestro, with the Toymaker and his ‘legions’?

I’ve no idea, and I very much doubt I ever shall.

Aside from the choice of setting and the casting being one big virtue signal, there was inevitably yet more. 

For instance:

The Barber revealed that his original name for the Nexus had been The World Wide Web. It soon became clear that the only reason this was inserted was so that the Doctor could call him a ‘Troll on the World-Wide-Web,’ revisiting one of the central themes of Lucky Day.

This has been a problem throughout the series. The writing serves the message rather than the story. Another example was the story that the Doctor told once he took his turn in the hair-cut chair. He had thousands of years’ worth of stories to choose from. Would he decide to power the engine with a tale of one of the numerous occasions he has saved the Earth from alien invasion, or of his many battles with the Master? Perhaps he might plumb for one of his historical journeys and his meetings with iconic figures from the history of our planet, with Marco Polo maybe, or Shakespeare or Hitler?

No, instead told a simple story of one of Belinda’s heroic endeavours saving our NHS from collapse, this one about how she saved the life of the token white character by correctly diagnosing her, overruling the Southeast Asian doctor in the process. Usually, bumbling fools in need of rescue by a Strong Woman of Colour are reserved for straight white males, but we all know now that the people we used to call ‘Orientals’ are ‘White Adjacent’ and thus part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

For some reason, this story was revealed through a proper short film, rather than mere words or painterly animation. Whatever, it had no reason to be here other than to stress how hard our nurses, especially our Indian nurses, work.

The resolution of the thin plot was unsatisfactory and derivative. How many times has the bad guy been vanquished through the sheer awesomeness of the Doctor and his history? Quite a few, though it was the climax of the Eleventh Doctor story The Rings of Akhaten that sprang immediately to my mind.

The point was that the Doctor had so many stories that the Engine overheated and was destroyed. This was illustrated by the overused projection of the images of some of the iconic Doctor’s past.

Perhaps this was used simply to remind us Ncuti was the Doctor. As is the norm for this season, the Doctor’s clothes gave no clue, blending seamlessly as they did into the pseudo-Nigerian environment. If one had joined the episode once the opening scene in the Tardis was complete, with no prior knowledge of the era, there would have been little to identify this show with the show we had once known or, until they appeared to remind us, the fantastic actors who’d once inhabited the character.

As far as I noticed, we didn’t get Colin Baker’s Sixth or Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh but we did get a few seconds of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor who we’d first met during the rightfully derided Chibnall/Whittaker Timeless Children story arc.

Unless Martin is to re-appear as the next Doctor proper in the season finale, this appearance was pointless in the context of the story. Indeed, in the latest after-show Unleashed look behind the scenes, RTD said that this appearance was simply an acknowledgement, appropriate to the setting of the story, that we had had a black Doctor previously in the canon of the show. He seemed unaware that this contradicted the canon of the individual episode, where we’d already heard the Doctor play the victim as regards finding himself in a black body ‘for the first time.’ Maybe Ellams slipped that bit in without Davies noticing?

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, The Story and The Engine didn’t offend me as much as Lucky Day, but I’d rate it fourth out of five so far this season, not far ahead of the last episode. It was instantly forgettable, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever watch it again.

Next week, it’s the Interstellar Song Contest, a tie-in with the oh-too-real-life Eurovision Song Contest. It’s been written by Juno Dawson, best known for his cryptically named opus How to be Gay. As great as that sounds already, it should be made all the better by the promise of the ‘Who Is Mrs. Flood’ reveal.

I should also mention that we also saw a little black girl at one point. I took this to be the little girl who was the first incarnation of the Doctor as seen in The Timeless Children. But the credits at the end revealed that it to have been ‘Poppy’ from the space station in episode one of ‘season one’. It seems she’ll be re-appearing in the finale, so maybe, as well as an answer to the riddle of Mys. Flood, we’ll also be getting a clue as to why RTD should have decided to open a brand-new era with Space Babies.

Anthony C Green, May 2025