The Story and the Engine

Chapter the 329th, in which the Doctor goes to see a man and it turns out to be about a god.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Belinda are still landing in random places using the vindicator device to triangulate and thereby help them return to Earth on the 24th May 2025. The Doctor decides to take a reading in Lagos, Nigeria in 2019, so he can visit a friend Omo at his barbershop. When he enters, though, he is trapped inside with Omo and three of the regular patrons. The mysterious Barber has taken them hostage, and they have to have haircuts in the chair while telling stories to fuel and propel the Barber's extra-dimensional engine (shaped like a giant mechanical spider) towards the centre of the nexus (a web-like structure in some tract of hyperspace or other). The only person that can travel back and forth between the barbershop dimension and the real world of Lagos is the Barber's assistant Abena, who brings the others food. The Barber claims to be a story-telling god (indeed all the storytelling gods) of Earth mythologies, but in reality he is a human who built the nexus that gives those other gods power. Abena is the daughter of the West African trickster god Anansi. A long time before, the Doctor - when in her fugitive persona - failed to take Abena away from her miserable life with Anansi, and she harbours a grudge. Abena thinks that the Barber plans to depose the gods and rule fairly in their stead, but he reveals that he plans to destroy them. The Doctor realises that this would be calamitous for humans. Abena helps show the Doctor the way to the centre of the engine's power. He tells his own never-ending story to overload the engine, and persuades the Barber to leave before it explodes. Omo grants the Barber ownership of his shop, now it has returned to normal; the patrons go back to their lives, Abena is free to start a new life, and the Doctor and Belinda resume their travels.

Context:

Random selection picked a very recent story for me to blog next. I watched it from the BBC iplayer accompanied by both my sons (boy of 15, and young man of 18 home from university) towards the end of May 2025, not much longer than a week after having first seen it. Both of them expressed positive opinions about the story and the series as a whole to that point, so it's clearly working with some of the key demographic to whom it is aimed.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the second story blogged from the 2025 season (season 2 or 15 or 41, or indeed however you want to number it, and whatever you want to call it), leaving five stories of the run remaining. Beyond that, I have completed 11 Doctors' televisual eras, Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14, which entailed completing 37 out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

For the only time in Ncuti Gatwa's tenure thus far, I watched this story the day after it landed on the BBC iplayer. The others I've all watched on the Saturday, not usually at 8am (when Ncuti's second run stories first become available) but sometime during the day before they were shown on BBC1 in the evening. On the 10th May, though, my daughter had a birthday celebration with a number of her friends invited round to the house, as she'd recently turned 13 years of age. The rest of the family were encouraged to steer clear of this group of teenage girls to avoid embarrassing her (we tend to do this just by existing at the moment, she's at that stage!). Anyway, she had a nice time, we didn't embarrass her (any more than usual, anyway) and I caught up with the story from the BBC iplayer on Sunday 11th May 2025. I was accompanied by middle child (boy of 15), who really liked the story and thought the Barber was an epic GOAT-ed bad guy, or words to that effect.

Reaction:

In the previous blog post for The Invasion, I mentioned that Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can tell any kind of story. It's nonetheless more conservative than it could be; a story like The Story and the Engine comes along once in a while that wakes one up to this: there's never been a Doctor Who TV story with anywhere in Africa as its setting before, let alone one like this that dwells on African, and specifically Nigerian, culture and characters. Other relatively recent stories by and of people of colour (Rosa, Demons of the Punjab) looked at historical conflict. It's refreshing that The Story and the Engine instead just tells a science-fantasy story in this setting. It allows the key characters - including the two regular cast members - to represent humanity while not being boringly white. This is a change from the usual, both for Doctor Who and UK television more generally. This rich and different texture, with the story taking the aspects of black barbershop culture and twisting them to become the tools of a malign force, is the key asset this story has. It helps to get an audience past some of the areas of the story that don't work quite so well, of which more in a moment. Every aspect of production in creating Lagos and its inhabitants is exemplary. There was some drone camerawork used of the real place to create establishing shots, but everything else seen on screen was created in Cardiff, not that you would know it. I've never been to Lagos, but based on everything I've read the depiction is accurate, and - this I can confirm - engaging. Once we get into the barbershop, it is down to the characters and the stories they tell (plus some nice effects and animation work depicting those stories on the window of the shop) to hold our attention. Again, they achieve this with aplomb, with lots of wonderful details that I won't spoil here.

The characters are all nicely drawn in minimal story time, particularly the Barber as played by Ariyon Bakare: the scenes where he snips off his own hair while monologuing are mesmeric. There is something deeply affecting about Ncuti Gatwa's performance as the Doctor when he talks about the haven that Omo's barbershop has become for him, now that he has a "black body" and he's "treated differently" elsewhere. His feeling of betrayal by Omo for luring him in to the trap, and his subsequently forgiving him, feel a tiny bit rushed. This might be a by-product of having eight characters crammed into one relatively small set by the end. The six word story (the script doesn't spell it out, treating its audience as intelligent enough to know it or look it up, but it's "For sale: baby shoes - never worn" ) wasn't written by Hemingway; that's a common misconception. I'll forgive this, though, as it doesn't mean that Hemingway might not have suggested it when challenged by the Doctor in the past; the mythology of it being Hemingway's invention also fits well with the general theme about the power of tall tales. The characterisation of story as a rapacious devourer, and the characterisation of those that construct the stories as unsung heroes compared to those that perform them, both scream out to me as preoccupations unique to screenwriters or playwrights (though none the worse for that). The unexpected cameo by Jo Martin as the fugitive Doctor was a nice bit of fan service, and importantly celebrated the first ever black actor to be cast as the Doctor. So, The Story and the Engine was rich, colourful, different from the norm, well made, but... I still didn't feel as much as I should about the action and the ending. I should have felt emotion about the risk, the more to feel the exhilaration when the Doctor's own story (as represented by lots of archive clips) is used to save the day.

The difficulty, I think, was understanding what was at stake. Before 2023, Doctor Who was rigorous in terms of scientific explanations. It did ghost stories and god stories often, but always had to put in some exposition to reconcile these stories to the rules of our physical universe. The Toymaker, for example, when he appeared first in the 1960s, was presented as an extra-dimensional being of supreme power within his own domain. Showrunner of all the Doctor Who shown since 2023, and exec producer of The Story and the Engine, Russell T Davies, made a deliberate and significant change change to those previously established rules. He had David Tennant's fourteenth Doctor inadvertently open up our universe to a pantheon of beings that had powers that went beyond the rules of the physical universe. No longer was it necessary to explain acts that were indistinguishable from magic by getting bogged down in the details of futuristic technology. This opened up the types of stories that could be told while making some of the mechanics of their storytelling a bit simpler, which - agree with the decision, or disagree - was clearly something that the people making it felt was required for the new Disney+ era of Doctor Who. The Toymaker wasn't an existing god of planet Earth in the way that Anansi or the others mentioned were, though. He therefore had no symbiotic relationship with the people witnessing his godlike magic. He derived no power from them, and they derived none from him. The Doctor, though, says that "Humans are tied to the gods", and that destroying the story gods whom the Barber wants revenge upon will "wreck" the "seven billion lives" on planet Earth, who will have to live without stories. This is reminiscent of story The Devil's Chord from Ncuti's first season - take away music, or take away stories, and it will have a disastrous impact on human beings. In that instance, though, what was needed was exactly the opposite to what is done in The Story and the Engine: Maestro needed to be banished to save music; here, the story gods must be protected instead.

If these story gods were supposed to be part of the Pantheon, they behave very differently from them, and seemed to exist on Earth, at least as an idea, before the Pantheon were freed to enter our dimension. They are, in fact, much more like the gods in Neil Gaiman's work (most notably the novel American Gods) than what had been established in Doctor Who in recent years. This isn't necessarily a problem, but given that the nature of the story nexus and the spider engine traversing it are already quite nebulous, it doesn't help sell what's happening in the narrative, particularly at the denouement. There's a lot packed in to the 47 minutes of run time too, and it could do with a little longer to make things clearer. I would not complain about spending some more time in this setting. Anyway, if one doesn't think too much about it, one can just take away the simple, and no doubt intended, message: stories are important, and Doctor Who is the most important of all of them. Amen to that!

Connectivity:

Both The Story and the Engine and The Invasion feature the second Doctor (a clip is used in the sequence where the Doctor tells his never-ending story and it overloads the engine); earlier on, when the Doctor is talking about stories he could tell, he mentions Cybermen.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Story is the Engine: Anniversaries and Endings - 1. [Speculation follows that some might consider to be mildly spoilerific.] If I've timed things right, this blog post has been published on the 26th May 2025, exactly a decade on to the day from when this blogging endeavour first started. Back then, Peter Capaldi had been the Doctor for a year, with his second series a few months away from transmission. Neither fully animated missing Doctor Who stories nor season box sets on Blu-ray were anywhere near being a reality. Nobody back then would have believed you if you'd told them that the series would one day be a lavish coproduction with Disney+ (the main difficulty in their grasping of this likely being that Disney+ didn't exist at that point). Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Trussonomics - all were yet to come, as were nicer things like non-white and non-male actors finally being cast as that wonderful folk hero Doctor Who. By May 2015, I'd ceased being an aspiring and perspiring screenwriter, not having put virtual ink to Final Draft software for about five years. I was looking for something to do for a while to keep my writing muscles in shape before I started creating stories again. I did not expect that while to extend to a decade. The decision to include both classic and new series stories in my scope meant that I potentially would never be finished. Until the last few weeks of those ten years, there wasn't so much as the slightest hint that Doctor Who as an ongoing 21st century concern would stop. From the off, I averaged 30+ stories blogged a year. The most the series - classic or new era - ever managed in one twelve-month was something like eleven stories, so I was always going to catch up. It didn't feel like that would be an end, though, as long as the BBC - and whichever coproduction partners they managed to hook up with - kept making the show.

In the last couple of years of that decade of blogging, I foresaw a time that I would have to abandon the approach of covering stories from different eras in a random order. Casting the net a bit wider in that time to include spin-offs and oddities put the point off a bit, but couldn't put it off for ever. That wouldn't mean I'd stop, though. I'd just have to settle for writing up each story as it was broadcast in a dull, pedestrian way. Or would I? The one key reason that wouldn't happen, of course, was if new Doctor Who ceased broadcasting new stories. At the time of writing (as anyone following the Milestone Watch updates, such as the one in the Context section above, would know), I have eight more Doctor Who stories to blog: two are from the classic series, one from the new series before 2025; plus, following on after this blog post for The Story and the Engine, five more from the latest Ncuti Gatwa season. I also have found about the same number of spin-offs and oddities to be interspersed with those posts. If I pace myself, I should be able to keep going until year end. By that time, 41 seasons and every special episode of Doctor Who will have been completed, constituting at least fourteen Doctors' eras. It could be fifteen. At the time of writing, the last one of those eight remaining Doctor Who stories, the finale of Ncuti's second season, is only halfway through. Speculation is rife that the story will either see Doctor Who end, or see Ncuti leave the title role, or both. I mentioned the flurry of such stories in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Slipback post in mid-March, and again in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Lux post in late April. Things didn't die down in between, and haven't died down since. Nothing about the rumours is consistent, except the relentless nature of the 'news' stories being published online.

The latest of these stories says Ncuti has been "axed" from Doctor Who; it's from the same newspaper site that earlier in the year said that he was leaving because the quality of the stories was hurting his career. The word 'woke' is used in the body of both articles, as seems to be inevitable. There are articles saying that the axe is falling because of the recent bad ratings, but the same places reported that the axe was going to fall months ago, before a second of the new season had been broadcast. There's another rumour that someone surprising (they are named online but I won't share their name here) has been cast as the Doctor and will be revealed at the end of The Reality War. Yet another says that the regeneration will start on screen but not complete, to leave things open. One story, which was then picked up and regurgitated by many other sites online, quoted an anonymous source saying that Doctor Who would definitely continue no matter what decision was made by Disney+ as to whether they will still be funding coproduction of future stories. Are any of these accurate in any way? Just because there are lots of rumours, doesn't mean any are true; but, it does feel like something significant is going to happen. As such, I need to think about endings with regard to the blog. I'm a bit torn. If I'm going to move from random to sequential ordering, then it would be neat and tidy for the blog to start that with a new Doctor and all previous eras nicely tied up. On the other hand, I love Ncuti in the role and want him to continue. If it's the end, or at least a lengthy pause, then the blog having covered everything in a nice round ten years (give or take a few months) would feel right. I could then get on with doing other writing. But I'd be without new Who stories coming along every year, and I'm a Doctor Who fan old fashioned enough to enjoy Doctor Who being on television. I can't predict what's going to happen. Like life, like hope, Doctor Who might end soon, it might end later, it might never end at all...

In Summary:

The engine of this story is well put together, the scenery it propels itself through is rich and engaging, but it reaches its conclusion without evoking the necessary emotion.