Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who: “The Story and the Engine”
This season of Doctor Who continues to be one of bold ideas, wild swings, and a lot of heart(s). This week’s episode, “The Story and the Engine,” features an incredible premise and very weird turns. Deep diving its themes is going to involve spoilers, so here is a bit of Whoย trivia for visitors who didn’t want any as a thanks for the click before they leave.
I’ve been watching The Righteous Gemstonesย lately, where Eric Roberts plays a wrestling promoter and gangster in the second season. Roberts also played The Master in the 1996 Doctor Whoย television movie, the first American and Academy Award-nominee to do so. Later in the video game The Eternity Clock, River Song (Alex KIngston) remarks that she can sometimes hear an American screaming inside the walls of the Tardis. The Roberts Master fell into the Tardis engine at the end of the film.
Onto the story.
One underrated aspect of this era of Doctor Whoย is the way it so often imitates the Classic Era, which is doubly weird considering showrunner Russell T Davis is responsible for modernizing the show in the first place when he took over the first time in 2005. All the same Buffyesque frames are still with us, but Davis is much more willing to explore the roots of the show as something not far removed from filmed plays.
Part of that comes from the writer of “The Story and the Engine,” Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams, the first Black man to write for for Doctor Whoย television. Ellams delivers an gripping bottle episode that takes place almost entirely within a dingy barbershop in Lagos, mostly relying on dialogue and character development to drive the story without flashy special effects.
Although, those effects do exist. One second, everyone is in a barber shop, and the next we’re looking at a giant robot spider in outer space or a cyberbionic brain-heart that glistens with The Mouse’s money. It’s something Doctor Whoย did a lot in the 1980s, giving science fiction bits in short, controlled bursts so the audience wouldn’t notice the budget was tiny. It’s interesting to see Davies do the same as an affectation despite access to considerably more resources. It makes episodes like this feel oddly timeless in a way something like “The Robot Revolution” never will.
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) lands in Lagos to take another reading on his plotatronic and get Belinda (Varada Sethu) home. While there, he visits a barbershop owned by a man he once saved who is now his friend (Sule Rimi). Unfortunately, the shop has been taken over by a being called The Barber (Ariyon Bakare) who is using stories to power the aforementioned robot spider to travel to the land of the gods and kill them.
So, yeah. There’s a lot going on, and plotwise it makes about as much sense as a telephone flavored ice cream. The Barber is apparently a former human storyteller who traveled the world basically creating gods like Loki and Anasi. However, the gods refused to give him credit and cast him out of the web of stories he created. He now uses the big spider and his story engine to travel to the heart of the web and cut away the gods from the power they derive from human tales.
“The Story and the Engine” has the same problem that its spiritual predecessor, “It Takes You Away”: there is not enough time for so big an idea. Everything happens at breakneck speed, and the cast is desperately trying to juggle balls in the air.
That said, it works wonderfully because the bones of everything the audience needs to know are inherent to the human condition. The Doctor and The Barber may be skimming over the plot, but it’s not like people watching a 62-year-old show need reminding how important mythology is. When all the past Doctors show up for an archival cameo near the end, it’s basically a reinforcement of the themes. Where would Earth be without The Doctor, and where would any of us be without stories?
I have a theory that faith is like hunger: a basic human condition that must be fulfilled in some way. It goes back to our tribal ape ancestors where thinking of ourselves as both individual and fundamentally part of a larger whole was necessary for survival. People who do not find something bigger than themselves to feed their faith will latch onto something terrible the second it fills their need like a starving person eating rancid food.
Part of the genius ofย Ellams’s script is how it manages to address the messiness of this in just 45 minutes. Stories are how humanity inspires, teaches, and evolves, but the gods themselves are capricious, cruel, and selfish. I don’t think it’s an accident that the past Doctor who gets the most screentime in the big montage near the end is Twelve and his speech about how he did terrible things in the Time War trying to save people. Again, it’s a lot to pack into a script also dealing with racism, betrayal, how overworked nurses are, the strength of community and, oh yeah, everything we’ve ever believed is part of one dude’s robot spider.
Sometimes I think Doctor Whoย in the Disney Era has a bit too much razzle dazzle and lofty ideals to make a mechanically sound episode of television. On the other hand, “The Story and the Engine” dares the audience to hold on and ride the tiger, which is thematically the perfect approach for the show. It’s what helped give Ncuti Gatwa one of his greatest “I am The Doctor” moments, coming alive not just as an interesting character, but a link to a generation-spanning story that still has people tuning in. It’s a fableย at this point, and if fables were perfect, no one would ever learn anything from them.
Doctor Who airs Saturdays on Disney+.
