Review by Tim Robins
In Lagos, the mysterious Barber reigns supreme. The Doctor discovers a world where stories have power, but can he stop the Spider and its deadly web of revenge?
Reviewed by Tim Robins
SPOILERS AHEAD
In “The Story and the Engine’, writer Inua Ellams spins a yarn about the power of storytelling. The episode draws on strands of Ellams’ and Doctor Who’s history, while dramatizing themes of broken promises and the storied nature of personal memory.
Or, in other words, a giant spider powered by stories is destroyed by the overwhelming energy of stories from the Doctor’s past. (Don’t worry, this is not a clip show, despite the barber shop setting, and the inclusion of scenes from old Doctor Who stories).
The TARDIS materializes in Lagos, Nigeria, 2019. While Belinda remains inside the TARDIS, The Doctor gleefully runs off to get his haircut from an old friend, a barber named Omo (Sule Rimi). But Omo and a handful of his best customers are all caught like flies in a web; or, in this case, Omo’s barber shop, which is now travelling space, on the back of a giant spider.
The Doctor and, later, Belinda fall foul of the shop’s new owner, known only as “The Barber”, who, The Doctor soon learns, is draining customers of their stories and using their energy to power the spider to carry him to the heart of The Nexus; a world spanning web in space which connects the gods to the stories that humans tell about them. Much to the horror of The Barber’s assistant, Abby (actually Abena, the daughter of the god, Anansi), this act of destruction will not only destroy the gods, but will also rob humans of their ability to use stories to pass on cultural traditions.
The Doctor discovers that Omo has colluded with The Barber to lure him to the shop in the hope that The Doctor can free Omo and his customers. But The Barber wants to use The Doctor’s energy to enable the spider to complete the journey to The Nexus. And it turns out that Abby/Abena has plans for revenge against the Doctor who, in his guise as The Fugitive Doctor, broke his promise to rescue her from her father.
Can The Doctor stop the story engine that drives the spider? Will The Doctor manage to heal the hurt that lies in the hearts of The Barbar, Abena and himself? And will stories live to make the world whole again? The answers to these questions and more are available on iPlayer and Disney+.
Reading my plot synopsis, you may understand why I wanted to start my review by saying that “The Story and The Engine” was the most pretentious Doctor Who story since “Kinda”, way back in 1981. But there are other contenders for that ‘honour’ (such as “Warriors’ Gate” and “Ghost Light”).
Let me emphasise here, I don’t mean to use that description in an unkind way. It’s a shame “pretentiousness” has only negative connotations. Pretension lies at the heart of my enjoyment of Doctor Who, and this story.
As a child, I recall running outside to play soldiers versus Yeti with my friends after an episode of “The Web of Fear” (1968). Playing Doctor Who was a thing children did back in The 1960s, even though fandom had yet to be invented. On another occasion, after watching “Fury from the Deep” (1968), I shoved fir tree leaves up my sleeves and pretended that I was possessed by sentient seaweed. (I also emitted a noxious gas, but that’s a different story).
In later life, I liked to pretend that academia had something helpful for fans wanting to understand Doctor Who. I’m no longer sure it does. Certainly, I never had anything that I wanted to say to academics, although my brain is still at the heart of who I am. As a child, I also used to play at being a brain, not Brains from Thunderbirds (1964-66), but ‘Brains’, from Here Come the Double Deckers! (1971), who Wikipedia describes as “the gang’s brightest member and resident science geek”. I wore glasses too, so I had to be bright because that’s what wearing glasses means, right, right?
Doctor Who itself is the product of ‘let’s pretend”. The TARDIS pretends to be a police box and, in “The Story and The Engine”, a studio in Cardiff pretends to be Lagos (albeit with the help of a bit of drone footage). The Barber pretends to be a number of gods, tricksters for the most part, and all connected to various kinds of storytelling.
The Barber also claims to be the god behind all stories and says that The Doctor and Belinda are in his domain – the barbershop. The Doctor and Belinda crack up laughing at the absurdity of his vainglorious claims. This is a version of the scene in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, in which a child points out that the emperor isn’t actually wearing any clothes. It is also a reminder that the credibility of a story is dependent on the credibility of the storyteller in the eyes of the audience. I wonder, in reality – would the child’s observations be heard let alone accepted as true?
Of course, acting is another form of pretence. The performances here did the script proud. Ariyon Bakare and Sule Rimi gave stand out performances as, respectively, The Barber and Omo Esoa. Bakare had the task of shifting from god to human. While cutting his dreadlocks, he was shorn of pretension. Rimi had the job of revealing and justifying setting up the Doctor as a sacrificial lamb.
Varada Sethu is charming as The Doctor’s reluctant companion, Belinda. The trouble that I have is that the actress is so clearly enjoying herself in her role, that I don’t for one moment buy that she wants to leave. But I am thankful for small mercies. An alternative would have been similar to Teegan’s endless whining, moaning and procrastinating during her Fifth Doctor stories when she wanted to go home, or not go home, or go home, or whatever.
In contrast to “let’s pretend”, “The Story and The Engine” lets The Doctor be himself. ”It’s the first time I’ve had this black body,” says The Doctor. “In some parts of the Earth, I’m now treated differently but, here in Africa, in that barbershop, I am accepted. I’m able to forget.” (Ironically, events in the barbershop force The Doctor to remember parts of his life that he would prefer to forget).
The Doctor is at home in the city’s crowded streets. He is on familiar terms with the people he meets. He calls them ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ and he gets to shake the story’s writer by the hand. The Doctor’s journey contrasts with Belinda’s later battle through the streets. She trips over market stalls, becomes harassed by traders and is ignored when she asks for help. To The Doctor, Belina is a fellow person of colour, but in the eyes of the people we see, her colour is wrong.
I like this approach to the colour of skin. It has a direct, if complex, authenticity. I remember a black barman bidding his friends goodbye on The Brighton Bartender’s Association Facebook page. The barman said that he would miss his “melanin brothers and sisters”. Black people aren’t afraid to refer to themselves in terms of their colour , after all there are few opportunities to pretend to be otherwise.
There were also moments when the story fell from its lofty pretensions to use familiar sci-fi cliches.
For example, The Doctor tried to destroy the engine by instructing Belinda to pull out all its wires and the spider is destroyed by overdosing on The Doctor’s stories, a version of an enemy destroying itself by taking on board “too much energy/information.” I smiled at Ellams’s use of such tropes. I like to think that he was smiling while he wrote the scene.
There is a moment of pure plot contrivance, where a labyrinth between the story-engine and the barber shop vanished. “The shop is compressing!” exclaimed The Doctor. “The corridor is now a straight line!” Well thank goodness for that, because it makes escape much easier!
“The Story and The Engine” contains stories within stories, particularly the story of how black women used to weave escape routes for slaves in the braids of their hair. Not all stories are true, but this one was. Then again, Abby weaves a strand of The Doctor’s hair into a guide through the labyrinth, a move that combines Black History with Greek mythology.
Stories such as this give hair a particular, powerful political place in black culture. It does in white culture too, but in a different way. White people wearing dreadlocks are particularly frowned upon in music venues as being a sign of cultural appropriation. Styles such as the mullet, the beehive and the skinhead have their own histories and other connotations for white people at different points in time.
(I am laughing right now, because I have just remembered Devine’s line in John Water’s written and directed 1988 film Hairspray, a story about popular, black music and racial segregation in Baltimore, America, 1963. In the film, Divine scolds black music fan Tracey Turnblad (Ricki Lake), for the way she is dressed. Divine describes Tracy’s hair as “all ratted up, like a teenage jezebel!”)
“The Story and the Engine” is a tangled web that weaves together aspects of storytelling and individuals’ relationships to their own past. Narratives are used to shape our understanding of reality, including our own sense of self; that is, the continuities and unities that sustain our identities are sustained through personal storytelling and the stories of others.
The importance of storytelling in shaping reality marks “The Story and The Engine” as assertively post-modern. Modernist literature evokes a world in ruins by, for example, challenging the authority of any one language to represent reality. Postmodernism challenges even this.
Postmodernism rejects the existence of one reality. It also rejects Modernists’ appropriation of black culture to represent ‘the primitive’ and ‘the irrational’, particularly when Modernism represents these as synonymous with childhood. In “The Story and The Engine”, black stories are given their due regard. They stand boldly alongside the pantheon of Gods in Greek, Norse and other mythologies.
Black stories are not only a counterpoint to “The Great White Way” (to appropriate a popular description of Broadway) of Western Philosophy and Literature. Black stories have a place and a power in their own right. Ellams has also battled with Ancient Greek gods in his other works. He clearly likes to mix things up.
Apparently, Ncuti Gatwa recommended Ellams to showrunner, Russell T Davies. I don’t know what story Ellams submitted, but Davies suggested that Ellams wrote a different story, one located in a single setting such as a barber shop.
Told that way, Davies sounds rather arch, because Ellams is well known for his play, Barber Shop Chronicles. But it sounds to me that Davies was telling Ellams to write what he knew. Ellams had recorded 60 hours of conversations in barber shops, and these were the basis of his two-hour play.
The Barbershop Chronicles has been described as a fun and energetic exploration of “contemporary black masculinity across the six countries, raising children, education, supporting football teams, sex, marriage and homosexuality”. So the play is right in Davies’ sphere of interest.
That said, the conventions of theatre production allowed for a more dynamic staging of the barber shops than allowed by the conventions of television realism. Sometimes, “The Story and the Engine” did feel like we were stuck in one place. There were longeuers, mainly moments when I didn’t see where the story was going; and so the time spent in the barber shop set became a little drawn out and slow.
“The Story and The Engine” also addresses connections between past and present that exist alongside story telling. I was particularly fascinated by the role of broken promises in the story. Although The Doctor is at first pleased that Omo has spread word of his adventures and their first meeting, he comes to realise that Omo has told his story to The Barber to help his friends and himself escape. The Doctor is the price of their freedom.
But we learn that The Doctor himself has engaged in an act of betrayal. He once promised to rescue Albena, the daughter of the spider-like god Anansi. Humiliatingly, The Doctor won her in a bet but never returned. But the Doctor didn’t keep this promise. Albena’s bitterness, her sense of betrayal, provides a sting in the tale.
The Doctor also feels betrayed. Omo has told the Barber about the time he met The Doctor as a child. In doing so, he has broken The Barber’s trust. (By the way, you can actually read this story, written by Ellams, on the Doctor Who TV web site).
Although voluntary, promises imply obligations to people and the past. To quote the philosopher David Hume, a promise, “is one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagined, and may even be compared to transubstantiation or holy orders, where a certain form of words, along with a certain intention, changes entirely the nature of an external object, and even of a human creature”.
Broken promises fracture the relationship between past, present and future. They break our relationship to ourselves, and our responsibilities to others. Broken promises change ourselves, and the world. Arguably, postmodernism has broken the promise of the so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’. In postmodernism’s wake, rationality no longer has a secure footing.
The production is first rate. The TARDIS interior is shot and lit in much more interesting ways this season. The scene where the Doctor fell out of the barber shop door and glimpsed the spider beneath was awesome and thankfully quick (I’m not sure how much scrutiny the effect could stand). I also enjoyed the guest appearance of Captain Poppy (played by Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps), from “Space Babies”.
(Davies must love that story, I know I do. Tired of babies, tired of life; tired of “Space Babies”, tired of Doctor Who).
I admit that I watched “The Story and The Engine” with a heavy heart, partly because I am not looking forward to Doctor Who being off air, possibly for quite some time, and partly because all the fun and energy of this season doesn’t seem to have been taken to the audience’s hearts. Then again, there are real world problems that cast a shadow over the story.
Researching Ellams’ work, I visited Afori: Books of Black Origin, in Brighton, and got talking to a young black woman who was working there. She told me that the Anansi was “old news”. Her family had come from Jamaica, and her grandmother had a bound book of stories about the god. I bought a book of Ellams’ poetry, The Half God of Rainfall. One of its marginalised characters is called Demi, who reminded me of Gatwa’s Doctor, in that his power is in his tears. Demi’s crying can flood the world.
Back to reality. Ellams’ poetry is a provocative, entertaining read. But not as provocative as UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s suggestion that we risk becoming an “island of strangers” if immigration levels are not cut. Are Ellams and the young shop worker the “strangers” that Herr Stamper was warning us about? I hope not.
Let’s not forget that every stranger is a potential friend, and every stranger has new stories to tell, even if some are sadly similar to ones we’ve heard before. Besides, as sci-fi rock-god David Bowie wrote back in 1971, “All the strangers came today, and it looks as though they’re here to stay…”
Tim Robins
Doctor Who in all its many iterations is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK.
The Story and The Engine and other recent stories stream on Disney+ internationally
Dear reader, a review is an opinion. Other opinions are available, including yours
Web Links
• Doctor Who TV: Read an exclusive prequel to “The Story & the Engine” from writer Inua Ellams
• Barber Shop Chronicles (Oberon Modern Plays) – AmazonUK Affiliate Link
Barber Shop Chronicles is a generously funny, heart-warming and insightful new play set in five African cities, Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, Accra, and in London. Inspired in part by the story of a Leeds barber, the play invites the audience into a unique environment where the banter may be barbed, but the truth always telling. The barbers of these tales are sages, role models and father figures who keep the men together and the stories alive.
• Afori: Books of Black Origin
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Doctor Who, downthetubes News, Features, Other Worlds, Reviews, Science Fiction, Television
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This (final) sentence makes no sense to me:
“The Doctor also feels betrayed. Omo has told the Barber about the time he met The Doctor as a child. In doing so, he has broken The Barber’s trust.”
Who has broken The Barber’s trust? Omo? How?
It’s always saddening to see your positive outlook coupled to name calling, Tim, in this case Herr Stamper/Kier Starmer. I’m not making any political point here, I just feel that kind of thing is beneath you and this website, and undermines the point you tried to make.