The Story and the Engine finds the Doctor for once not apart from the world, but a part of it.
For a Time Lord, Doctor Who has always been somewhat beholden to its time, so the Doctor’s more exotic escapades often interpreted their destinations through a tourist lens which was often, especially in its early years, tinted with a post-colonial British worldview. The Story And The Engine offers a very different flavour. The Doctor and his companion immerse themselves in the local culture, instead of remaining aloof from it; living it, not just observing it.
The smell of clippers and cocoa butter, the hum of conversation layered over the rhythmic snip of scissors. That’s where The Story and the Engine begins – not in some cosmic void or war-torn future, but in a Lagos barbershop where the most dangerous thing might be forgetting how your tall tale ends. Until, of course, it isn’t.
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) arrive in Nigeria’s capital and step into the warm familiarity of Omo’s shop – only for the walls to dissolve into myth and menace. At the heart of it all is the Barber (Ariyon Bakare), a semi-divine figure with a grudge against humanity and a literal engine powered by forgotten stories and stolen hair. As the Doctor is drawn into a folkloric reckoning centuries in the making, it becomes clear this is less alien invasion, more cultural reparation on a cosmic scale.
Written by Inua Ellams, this is Doctor Who as diasporic fable – a story immersed in West African oral tradition and shaped by the rhythms of community, not conquest. The shop is a hub, a hearth, a haunted house. Every line clipped from a head is a story clipped from memory, every echo of laughter tinged with something ancient. And for once, the Doctor isn’t necessarily the most extraordinary presence in the room – he’s just another customer waiting his turn, until the myth taps him on the shoulder and demands he explain himself.
There’s a sharp confidence to how Ellams deploys the mechanics of folklore without sanitising or sci-fying them into oblivion. The Barber isn’t a disguised alien in a wig and cape – he’s a trickster demigod with a cosmic chip on his shoulder, given gravitas and pathos by Bakare’s velvet menace. In keeping with all truly great villains, his cause – at least to him (and his embittered ally Abena (Michelle Asante) – is a just and noble one. He intends to reach the nexus of all stories so he can sever the threads between gods and humans once and for all, depriving the gods of the sustenance of faith and belief, irrespective of the collateral damage to the human race who will lose the wisdom and comfort stories provide. His vehicular choice of vengeance is a multilateral reference. Of course, it explicitly accuses Anansi the spider god himself, but on another level it taps in to an established history of The Doctor having a troubled relationship with arachnids, particularly those of Metebelis III. For all the clumsy invocations of RTD’s cherished Pantheon of Discord, The Story And The Engine is the Gatwa era’s most successful attempt to bring with worlds of Doctor Who and the world of deep-rooted mythology to life in a way that feels cohesive, coherent and compelling.
And yet, for all its cultural verisimilitude and folkloric accuracy, it still feels like Doctor Who (even if the TARDIS uses a brand new “Red Alert!” alarm instead of the more traditional Cloister Bell). Like the TARDIS, to a certain extent the Doctor themselves has always functioned with something of a chameleon circuit, ideosyncratic, yes, iconoclastic, occasionally, but always subtly calibrated in some way to their environment. In The Story and the Engine, Gatwa’s Doctor finds himself able to shed that perception filter and his joy at being somewhere he doesn’t stand out is palpable. It’s a much more direct acknowledgement of the current Doctor’s skin colour than the milquetoast reference in Lux and one that’s rooted in the comfort of belonging rather than dwelling on the prejudice and exclusion he faces elsewhere, and all the more impactful for it. It’s organically expressed within the rhythm of the story, not grinding things to a halt to deliver a “very special episode” message.
The usual tonal gearshifts of Doctor Who are intact, too – banter over fritters and rice gives way to metaphysical dread and then circles back to deadpan humour as the Doctor navigates the situation. Gatwa, whose Doctor thrives on emotional honesty and sudden flares of fury, gets plenty to work with and the moment his happiness turns to fury – as he realises what the Barber is doing – is electric. There’s a rage in Gatwa’s performance that feels hard-earned: this is a Doctor who’s aghast at having been betrayed by someone he considered a friend, and tired of stories being stolen, twisted, erased.
Belinda, too, finds her groove here. She’s not a screamer or a tagalong – she’s a listener, an observer, a nurse who spots the trauma where others see only malice. Her contribution isn’t punching or plotting but naming the cycle: “hurt people hurt people.” It’s simple, it’s true, and it stops a demigod in his tracks. Sethu plays it with calm intensity – no tears, no trembling voice, just a clear-eyed, pragmatic statement of empathy in a world of escalating stakes.
Director Makalla McPherson brings a welcome sense of theatricality to the episode, from the intimate staging of the barbershop – all teal walls, buzzing lights, and ancestral portraits – to the disorienting plunge into the Mecha-Spider’s nexus realm. The transition from cramped real-world textures to mythic abstraction is smooth, grounded by animation and a Murray Gold score that embraces Afrobeat inflections to bolster the immersive atmosphere. A barbershop becoming a cosmic engine powered by stories isn’t a metaphor – it’s literally happening, and the show trusts the viewer to keep up.
When Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor manifests to set the record straight to Abena, it’s not a surprise twist – it’s a recognition. A black Doctor meeting another in a story about the importance of embracing and honouring your culture and your place within it? That’s Doctor Who doing the kind of poetry it often fumbles but, this time, gets absolutely right.
It’s far from the only callback, nor the only moment that comes close to puncturing Doctor Who‘s increasingly perforated fourth wall. The Doctor’s invocation of his own endless story – with his past faces and adventures playing out across the barber shop’s cathode ray tube screens – could so easily have been throwaway fan-service but it becomes a moment of real weight in an episode heavy with meaning, not craven nostalgia but an acknowledgement of lineage. The Doctor references having been in Ghana in 1996 – a probable callback to The Chase and he jokes about watching Marvel movie with a god, canonising the MCU’s existence in the world of Doctor Who and raising the intriguing proposition that it was The Whoniverse’s Keven Feige who copied UNIT’s London HQ for the Avengers movies rather than the other way around.
Thematically, The Story and the Engine is clear and clean: stories matter. Who tells them matters. How they’re told matters. In a show that’s spent decades layering its own mythology, often at the expense of acknowledging the cultures and traditions it borrows from, this episode feels like a long-overdue correction – not just in subject matter, but in authorship, tone, and framing. It isn’t just set in Lagos – it feels Nigerian, from the casual Yoruba woven into conversation to the way people tease and challenge each other with familiarity and heart.
And yet for all that specificity, it never forgets the universal pull of a good Doctor Who yarn, or – unlike more than one episode this season – that the Doctor is a warrior, yes, but above all else a merciful one. There’s no gloating or indifference to the death of a villain here. Revenge is cooled to regret and becomes a path to redemption. A demi-god reformed, and a goddess released. This isn’t the tired trope of Doctor Who “reinventing itself” – it’s Doctor Who finally realising how many other ways it could have been told all along. It’s a bottle episode yes; but there’s a message in that bottle: that stories, like hair, will always grow back. And with the hiatus rumours still swirling around, maybe, just maybe, a reminder that stories shouldn’t be cut short.
