TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “The Story & The Engine” is Fascinating and Makes Very Little Sense

Two years ago, in the Doctor Who 60th anniversary episode “The Giggle,” the 14th Doctor (David Tennant) explains that there are only special circumstances in which the gods can enter this plane of existence. In the case of the Toymaker, the god of games (Neil Patrick Harris), he was able to enter the world because the Doctor played a game at the edge of the universe. It was a weird explanation, and it was hard to describe what he did as a game, but there was at least a sense that the gods couldn’t easily cross over from one reality to another.

In part one of last season’s finale, “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” some of the villains from earlier seasons of Doctor Who and its spin-offs, namely the Mara and the Trickster, were now said to be gods as well. But still, the sense was that the Doctor runs into an actual god maybe once every few regenerations and that it wasn’t a very common occurrence. Now, in the latest episode, “The Story and the Engine,” we’re supposed to believe that the gods interact with humanity on a fairly regular basis, and the Doctor has a long history of interacting with the gods. It’s a fascinating episode, but it doesn’t really seem to fit into the overall lore of Doctor Who.

At this point, I’m going to put in my spoiler warning, so don’t read past here if you haven’t watched the episode yet and don’t want it spoiled.

In “The Story and the Engine,” the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) explains to his companion, Belinda (Varada Sethu) that, now that he’s Black for the first time in his many lives (that he can remember, anyway), he has had to adjust to the fact that he’s unwelcome in certain parts of Earth’s history. But in a barbershop in Lagos, Nigeria run by a man named Omo Esosa (Sule Rimi), the Doctor has found a place where he feels accepted for who he is. So he decides to make a stop into Omo’s barbershop, only to find it being terrorized by a mysterious figure known only as The Barber (Ariyon Bakare).

The barbershop is full of customers who cannot leave because the shop is both in Lagos and in a place called the Storytelling Nexus at the same time and only The Barber and his assistant Abena (Michelle Asante) can pass through back to Lagos. The Barber forces the men in the barbershop to sit in his chair and receive a haircut while they tell stories, and the stories feed the engine of the vehicle they’re traveling through the Nexus in. It comes out that The Barber was a servant of several different storytelling gods who was cast aside and now seeks revenge with a plan to remove the gods from the Storytelling Nexus, which would kill them. The Doctor explains that humanity is dependent on the gods and to kill them would destroy humanity.

Meanwhile, Abena turns out to be the daughter of the man-spider Anansi whom the Doctor lost a bet to and was supposed to marry in a previous regeneration. In a bizarre cameo, we see the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin), a regeneration of the Doctor who we learned in 13th Doctor era predates what we think of as the first Doctor. She’s a very early regeneration from before the Doctor’s memory was wiped after they were discharged from Division. That’s a really complicated story to get into, but the big takeaway from all this should be that the Doctor’s memory was wiped and, as some people have pointed out, the cameo suggests that the Doctor has gained access to memories from before the mind wipe, which makes no sense whatsoever.

There’s also a very weird storytelling moment in this episode where the Doctor gets really mad at Omo for somehow luring him there. That made very little sense. First of all, I didn’t really understand how Omo was guilty of anything. It was not very clear storytelling as to how he was responsible for the Doctor getting trapped in the barbershop. Secondly, the Doctor comes when people call for help, so why would he get mad at someone for calling for help?

Of course, as bizarre as this episode is, it’s steeped in African storytelling traditions, which are really fascinating. In a way, this episode was a tribute to African folklore and the magical realism genre that is so popular in African literature. In that sense, it flows with the themes of the episode that none of this really makes sense within the larger context of Doctor Who canon. But that still leaves us with a very strange moment in Doctor Who that doesn’t really fit into the larger story arc of the Doctor. If suddenly the Doctor has been chummy with the gods for centuries, then the show’s backstory is being rewritten a bit more aggressively than I realized it was, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Rating: 78/100

Doctor Who is streaming now on Disney Plus.

Featured photo courtesy of James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf