Doctor Who: The Story & The Engine

This episode was one of the ones that I was the most trepidatious about going into it. From the brief synopsis, the Next Time trailer and the couple of clips that had been released prior to broadcast, it seemed like it was going to be something of a throwback to the previous Chris Chibnall era of the series. During Chibnall’s era, it felt like there were often episodes that were more focused upon showcasing a particular culture rather than having a strong science fiction story to tell within that world. And “The Story & The Engine” certainly does make the culture that it’s set in and around an important aspect of the story that it’s telling. Fortunately, it has a lot more to offer than those earlier examples did.

To begin with, this is a lush episode, for all that the majority of its action takes place confined to a single set: the interior of Ojo’s Palace, a barbershop in Lago, Nigeria. Both the storytelling traditions that it draws from and the manner in which the episode uses the backdrop of Laos as its staging ground, however, push the show into areas in which it’s seldom if ever traded before. In particular, surrounded by a virtually exclusively African cast, Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor shines as seldom before, inhabiting and unifying the disparate aspects of his performance into a more fully-realized incarnation of the character he’s been portraying. In part, the episode does this by steering into one of the most obvious questions that came up the instant Gatwa’s casting was announced: how will the Doctor’s stories change with a black man in the lead role? As opposed to “Lux”, where the acknowledgment of the racism of the period it was set in was more of a necessary evil than a true storytelling component, here the Doctor explaining to Belinda how he’s had to become used to being misperceived and unwelcome in many places since gaining his latest body, and by extension what it means to him to have a place like this barbershop where he can simply be who he is.

The mysterious Barber who has taken over Ojo’s shop, keeping its patrons prisoner and feeding their stories to the massive engine that he’s using to convey himself and the establishment across the Nexus, made for a compelling and nuanced villain. If I had a complaint in this area, it’s that the story spends a bit too much time keeping the specifics of its situation vague, forcing Gatwa to have to react as one confused or lost for too much of the run time. I don’t need for the Doctor to have all of the answers immediately in every story, but I do feel that the best Doctors tend to put forward an aura of confidence and calm in a crisis situation, a command of the moment. Gatwa gets there by the halfway point of the episode, but it felt to me like too long a journey to the point where the hero can be the hero.

This is another story that embraces mythology and mysticism, a vein of storytelling that showrunner Russell T. Davies has been seemingly enchanted with having come back to the program. But as opposed to pervious stories featuring members of Davies’ new Pantheon, which have begun to feel repetitive to me, the tone and the style of this episode made the similar elements feel fresh and new. I suspect I’d have liked it even better in some other season where the Doctor hadn’t just gotten done vanquishing a god a couple of episodes previous. But thematically, the story being about the power of storytelling and the tradition of storytelling was woven together wonderfully, and the Doctor’s ultimate solution–to take command of the Story Engine by feeding it his own Ernest Hemingway-esque unending six-word story “I’m born, I die, I’m born”–felt both legitimately birthed from those traditions as well as a fair-play solution to the problem at hand. It’s the Doctor doing something clever to resolve the situation, a hallmark of the series but one which hasn’t always been well-actualized in recent episodes.

And of course, the fleeting cameo by Jo Martin as the Fugitive Doctor was a welcome surprise and a dollop of nostalgia, as was the usage of moments from other prior Doctors going all the way back to the beginning. But I thought the manner in which Gatwa’s Doctor described himself as being analogous to the barbershop in terms of having contained all of those disparate lives and carrying all of them within himself was a nice bit of writing. All of this worked to help further Gatwa’s feeling of being genuinely the Doctor, for all that his personality stands in marked contrast to a number of his predecessors.

So this was a good episode. It was definitely ambitious in all of the right ways, but it didn’t sacrifice its storytelling principles in pushing the envelope. I don’t know that I’d want a steady diet of such stories, but it made for a great singular installment. I do feel as though the show may have steered away from its bread-and-butter storytelling model of being set in a rationalist universe in which the supernatural can always be explained through science and technology a bit too far–I feel as though the rules of engagement that used to govern DOCTOR WHO stories have been suspended, in a way that doesn’t provide enough context for me as a viewer to intuit what is possible and what is not possible in any given situation. As much as anything, as I stare over the past two seasons, i think this as much as anything else is responsible for the somewhat shaky reception the program has been finding. It has all of the outward trappings of DOCTOR WHO, but the storytelling engine has changed, and not in ways that are clear and understandable.