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Doctor Who Considers Some Metatextual Roots in “The Story and the Engine”

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<i>Doctor Who</i> Considers Some Metatextual Roots in “The Story and the Engine”

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Doctor Who Considers Some Metatextual Roots in “The Story and the Engine”

In an episode where all stories have value and every life is precious.

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Published on May 12, 2025

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Omo, the Doctor, Amaka, and Tunde waiting for the haircut in Doctor Who's "The Story and the Engine"

Who wants that story screen, though?

Recap

Rashid, Tunde, and Akama sitting and listening on a bench in the barbershop in Doctor Who's "The Story and the Engine"
Image: Dan Fearon/BBC

Omo Esosa (Sule Rimi) is getting a haircut and tells a story about how he met the Doctor when he was a boy. Images play out on a wall to showcase this story, and a light on the wall turns from red to green. The other men in the room calm visibly at this, and Omo assures them that the Doctor always comes when needed. The light flips back to red and the room shakes. Omo calls for the Doctor knowing that “it” is hungry. The Doctor and Belinda land in Lagos, Nigeria in 2019 to take another Vindicator reading. The Doctor tells Belinda that he loves it here, specifically a barbershop he frequents. Belinda notes that the TARDIS does his hair for him, but the Doctor tells her that being the first time in “this Black body,” the shop is a place that allows him to feel a sense of community. Belinda sees how much this means to him and tells him to go off and enjoy himself while she waits on the TARDIS.

The Doctor heads into Lagos, weaving through the streets and greeting folks left and right. Upon nearing Omo’s shop, he notices that there are missing signs for Omo and several other men. He finds the shop and enters, the door slamming behind him; simultaneously, an alarm goes off in the TARDIS. All the missing men (Stefan Adegbola, Jordan Adene, Michael Balogun) are present in the shop; the light goes red once again. One of the men sits down in the chair to get a haircut and tells a story about Yo-Yo Ma and a shaman. The Doctor sees the story appear on the wall and is excited, wanting to know how it works. He’s informed that he can only learn by telling a story himself while getting his hair cut. Omo is no longer the barber; there’s a new Barber (Ariyon Bakare) who came recently and seemed to magically take over the shop. A woman enters (Michelle Asante) and brings food, but the door closes behind her; the alarm goes off on the TARDIS again. The Doctor recognizes this woman, but can’t remember why—she’s working to help the Barber.

The Doctor sits down to tell a story, and decides to tell one of an ordinary life, about Belinda. He tells a story about how she correctly diagnosed a woman who was receiving the wrong treatment from her doctor, and was required to stay by the woman’s side, even though she missed her grandmother’s birthday for it. Weeks later, the woman appeared to thank her, knowing Belinda was truly responsible for saving her life. The Doctor’s story powers the “engine” better than any of the others, and the Barber and woman leave to recalibrate it, locking the door behind them. The TARDIS alarm goes off again, and it shows Belinda an image of the barbershop. The Doctor berates Omo for betraying him when he thought this place was safe for him; the men have all been missing for a long time and are missing important parts of their lives being stuck here. The Doctor insists on opening the door despite warnings from the other men, and reveals the vacuum of space outside, with a large spider machine walking across a web. He makes it back inside and explains that the web is in space and Lagos at the same time. Outside, Belinda is pointed toward the shop by a young girl, and is the next person to get trapped.

The Doctor calls the Barber a coward and demands to know who he is. He claims to be an array of gods that deal in chaos and tricks and creation: Anansi; Sága; Bastet; Dionysus; Loki. The Doctor and Belinda burst out laughing because the idea is ridiculous. The Doctor has met many of these gods and hung out with them, including Anansi, who tricked the Doctor into marrying his daughter once. Rumbled, the Barber admits the truth: He was the person who took the gods’ stories, refined them, and packaged them to be told by humanity, keeping the gods alive. But they abandoned him once achieving that power, so the Barber created this web, which he calls the Nexus, to erase the gods from existence. Doing so would prove destructive to humanity, preventing humans from being able to tell stories. The woman criticizes the Doctor, and he finally recognizes her: Abena, Anansi’s daughter. He apologizes for not helping her, but we see another aspect of him—the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin)—tell Abena that she was busy with another story at the time.

The Barber tries to force the Doctor to tells another story, but Abena stops everyone and agrees to tell one of her own. As she braids the Doctor’s hair, she tells a story about enslaved Black women, who would braid maps to freedom into their hair and pass down the knowledge to help others escape. The Engine stabilizes again; the Doctor and Belinda escape deeper into the ship and find the engine room—due to the map Abena has braided into his hair. The Barber follows them, but the Doctor insists that he’s disrupting the engine by bringing up Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story, which he goaded him into creating. The Doctor has one of his own: “I’m born. I die. I’m born.” All of the energy from the Doctor’s story, his life, begin to run through the engine and the screens in the engine room show countless incarnations. The engine can’t process the power, so the Barber has two choices: Let everyone die here, or open the door and let others escape to safety. The Barber unlocks the door. The Doctor talks him into joining them and finding a new life for himself. The engine self-destructs.

Outside the shop, which has now reverted to a normal shop, Omo apologizes to the Doctor: He knows the man is powerful, but also that he should have protected him from this as a member of his community. The Doctor offers his own apology and they reconcile. The group offer their thanks to Abena for keeping them alive, and Omo decides he’s going to retire, giving the shop to the Barber. He points out that he has no name, so Omo recommends Adétòkunbo: his late father’s name. Belinda asks the Doctor about the child who guided her as they head back to the TARDIS, but the Doctor has no idea who that might be. They continue on their journey home.

Commentary

Image: Dan Fearon/BBC

Inua Ellams wrote this episode (and has a little acting spot as a market seller in it!), and it’s a gorgeous piece of work. There’s a lot packed into this script, so let’s jump right in.

In so many ways, this episode is an explicit gift to Ncuti Gatwa himself, his position in the canon of Doctor Who, and the labor required of him in taking on the role. We begin the episode straight away with the Doctor confessing to Belinda that things are different being the Doctor in his body. (Am I still pretty miffed that this point got glossed to hell with Jodie Whitaker’s iteration? Yes—but it’s important to every iteration of the Doctor who isn’t a cisgender white man, so I’m glad they’re making space for it now.) The Doctor needs that sense of belonging and community, so he’s sought it out in places where he fits in seamlessly. The barbershop in Lagos is one of those places.

It’s important to consider how painful this would be for the Doctor—who is now engaging in multiple levels of diaspora. Though the character may not conceive of it most days of the week, that is the nature of his existence. The Doctor was already a diaspora-of-one when he was taken in by a Gallifreyan “mother” and made the foundation of Time Lord society. The Doctor furthers this narrative by essentially adopting Earth and humanity as their second home following the destruction of Gallifrey. And now, again, because his body is different this time around, the Doctor finds himself cast out once more, and in need of new homes where he feels connection and belonging on the planet he’s chosen as his harbor.

All of this is being brought to the forefront by a Rwandan-Scottish Doctor and a Nigerian-born British writer—something that the show has never rightly tackled.

In a painful twist, that feeling of disconnect from the homeland in diaspora communities is brought to the forefront in the Doctor’s fight with Omo. The Doctor believed he’d found a safe place at the barber shop, but he’s still ultimately an outsider to them. While it’s important that they reconcile—that Omo acknowledges that he wants the Doctor in his community and therefore should have treated him as part of it—it’s still true that this experience is a constant one for the character. We get the beauty of belonging on the meta-narrative front for Gatwa himself, but the Doctor has just been forced to confront how deep this feeling can go, how specific it can become.

We’ve also got a fairly major reveal in the Doctor recalling his relationship with Abena. (Forever angry that I’m not getting to see Fugitive Doctor in a showdown with flipping Anansi while he tries to get her to gay-marry his daughter??) The memories before the Doctor’s “reset” by the Time Lords, including those from working with Division, are supposed to be in a Chameleon Arch tucked away in the bottom of the TARDIS somewhere. The Thirteenth Doctor did have some bleed-through on those memories during the Flux incident, but this suggests that those memories are either leaking through more frequently now or always have been. It’s possible that much of the time, when the Doctor mentions a thing from their past that we haven’t seen on screen, they’re referring to these pre-reset memories and simply don’t realize it; their brain is complicated and operates on so many levels, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t notice.

This helpfully gives us the treat of allowing the only two Black actors who have played the Doctor to appear in an episode together. More Jo Martin, please? Jo Martin all the time.

Another aspect here that I adore: The Barber (Ariyon Bakare is mesmerizing in this episode) makes the claim that he’s several different gods, a favored storytelling trope among plenty of fantasy writers in various mediums. It’s the sort of concept that sounds so cool the first time you ever hear it, and is diminishing returns forever after. Like yeah, we get it, humans like to tell similar stories across the world and that’s very cool! But you’re robbing each individual story of its unique patina by suggesting that they’re just scratch off versions of the same thing. And, moreover, it’s usually white writers and/or characters making this claim, smacking of the desire to basically colonize other cultures’ stories and gain some form of ownership over them. With the Barber making the same claim, I assumed the subversion of the trope was going to be in allowing a Black character that same journey, which would have still been an enjoyable change from the norm.

But Ellams turns this on its head by having the Doctor and Belinda laugh outright because the idea is, in fact, ridiculous. And the result is a much more enjoyable concept: The artist who perpetuated these stories and never got the credit for building those beings into gods.

While I wanted a little more time to dive into his desire for recognition, the ultimate point made here is far more imposing: Those stories built and shaped the world; they’re a part of humanity’s innate fabric. Removing them would kill our ability to tell story collectively—an abstract threat that manages to be far more terrifying than a specific one, and much more interesting than a multi-god being being a pain in the butt. 

Everyone in this story is redeemable and everyone matters: The Doctor tells them a story of Belinda’s life (how does he know it, I wonder?), something ordinary and smart and brave that has a beautiful ending. Each of the men in the shop tells their story, places they need to get back to, loved ones they are missing. No one’s humanity is ever questioned here, and true to Doctor Who’s best ethos, there is nothing more precious than a normal human life. Because of this Doctor, this writer, this story’s heritage, it also tells us explicitly that nothing is more precious than the normal human lives of Black people. It reminds us of this again when Abena tells her story of braiding hair towards freedom, and again when the men bow down before her at the end—saying that the Doctor rescued them, but she kept them alive, like all the women they know and adore.

Mechanically, it’s one of my favorite types of TV episodes: A locked room with a few people just talking and gargantuan stakes in the background. Emotionally and contextually, it’s a tour de force that I’m sure I’ll revisit again and again.

Time and Space and Sundry

Belinda on the TARDIS while red lights and alarms go off in Doctor Who's "The Story and the Engine"
Image: Lara Cornell/BBC
  • Inua Ellams also wrote a prequel to the episode that you can read here! Ellams is primarily a poet and playwright, and it’s been noted that there are many aspects of his previous works that show up in this episode—check out Barber Shop Chronicles and The Half God of Rainfall to see some of those connections.
  • There are all sorts of items related to story within the engine room, but the one that excited me most was the Jumanji game board??
  • The design of the spider-bot. That is all.
  • Obviously the little girl who pointed Belinda toward the shop is important, though we likely won’t find out how until the end of the season.
  • I might have been a little dismayed at Belinda using the “hurt people hurt people” precept with Abena, but only because it’s a very cheesy way to point out a very complex and difficult thing. On the other hand, I am liking how adamant she is about sticking to the plan! She tries not to leave the TARDIS and everything.
  • The six word story commonly attributed to Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) was not, in fact, written by him. Which makes that reference funnier, really, because then we have to imagine the Doctor getting an entirely different six word story from him. And also imagine the Doctor giving Hemingway a hard time for being the soul of brevity, which is never a mistake in my book. Thanks for that, Doctor.

See y’all next week! icon-paragraph-end

About the Author

Emmet Asher-Perrin

Author

Emmet Asher-Perrin is the News & Entertainment Editor of Reactor. Their words can also be perused in tomes like Queers Dig Time Lords, Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. They cannot ride a bike or bend their wrists. You can find them on Bluesky and other social media platforms where they are mostly quiet because they'd rather talk to you face-to-face.
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ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago

Apparently the little girl was Captain Poppy from “Space Babies,” last season’s premiere. Why she returned here is a mystery.

This was an excellent episode, but I’m uneasy with the way it treats gods as real entities that the Doctor has long been on good terms with. Traditionally, the show’s stance has been that magic and the supernatural don’t exist, that everything seemingly divine or mystical is just futuristic or alien science that humans don’t understand yet. And the ongoing story arc of the 14th/15th Doctor era is that the Pantheon of gods has been released into the universe and they’re all evil, so doing an episode that talks about gods as the Doctor’s old buddies (which apparently Belinda has also been hanging out with somehow during her brief tenure, since she was in on the joke too) seems jarringly inconsistent. As a standalone work of fiction, this is a hell of a story, but it doesn’t quite fit the larger universe.

It’s also an odd contradiction for the Doctor to say this is his first time in a Black body when there’s a Jo Martin cameo coming up. It would’ve been made more sense if he’d said it was the first time in a very long time, or the first time he could remember, or something.

Incidentally, the whole thing could’ve been resolved so much more quickly if, when Belinda had entered the barbershop, someone had had the presence of mind to yell, “Don’t let the door close!”

Ray
Ray
1 month ago

Rewatching it, the Doctor says to Belinda “This is the first time I’ve had this Black body,” and not “a Black body,” acknowledging time as the Fugitive Doctor

ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago
Reply to  Ray

But that doesn’t make sense. The Doctor could say “this is the first time I’ve had this body” about any one of their incarnations (except the Fourteenth), so the sentence only has meaning if he’s talking about a category rather than an individual incarnation. In context, he’s specifically talking about how he’s treated differently than he was in a white body, which is why he finds it comforting to be in Nigeria.

I suppose it can be interpreted as the Doctor still thinking of Hartnell as their first life, still not fully at home with the idea that the pre-Hartnell incarnations were part of his history too — as evidenced by the fact that we only saw clips of Doctors from Hartnell on in the TV sequence. It’s only occasionally, when he’s nudged to remember, that he connects with some memory of the Fugitive or another early incarnation. So it can be rationalized that way. Still, if I’d had script input, I would’ve recommended tweaking the phrasing of the line as I suggested, so it wouldn’t seem so incongruous.

Stuboystu
Stuboystu
1 month ago

I definitely agree that that line is problematic. My fix in my head for it is that we’ve seen in the past that the Doctor has access to past knowledge but we’re never entirely sure if it’s that he fully recalls it or if it’s something that comes to mind in the moment. (My example for this is in Remembrance of the Daleks where he is talking about the ancient Time Lords creating the Hand of Omega and corrects “didn’t we have trouble” with “they”.) So his memories of being the Fugitive Doctor are fleeting things, he probably doesn’t remember the substance of being that incarnation, as per the Thirteenth being certain she’d never been the Fugitive because she knows all her faces, but with a specific trigger, as during Flux or here, he knows he took part in events the Fugitive Doctor took part in. So any real sense of the Fugitive Doctor’s experience of being black is probably not accessible to him and hard to bring to mind (the Second Doctor once pointed out that he had trouble remembering his family in Tomb of the Cybermen). But really it’s just an awkward line I wouldn’t be surprised was inserted during the editing process because there’s no need to explain all of that to Belinda, it’s clearly there for the audience.

ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago
Reply to  Stuboystu

It is interesting, though, to see a Doctor letting a companion in on the fact of regeneration so early in their relationship, which usually only happens in cases where a regeneration happens early in a companion’s tenure, like Ben, Polly, Tegan, or Peri, or when they’re involved with the regeneration itself, like Grace (if you consider her a companion).

Stuboystu
Stuboystu
1 month ago

I definitely consider Grace a companion! I get the feeling rights are an issue in it, but I’ve always felt not having some McGann/Ashbrook Big Finishes (I think there’s one where she plays a different character) is a big omission.

And thinking about it yes, it’s nice to see the Doctor being open and bonding with Bel in that way.

EFMD
EFMD
1 month ago

To be honest I really, really Hate the idea that there are whole incarnations of The Doctor that we’ve never seen: that we don’t see absolutely EVERYTHING The Doctor gets up to seems perfectly fair (99% of any life is just getting through the day, after all) but the show is slipshod enough about continuity without giving the writing staff license to insert Doctors of Historic Significance at whim (Not least because being able to refer to ‘Two’, ‘Eleven’ and ‘Fifteen’ is a very useful shorthand which is now almost impossible to sustain).

Much as I miss the Mighty John Hurt, the legacy of his War Doctor continues to vex me so (Almost as much as the notion that The Doctor was never just a regular Time Lord, which bothers me because the character is already The Special – at this point it’s less revealing an interesting new wrinkle on the character and more like making sure there are only two Time Lords you will ever need to take an actual interest in).

Anyway, cross old growling aside (No, wait, I remain DEEPLY impatient of the notion that gods rise and fall on the strength of mere human belief: it’s an approach that, when you come down to it, strongly suggests that the Divine is only ever what WE make of it, which is rank hubris* – possibly even in the most Classical sense of the word) I rather liked this episode, even though I agree with @ChristopherLBennet that it’s weird to see DOCTOR WHO run with an ‘All Myths Are True’ approach (That moment where ye olde Many Faces brag is laughed to scorn was so very, very sweet though).

I do think it’s a pity that this episode, rather than the last one, which ends without a certainly elderly-looking schemer making a sting-in-the-tail appearance: as mentioned in the review for last week’s episode, it would have been more thematically proper for the Mrs to show up as a Last Temptation for the barber than as a last-minute boost to the ego for that villain.

*Hubris is, for the record, the sort of Pride that attracts lightning bolts from On High – for example, when a mortal man acts as though he were God or as though he were the only real human being and all others mere shaved apes.

ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago
Reply to  EFMD

“without a certainly elderly-looking schemer making a sting-in-the-tail appearance”

If you mean Mrs. Flood, she did make a brief appearance in Belinda’s hospital story. Which is odd, since the Doctor was telling that story, and if he’d known that Mrs. Flood was in it, he should’ve reacted to that knowledge.

I’m not a fan of the Timeless Child business either, but it’s a fait accompli now and we can’t undo it, so rather than continuing to gripe about it, I’m more interested in exploring the new storytelling possibilities it opens up.

EFMD
EFMD
1 month ago

Also, how fierce are the arguments over which Doctor popped in to save the day circa AD 1965? (Fifteen implicitly suggests that it wasn’t HIM – it’s his first time in the barber’s seat, after all) but the short story makes it clear that the Doctor in question was male (or male-presenting) and be-ringed, which doesn’t really narrow the field.

The story is set in ‘65, during what we’d call the Hartnell era, but this being a show about a time-traveller that’s not necessarily relevant: in truth, the actual incarnation of The Doctor in question is completely unimportant, but it’s still fun to wonder which of them it might have been.

ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago
Reply to  EFMD

Where did you get the idea that Fifteen hadn’t been in the barbershop before? What he told Belinda was that he’d found the barbershop to be a haven for him since becoming Black, a place where he’d be accepted and wouldn’t face the intolerance he’s often been subjected to in white-dominated parts of history. It’s clearly a regular haunt of this incarnation, and Omo recognizes him when he comes in.

It’s also pretty clear that it was Fifteen that Omo met as a child. As far as I can tell, he’s the only known incarnation of the Doctor to wear multiple rings instead of just one. (And if the wiki is accurate, only the First, Third, and Twelfth Doctors were habitually ring-wearers.)

Atrus
1 month ago

I loved this episode for the way it breaks the usual mold and brings a really new voice to the writing, and Ariyon Bakare gives a truly stellar performance as the Barber. The scene where he cuts his own hair is hair-raising.

I only wish it had come up in a different season, because the portrayal of the gods of storytelling as necessary to humanity in this episode doesn’t really gel with how the gods of the Pantheon have been presented so far, and the story doesn’t spend any time explaining the difference between the two.

I’m also not 100% sold on the initial speech about how the Doctor feels safe to be his Black self in that barbershop, for a few reasons.
The first is that he’s very much less than his usual self in this story. He’s less flamboyant, less honey and babes, less overtly queer. Nigeria is not a good place to be for queer people, and while the barbershop may be a place where the Doctor is comfortable exploring being Black, it doesn’t seem to be a place where he can be all of himself.
The second is that… he’s not a Black human, he’s only played by one. He may have adopted Earth as his second home, but he’s still an alien with access to all of time and space, so if he wants to be comfortable being black he can just go to any of the billion places where no one will even bat an eye at his looks or who he wants to snog or how many hearts he has.
“Omo is my longtime friend and talking to him helps me when I’m having a hard time” would have been reason enough to visit him.

These are just niggles, though. The core of the episode is solid and strong, and I wish we had more like these.

Last edited 1 month ago by Atrus
Stuboystu
Stuboystu
1 month ago
Reply to  Atrus

Great points. I really enjoyed the feel of this episode as well, but yes, it seems odd to have another set of gods pop up.

As mentioned by others, the whole gods and storytelling is turning into a bit of a trope but I didn’t mind it here, precisely because of the oral traditions of storytelling that it plays into as well.

David_Goldfarb
1 month ago

One thing I find myself wondering: is there any significance to the name “Adetokunpo”? This is the name of a basketball player in the US who is so famous that even I have heard of him, and that is a high bar indeed.

Given that it’s US basketball and a UK show, it may well be coincidence. The US comic strip Doonesbury had characters named Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, who married; if Joanie had taken Rick’s name, she would be “Joan Redfern”. The novel / 10th Doctor story “Human Nature” had a Miss Joan Redfern. But when I got the chance to ask Paul Cornell if this was a deliberate reference, he claimed to have never even heard of Doonesbury.

ChristopherLBennett
1 month ago
Reply to  David_Goldfarb

I think it’s just a relatively common Nigerian name.

Wyvern
Wyvern
1 month ago

When they were navigating the labyrinth and the Doctor kept using his fingers to feel his way through the map braided into his hair, I couldn’t help thinking it would be quicker if he’d just bent down and let Belinda read it.