Doctor Who (2025) The Story and the Engine: Brilliant Low-Key Idea, Pompous Execution

Inua Ellams makes his Doctor Who writing debut with The Story and The Engine, an episode with a tone and setting unlike any Doctor Who episode I’ve ever seen. Typically the show never sets foot outside of either Europe or the USA for a whole episode, though there are some exceptions (India in Demons of the Punjab, China in Legend of the Sea Devils, etc). With this episode, we travel to Lagos, Nigeria and it’s brilliant to see the show explore such a different culture and have such a different look. 

Ellams’s story as to how he got to write for the show is also interesting, as he was recommended to Russell by Ncuti Gatwa. Gatwa has wanted an Africa-based episode for some time, and obviously knows Ellams’s previous work which includes The Barbershop Chronicles, his 2017 play which explores six different black barber shops across the UK. So Ellams knows what he’s doing exploring this culture, and with The Story and The Engine, Ncuti finally gets his wish. How is the finished product? Well… It’s complicated.

Let’s make this clear. I still liked The Story and The Engine and think it delved into some really unique and interesting ideas that Doctor Who has never tried before. It’s also continuing this era’s heavily experimental nature, constantly giving us new places and themes. However, it does remind me a lot of last series in that it’s a good episode that is one draft away from being a great one.

The premise at the heart of everything is superb – a group of people locked in a barbershop have to tell stories while getting their haircuts, in order to fuel the engine of some mysterious unseen thing. The idea of a spaceship being run on the power of stories feels very Moffat to me, but I don’t mean that in a derogatory way (sometimes I do, just not this time), as Moffat was all about the power of emotion being turned into something that was tangible. What Moffat didn’t have was this much budget. The Story & The Engine initially seems like a one-room play as the first twenty minutes are mostly set in this barbershop with Ncuti, a mysterious barber and a few unwilling visitors – then of course he opens the door to try and leave, and he realises the barbershop is in the middle of a massive outer-space web and on top of a gigantic spider. 

This visual, although absolutely gorgeous, is definitely another case of ‘We’re showing off the Disney money’ syndrome, and it strangely took me out of the episode. I was enjoying the low-key tale of some young Nigerian men being held hostage by a malevolent barber, and the sudden interruption of a massive sci-fi CG set-piece did knock the wind out of my sails a bit. Again, it looked amazing, I have no complaints there, but it didn’t quite fit into this low-key but high-concept story.

The episode is keen to show off Nigerian culture. We have some scenes set in the hustle and bustle of a Lagos market, we wander around the backstreets to find the barbershop itself, and there’s many references to folkloric figures and characters. However, since Doctor Who is confined to a 45-minute timeslot (they’ve got the Disney+ and iPlayer loophole now, they can make them as long as they need to be and yet they still don’t) and we also have the baggage of everything else going on this series, there’s not as much chance to dive into these ideas as we’d hope. We really only hear two stories: one in the prologue, and one by the Doctor who decides to spotlight the brilliant story of a ‘normal life’ by telling a story of when Belinda stayed at the hospital overnight to care for an ailing elderly woman. Both these scenes are really nice, particularly the latter one which gives us some background to Belinda, and they’re acted out really well, but there needed to be more of them for me to be sold on this story concept. 

The episode is also oddly paced, as there’s a lot of dialogue and uninterrupted conversations during the middle that probably could have been trimmed down a bit or at least presented in a more interesting way. When the men are sitting in the barber’s chair telling stories their tales are visually presented through animation on a wall to the left, and I’m of course really happy to see animation in Doctor Who in any form, but it’s criminally underused here. 

I’m reminded of the way animation was used in the Jodie Whittaker episode Can You Hear Me, to present the backstory of these two gods in stunning fashion, and this episode has even more of an excuse to use animation in that way than Can You Hear Me did. I would’ve loved to have seen the barber’s history with the gods and his developing hatred for them presented in a similar way to the Tale of The Three Brothers scene from Harry Potter. It’s still a great scene and Ariyon Bakare is fantastic in his guest performance as the Barber himself, but I wish the episode used animation more. As it stands, the long scenes of talking in the barbershop did get a little tedious around the middle. 

Of course, my fan brain started doing cartwheels when Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor showed up briefly (a nice surprise for someone like me who’d given up on any chance of the show continuing to explore that), but that was also the one chance I had to focus on someone else other than a lot of information being explained to me in one specific way – a lot of talking. It didn’t help that the sound mix of this episode was particularly poor, with a lot of the music and sound effects being overly loud when watching in iPlayer on 4K. I love Murray Gold’s music but bloody hell man, turn it down.

I found the episode’s second half to be better than the first – the episode manages to focus all its brilliant ideas into a really exciting tale of a man, sick of playing second fiddle to the gods and helping share their stories, who is prepared to take revenge on the gods and destroy human culture. There’s a lot of interesting character conflict here as a woman named Abby, a friend of the Barber, is revealed to be Abena, the daughter of a trickster God. The Doctor can’t quite remember how he knows Abena or why she is so antagonistic towards him, but then it’s revealed – he knew her when he was the Fugitive Doctor, memories which are only slowly coming back to him. It was a very pleasant and shocking surprise to see Jo Martin back, and it’s even teased that we might finally hear the rest of her story which is, of course, very enticing.

The Barber is going to destroy the engine and kill the gods but the Doctor pulls a Rings of Akhaten and overloads the machine with his endless stories from across his multiple incarnations. This trick has been pulled before and I’m not quite sure if it was necessary on this occasion, but it’s still cool to see that, in an era that feels this fresh and new, it is still tapping into the same extensive mythology that Doctor Who has built up for itself.

Despite the plethora of ideas here, there’s not much else about The Story and The Engine. Belinda isn’t really in this episode that much and, apart from a couple of great lines, she doesn’t get that much to do. I love the idea of this new black Doctor seeing Lagos as a second home and loving his visits to the barbershop, but this episode features yet another instance of him crying which did feel overdone here. The mysterious appearance of a young girl, who looked similar to Poppy from Space Babies, is also interesting but I am impressed that this episode manages to stand on its own in a series with a lot of ongoing elements going on in the background.

The Story and The Engine is definitely good, and I love the way that it stands out from the pack, even in an era this willing to experiment. However it’s when it tries to make itself large-scale that it can lose a bit of steam. The pacing is off around the middle, some of the direction feels a bit listless, and the sound mix is so overbearing you need a rewatch to pick up on some genuinely brilliant lines of dialogue. It’s a great script that kind of gets kneecapped by the large-scale execution, but it’s still good to see this culture on screen in British sci-fi – especially since it’ll act as a palate cleanser before I’m smothered to death by camp, what with Eurovision coming this Saturday.

Alex’s Archive – Doctor Who (2025) The Story and the Engine