The Doctor goes to a barbershop in Lagos where he’s been a regular for years, finds the owner replaced by a stranger, and discovers the building is a machine that runs on the stories its customers tell while they’re in the chair. Nobody can leave until they’ve given one. “The Story and the Engine” is the most distinctive episode of the series and probably the most distinctive thing this era has made. I enjoyed it a great deal.
It’s built around the rhythm of men talking in a room, and it feels like nothing else in the run. Doctor Who has been going to London, Cardiff and generic space stations for twenty years, and an hour rooted this specifically in a real city is genuinely rare. The show has done “abroad” plenty of times. It has rarely done somewhere in particular.
The barbershop is the point
The setting does almost all the work and the episode knows it. A barbershop is a place where men talk, where the same conversations come round again, and where somebody holds a blade to your throat while you tell them things you wouldn’t tell anyone else. Turning that into a literal engine barely counts as a metaphor. The regulars are sketched quickly and well, each with a story they’ve told before and a reason for telling it. The rule that a story must be true to fuel the engine, and that a lie stalls it, gives the whole thing a shape, and the moment a man realises he’s been telling his own story wrong for years is quietly devastating.
It looks completely unlike the rest of the series, too. Lagos is shot with real warmth and specificity, the shop is lived-in instead of designed, and the look of the engine, all web-like filaments and moving glyphs, is genuinely unusual for this show. The Doctor being a regular is a lovely touch. He knows the owner and has a usual chair, and the show rarely lets him have somewhere ordinary that he simply likes. It makes the intrusion land harder, because somebody has taken a place that was his.
The Barber, and a god with a grievance
Ariyon Bakare is very good as the Barber, and he’s the best-built villain of the run. He’s a god who was written out of his own pantheon, reduced to a footnote in stories about other people, and his plan is essentially revenge for being forgotten. That’s a much more interesting version of the Pantheon idea than the show has managed before. The Toymaker and Maestro were enormous and arbitrary, while this one has a grievance I can follow, and it gives the episode something to argue about as well as a threat to survive. Abena is good value too, and the mid-episode turn where her loyalties shift is well earned.
Abena’s own story, when it arrives, is the best of the ones told in the chair. It’s short and unflashy, and it changes how I saw her whole presence in the shop. Because a story has to be true to work, every one we hear doubles as a confession, and she has the most to lose by telling hers. When the Doctor finally has to put something honest into the engine, the pause before he starts is the most revealing thing this incarnation has done. A man who talks constantly, stuck for something true, is a lovely idea for this Doctor.
Why the room matters more than the plot
What this gets right, and most of the run gets wrong, is that it builds a place before it builds a threat. I know who sits where in that shop, which chair is whose and what the arguments are about. By the time the engine starts pulling at people, I care because I’ve spent twenty minutes with them doing nothing in particular. Vincent and the Doctor works the same way, spending its time in a kitchen and a field with one man before anything invisible turns up. Nobody in that barbershop needs rescuing at the start, either; they need a haircut and somebody to talk to, and the episode treats both as worth forty-five minutes.
Gatwa is noticeably different here, and it suits him. He’s quieter and more deferential, a guest in somebody else’s space instead of the cleverest person in the room, and he spends a lot of the hour listening. Given how much of this era has him explaining things at speed, watching him sit in a chair and let other people talk is one of his better performances. A programme built on the idea that stories have power should occasionally make that literal, and putting the engine somewhere storytelling is already a daily ritual is far smarter than another cosmic library.
Where it wobbles
The mechanics get tangled in the last third. The engine, the god, the spider, the Barber’s history and the Doctor’s own story all need resolving, and the episode resorts to a lot of rapid explanation to get there. The resolution turns on a piece of business about the shop’s true name that I had to rewatch to follow. There’s a version of this that stays in the room and lets the conversation do everything, and it’d be a stronger hour. By the end the episode is juggling far more than it needs to, which is a shame when the room was already enough.
Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s warm, specific, beautifully shot and completely unlike anything else in the run, with the best-motivated villain of the era and a premise that turns a real place into a real idea. It only loses ground for a final act that tangles itself. Once again it leaves the Doctor explaining instead of acting.