Doctor Who: The Story and the Engine

In The Story and the Engine, the Doctor visits Lagos and uncovers a mysterious barbershop powered by stories, where Nigerian folklore and sci-fi collide in a meditation on identity, legacy, and the power of oral tradition.

The Story and the Engine is an intellectually thrilling premise, and in some moments, an emotionally moving one. But this fifth episode of Doctor Who Series 14, written by Nigerian poet and playwright Inua Ellams and directed by Makalla McPherson, finds itself tangled in its own web. It gesticulates towards grandeur but rarely grounds its ideas with the narrative discipline they deserve.

That doesn’t stop the episode from being one of the most thematically distinctive of the season. Set in a bustling 2019 Lagos, it finds the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and companion Belinda (Varada Sethu) caught in a mystery when locals vanish, including the Doctor’s favourite barber, Omo (Sule Rimi). The culprit, it turns out, is another barber who feeds stories into a spaceship engine, giving life to his creation through the tales he coaxes out of unsuspecting customers. A once-mortal figure who gave life to gods and folklore, including Anansi, the West African spider god, the episode heavily borrows from. Our antagonist barber is a remnant of a time when oral tradition was more than metaphor, it was powerful.

This, then, is an episode about storytelling as creation, as resistance, and as cultural survival. In Ellams, Doctor Who has found a writer with a refreshingly literary sensibility. Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles echoes here, not just in setting, but in tone. The barbershop is more than a location; it’s an archive of intergenerational knowledge, a confessional booth, a communal parliament.

And Gatwa seizes the opportunity. His performance in this episode is textured, charismatic, and grounded. We’ve seen the Doctor visit Earth cultures before, but never with this kind of intimacy. He belongs here. Whether in the informal patter with a market auntie or the affectionate pronunciation when speaking to peers, Gatwa’s Doctor defines himself and owns the identity of the first Black Doctor.

Visually, the episode is elevated by the contribution of Nigerian-British artist Bunmi Agusto, whose illustrations bring the engine’s story-hungry animation to life with style and specificity. The idea that stories have weight, that words can be rendered into light, texture, and form, is both literalised and celebrated. The Story and the Engine is Doctor Who at its most conceptually lyrical.

But despite its best intentions, the episode falters in its construction. The rules of the antagonist’s powers are left muddy. The central metaphor, stories fuelling ships, gods being born of gossip, is poetic, yes, but only loosely sketched. The viewer is often left behind, squinting through exposition that feels more ornamental than functional. A cameo-laced sequence adds to the convolution, derailing tension rather than deepening it. And the episode’s resolution feels too neat for all its emotion, as if the script, sensing its narrative sprawl, suddenly decides to bring the curtain down.

Even so, within this clutter, there are grace notes. A quiet, affecting monologue in which the Doctor recounts one of Belinda’s first days as a nurse is among the most human moments Doctor Who has offered in years. Her act of care, borne out of instinct and persistence in a fractured NHS system, reaffirms what this show does best: marrying the epic with the ordinary. It’s also a subtle nod to the sacrifices of real-world health workers post-COVID, who, like the Doctor and Belinda, worked under impossible pressure to preserve life.

One could argue that The Story and the Engine is the season’s most conscious nod to narrative repetition. Belinda sees visions of a child, identified through the credits as Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) from Space Babies, and the series’ structural mirroring with last year’s run is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. From godlike foes to Doctor-lite sociopolitical parables, Series 14 feels like a remix of Series 13, with variations rather than revolutions. Perhaps this is deliberate. Perhaps, like the episode itself, Doctor Who is exploring the tension between originality and retelling.

Which leaves us with an episode that is, in many ways, more interesting than it is successful. It’s not a fan-pleaser, nor a lore-builder. Its pleasures are quieter: a new cadence of speech in the Doctor’s voice, a richer tapestry of culture in the show’s world, a visual commitment to showcasing African artistic traditions. These aren’t things the show has always done well. But here, they’re done with care.

Ellams’ debut might lack coherence, but The Story and the Engine offers something far rarer in the modern era of the show: a fresh perspective. And in a franchise often preoccupied with the future, what a joy it is to spend an episode reflecting on how we inherit the past, through story, through community, and through the simple act of sitting in a barber’s chair, and being listened to.

Doctor Who: The Story and the Engine is available for UK audiences on BBC iPlayer. New episodes are released weekly on Saturday at 08:00 BST on the streaming platform or broadcast later on BBC One. For viewers outside the UK, the show can be watched exclusively on Disney+.