Season Two (Series Fifteen); Episode Five - "The Story & The Engine" by Inua Ellams

Doctor Who is getting some more new blood! For the first time since Rogue last season, we have an author who’s never touched the show in the writer’s room and it was an episode I was, surprisingly enough, quite excited for. I have made a point to not look at any news for this series after being spoiled for the Sutekh reveal last season by numerous bang-on fan theories, so I’ve not even been watching the next time trailers. All I knew is that it was set somewhere in Africa and that there was a spider. Going in blind, I was looking forward to something new, something fresh, and what I got was something that I’m still not sure how to react to.

Visiting an old friend’s barber shop, the Doctor finds himself face to face with a mysterious storyteller on a path to revenge, powering his ship with the stories of lost souls. And who has more stories than the Doctor?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This is going to be a hard story to review. It is pretty unlike anything this show has ever put out before I’m still unsure on how to feel about it. On one hand, I adore the creativity and originality of it all - it is a truly unique episode and I can’t fault it for that - but then on the other hand, it has one too many problems as an episode itself for me to properly get invested. Maybe I’ve just become predisposed to disliking this season because all I feel watching these episodes at this point is apathy and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s more my fault than the show’s. Well, best we find out.

If there is one thing The Story & The Engine does tremendously, it’s imagery. The set and costume design is immaculate, and I love the earthy, traditional vibe of it all; it really gives off a unique air. Beyond that, I also think the setting is great because, for somebody who loves Earth so much, the Doctor never seems to want to leave England. We’ve gotten two international episodes this season and I think that’s brilliant because the show really should travel around a little more. 

As for the plot, I definitely admire its freshness if nothing else. I really dig weaving folklore and storytelling into a narrative because it makes for some great concepts and all the stuff about the power of stories and the Nexus was fascinating. I do quickly have to bring up that I found myself somewhat lost for a not insignificant chunk of the episode. For a story about stories, The Story & the Engine struggled with its exposition and the line between an in-universe narrative and a truckload of heavy handed explanation was very thin. Too much information is dumped on you at once and I found it hard to keep up. Also, does anybody else think it's weird that Anansi and all the other gods are just straight up real? Like, the Doctor fights Gods all the time, but they’re mostly ageless beings of unimaginable power, not actual avatars of human folklore. This episode feels a lot more fantasy than sci-fi and sometimes clashes with the model of Doctor Who, but not enough for it to properly become a problem.

What I can’t let slip however is the rest of the episode because if you take away all the bells and whistles you’re left with a kind of dull affair. Let’s start with characters, and the only one I can really compliment is the Doctor. I have brought this up before but I adore the idea of the Doctor zipping around the universe and making friends and connections as he goes, and having little homes away from home to go to - I think it makes the universe feel a little bit more lived in. Also, Fugitive’s cameo was fun; for as much as I hate the Timeless Child, I’m happy they're not just going to lazily drop it (can’t fix bad writing with bad writing). However, our sidecast is too large and uninteresting for me to really care, each one characterised by a sentence of exposition. There is some attempt with the Doctor’s old friend Odo and Anansi’s daughter (???) Abby - as well as the Barber himself - but there’s so much going on that it all just falls flat for me and I found myself distinctly uninvested. 

In fact, “uninvested” could probably describe most of my feelings towards this story. The characters are too shallow and the ideas too big and numerous for me to really buy into it, plus, it’s nature as mostly conversations in a barber shop mean that, at least for me, there was next to no tension. Also, I don’t really know how to describe it, but the whole episode felt… awkward. Everything landed just a bit off: the lines were a bit too dramatised, the direction was a little too askew, the ideas conveyed just a little too poorly. This episode is presented in a very clumsy way, I think because there’s so much going on it’s hard to capture it all. This story might have worked quite a bit better as prose because then you could really have the narrative space to run around but here, everything’s a little, I dunno, squished.

I’m on the fence about The Story & the Engine. I appreciate its originality and its vision but it seems too caught up with the wrong things and because of that, I feel little in the way of love towards it. It’s like a story I should adore but without the enthusiasm, presented in a slightly wonky way in a medium that couldn’t really contain it. It’s definitely not bad and by far the most creatively rich of the season so far, but it’s missing the universal ingredients that make a great piece of TV.

6/10

Pros:

+ Really great set and costume design

+ Brimming with fascinatingly original ideas

+ I love the weaving of stories and folklore into the narrative

+ Did some interesting things with the Doctor

Cons:

- Awkwardly put together

- Its storytelling turns to exposition quite easily

- Tensionless for most of the narrative

- Couldn’t find myself invested in the characters