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One of the great things about having a bigger variety of writers this season is that we get to be absorbed into cultures we wouldn’t otherwise get a look at. It’s often been said that RTD loves modern-day London a bit too much, so bringing in a writer like Inua Ellams who can immerse us in Lagos, a culture we rarely get to see on a show like this, is a huge boon and immediately makes the episode stand out on vibes alone.
It was also nice to see 15 acknowledge that the way the world sees him is different now that he’s a black person for the first time in several millennia, especially after Lux earlier this season swept the racism angle under the rug because it didn’t have time to deal with it. This is a good example of how you can address something like that in an episode without having to shift the focus to make the whole story about it.
The downside is that it feels like the episode doesn’t know what it actually wants to be about until halfway through.
One big problem is that it takes too long for stakes to be established. Our cast of secondary characters being trapped in this strange barber shop with a mysterious and sinister man is enough to start with, but as the episode progresses, it starts to become more and more strange that nothing is being explained. Of course, a good mystery is central to any Doctor Who episode, and you have to leave some questions unanswered until later, but this episode was reluctant to give us anything to latch onto until about the mid-point. That’s fine when it’s in service of a big twist like what we saw last week, but this episode doesn’t have a moment like that to justify not giving us some details earlier.
We learn that the barber shop is traveling through space very early, but without any understanding of where it’s going, who’s making it go there, or why it’d be bad for it to reach its destination, I don’t have stakes to invest in. Until about halfway through, it’s not even clear that there is an evil plan, aside from the fact that this is Doctor Who, so we know there has to be one. As I said, you don’t need to answer all of these questions up front, but you have to give us something, and this episode waited too long to do so.
On the flipside, once we do get those stakes, the human perspective on the story gets lost. The four ordinary men who are trapped in the shop with the Doctor just exposit their backstories and then fade completely into the background. I realize 45 minutes isn’t enough to give them all fully-defined arcs, but I do expect them to be more than just bodies in the room.
I’m also not a fan of sticking the backstory for this episode in the Fugitive Doctor’s timeline. Aside from the fact that I think it’s a storyline best left alone, I really don’t want this pre-First Doctor timeline to just become an easy place to shove a backstory to artificially give the Doctor emotional investment in an episode. I don’t mind adventures we’ve never seen informing new stories, but this was not a good way to do it.
Despite all that, the final act did a lot of good work to pull me back around to enjoying myself. I enjoyed the emphasis on the power of stories, and if anything, I wish the episode had given us a deeper examination of it. With the villain’s plan being to erase the gods from every culture throughout history, it was set up to be a perfect playground to explore how inexorably tied to the stories of gods humanity has always been and how severing that tie would change the face of our entire existence. The Doctor makes a point of it a couple of times, but I think it was extremely fertile ground where a lot more could’ve been done.
The dramatic irony in a villain who leverages the stories of others for power not having a story of their own is a great concept that I think just about every writer would have a very different take on, and I loved how the Doctor became the natural counter to that as a being who has lived countless different lives as countless different people – many of them David Tennant. Bonus points for feeding all of us starved Ninth Doctor fans with a clip of Ecclestone.
I’m left with a good feeling, but I think The Story & The Engine could’ve done with a narrower focus. I like all of the concepts it brings to the table, but they weren’t explored as deeply as I was hoping for, and while I enjoyed the resolution, it would’ve felt a lot more satisfying had I been given more reason to invest in the journey a lot earlier on.
Also – and I realize this is a pedantic nitpick, but I’m a Doctor Who fan so that comes with the territory – but surely “The Story Engine” would’ve been a better title than “The Story & The Engine”? No?
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