The Story & the Engine: A Deep Dive into African Mythology, Cultural Memory and the Power of Storytelling

How successful is Doctor Who’s journey into Nigerian folklore, and does the episode fully realise the opportunity offered by African mythology?

Introduction: A story about who gets to tell stories

When Doctor Who arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, in The Story & the Engine, it did more than transport the Fifteenth Doctor to another geographical location. Written by Nigerian-born poet and playwright Inua Ellams, the 2025 episode attempted to place African cultural memory, oral storytelling, Black identity and the politics of historical recognition at the centre of a science-fiction adventure. Its setting is not simply an exotic backdrop for an encounter with a monster. Instead, the episode proposes that stories are living things: they shape communities, preserve identities, give power to gods and determine whose contributions survive the passage of time.

 

That is an ambitious proposition for a programme whose own longevity depends upon the continuous retelling of stories. Doctor Who has survived for decades by transforming its central character, reinventing its mythology and introducing successive generations to a universe in which almost anything is possible. An episode about the relationship between storytelling, cultural inheritance and power is therefore especially appropriate. By bringing the Doctor into a Lagos barbershop, Ellams creates an opportunity to examine the programme itself: who creates its stories, which cultures shape them, whose voices are amplified and which contributions risk being forgotten.

The episode’s most significant achievement is that its central science-fiction concept emerges from its cultural and thematic concerns. The mysterious Barber, the supernatural engine, the enormous spider and the web connecting stories are not entirely separate inventions. They belong to a shared imaginative framework in which storytelling becomes both a source of life and an instrument of control. The result is a distinctive adventure that often feels more interested in the philosophical possibilities of Doctor Who than in the mechanical requirements of a conventional monster-of-the-week episode.

Yet the episode also invites a difficult question: does it genuinely explore African mythology, or does it use African mythology primarily as a starting point for a broader meditation on storytelling?

The distinction matters. Africa contains an immense diversity of peoples, religions, languages, literary traditions and mythologies. Nigerian traditions alone cannot be reduced to a single body of folklore, much less treated as representative of an entire continent. An episode that foregrounds Anansi, the spider trickster associated particularly with Akan storytelling traditions in Ghana and neighbouring parts of West Africa, while setting its action in Nigeria, makes an interesting choice. It also creates a responsibility to distinguish between related cultural traditions rather than presenting them as interchangeable expressions of a universal mythology.

Ultimately, The Story & the Engine is a thoughtful and imaginative piece of television that makes meaningful use of its cultural setting. Its greatest strength is its understanding of storytelling as a form of power, memory and communal survival. Its principal limitation is that its expansive ambitions sometimes lead it away from the deeper exploration of specific African mythological traditions that its premise seems to promise.

1. The barbershop as a cultural and emotional centre

The first major decision Ellams makes is to begin with an ordinary, recognisable social space rather than an ancient temple, a remote village or a supernatural landscape.

The Doctor arrives in Lagos in 2019, hoping to visit Omo’s Palace, a barbershop that has become a place of comfort and belonging. But the shop has been taken over by a mysterious new barber, and Omo and several other men are effectively held captive. Their hair is repeatedly cut as they are compelled to tell stories, supplying energy to an extraordinary machine. What initially resembles a hostage situation gradually expands into a cosmic confrontation involving gods, folklore and the relationship between stories and reality.

 

This is a particularly effective starting point because the barbershop already has a social function before the science-fiction plot begins. It is a place where people talk, argue, joke, remember and exchange information. The conversations that happen there matter as much as the haircuts. Customers are not merely purchasing a service; they are participating in a shared cultural experience.

Ellams had already explored these relationships in his stage play Barber Shop Chronicles, which follows conversations across barbershops in several African cities and London. Russell T Davies had seen the play and encouraged Ellams to imagine what would happen if the Doctor entered one of these spaces. The resulting episode therefore develops from the writer’s existing artistic interests rather than simply selecting Lagos as a visually distinctive location.

 

That distinction is crucial when considering representation. A setting can be geographically accurate yet culturally superficial. A story might show familiar buildings, colourful clothing, music and busy streets without communicating anything meaningful about the people who live there. By contrast, The Story & the Engine makes a recognisable feature of social life the mechanism through which its central ideas emerge.

The barbershop also offers a compelling counterpoint to the TARDIS. Both spaces bring different people together, and both can become places where extraordinary conversations occur. The TARDIS carries the Doctor between planets and historical periods; Omo’s Palace creates a sense of connection through everyday human interaction.

The difference is that the barbershop belongs to a community rather than to a solitary traveller. The Doctor may be the most extraordinary person in the room, but he is also a customer who depends upon other people for his sense of belonging.

This allows Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor to display a different kind of vulnerability. He is exuberant and sociable, enjoying the opportunity to relax among people with whom he feels comfortable. His attachment to the shop is not simply a convenient excuse for the plot to begin. It establishes that he has found somewhere he values for reasons beyond its practical usefulness.

The later revelation that Omo has withheld information and exposed the Doctor to danger therefore carries an emotional cost. The betrayal hurts because the Doctor has invested trust in this community. He is not merely annoyed that a plan has gone wrong; he is disappointed that a place he considered safe has become a place where people are willing to sacrifice him to protect themselves.

There is an important thematic connection here. Communities are sustained by stories about who belongs, who can be trusted and what people owe one another. The barbershop’s supernatural transformation makes those ordinary social relationships visible on a cosmic scale.

The episode succeeds because it makes its cultural setting indispensable to the story’s emotional logic. The barbershop is not simply where the Doctor encounters African mythology. It provides the model through which the episode understands community, storytelling and belonging.

Nevertheless, the setting could have been explored even further. Lagos is a vast, complex, contemporary city, not a synonym for Nigerian culture as a whole. More sustained attention to the shop’s neighbourhood, the characters’ daily lives and the specific social environment might have made the location feel even more fully realised. The episode gives us a strong impression of community, but it occasionally prioritises the metaphysical mystery over the everyday world that makes that community distinctive.

2. Anansi and the opportunity offered by African mythology

At the heart of the episode’s mythological framework is Anansi, a trickster figure associated especially with Akan folklore and the storytelling traditions of Ghana. Anansi tales have circulated through oral traditions, adapted across generations and travelled through the Caribbean and the wider African diaspora.

Anansi is an especially productive figure for Doctor Who because he is associated with wit, deception, storytelling and the ability of a less powerful character to challenge a stronger opponent. In many familiar Anansi tales, intelligence and cunning are more important than physical strength. Stories become ways of negotiating power, exposing hypocrisy and making sense of the world.

The association between Anansi and stories is not merely decorative. It provides a foundation for Ellams’s central invention: a universe in which storytelling has the power to sustain supernatural beings and influence reality.

In the episode, the Barber claims connections to Anansi and several other mythological figures, including Loki, Bastet, Dionysus and the Norse goddess Saga. The Doctor rejects his claim to be these gods, however, and eventually exposes a more complicated identity. The Barber was once human, and he helped the gods maintain their relationships with humanity by spreading their stories. He believes that his contribution has been erased, leaving the gods celebrated while the labour that sustained their reputations goes unrecognised.

 

This is an imaginative adaptation of Anansi’s association with storytelling, but it is important to distinguish the episode’s invention from traditional mythology. The Barber’s elaborate biography, the supernatural engine and the particular system linking the gods are creations for the programme. They should not be understood as straightforward accounts of an established African religious tradition.

That distinction is particularly important because Anansi is not exclusively Nigerian in origin, and African mythology is not one unified system. Nigerian cultural traditions include, among many others, Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Hausa and Isoko traditions, each with distinctive histories and beliefs. The Yoruba orisha, for example, belong to a different religious and cultural framework from Akan Anansi stories, even though traditions can interact and share broader regional contexts.

Ellams’s choice to bring Anansi into a Nigerian setting is not inherently inappropriate. Folklore travels, adapts and becomes part of new cultural environments. The African diaspora has played an especially important role in preserving and transforming stories across geographical boundaries. The important question is whether the adaptation acknowledges that movement or obscures the distinctions between its sources.

Here, the answer is mixed but generally favourable. Ellams is not presenting a documentary account of a single mythology. He is constructing a speculative universe in which gods from different traditions can coexist. He has explained that his upbringing in a household shaped by both Muslim and Christian traditions, alongside his exposure to Nigerian folklore and other religious stories, encouraged him to think across different pantheons.

 

The result reflects a form of cultural cross-pollination rather than an attempt to reconstruct one traditional belief system in isolation.

That is a legitimate creative approach, and it fits Doctor Who, a programme that has always borrowed, transformed and combined ideas from different traditions. The difficulty is that cross-cultural synthesis can become cultural flattening when the distinctions between traditions are not sufficiently developed.

The Barber’s claim to embody so many gods initially promises an exploration of the similarities and differences between mythologies. Instead, the individual deities largely become names in his catalogue of identities. The Doctor’s encounters with them are mentioned with comic familiarity, but the episode does not devote much time to exploring their separate traditions, relationships with humanity or distinctive philosophical implications.

As a result, the mythological framework is conceptually broad but culturally selective. It uses a variety of divine figures to establish the scale of the story, while its most sustained exploration concerns the general power of storytelling rather than the particular histories of those traditions.

What could the episode have done differently?

One possibility would have been to spend more time with Anansi himself, rather than treating his identity primarily as the background to the Barber’s grievance and Abena’s history.

Anansi’s trickster qualities could have shaped the narrative structure. A story about a trickster might turn on competing accounts of the same event, a bargain whose meaning changes as it is retold, or a seemingly foolish character who understands the rules better than everyone else. Such techniques could have allowed the episode to derive its twists directly from a particular storytelling tradition.

The Barber’s elaborate deceptions already point in this direction, but the episode does not always make the connection sufficiently specific. His behaviour resembles the broad archetype of the trickster, yet that archetype is not unique to Anansi. Without more detailed engagement with Akan storytelling, the cultural specificity risks being overshadowed by a universal category.

A second opportunity lies in Nigeria’s own mythological traditions. Ellams has expressed an interest in a future Doctor Who story involving the Yoruba orisha, demonstrating that he recognises how much further the programme could travel into this territory.

 

A story centred on a specific Yoruba tradition, developed with appropriate cultural and religious understanding, could explore a different set of relationships between divine power, community, responsibility and the natural world. It would also avoid the implication that an episode set in Nigeria necessarily needs to represent African mythology in its entirety.

The key is not that every story must focus on one tradition exclusively. Rather, the programme should be confident enough to explore individual traditions in depth instead of relying on the broadest possible collection of mythological references.

My assessment is that Anansi is an inspired starting point, but the episode is more successful as a story about the power of mythology than as a deep exploration of Anansi mythology itself. Its ideas are strong, but there is room for greater specificity.

3. The Barber: a villain built from historical erasure

The most intellectually interesting aspect of The Story & the Engine is that its antagonist is not simply a god who has become evil. He is a figure whose anger emerges from a recognisable injustice: the experience of contributing to something significant while watching other people receive the recognition.

Ellams has explained that the Barber’s conception began with his encounter with a troubling aspect of French terminology surrounding ghostwriting and racialised language. This led him to consider a Black man who had helped construct storytelling systems but whose contribution had been erased from the record. He then connected this idea to the association between Anansi and the ownership of stories.

 

This origin gives the Barber a political dimension that elevates him above a conventional supernatural villain.

The gods are famous. Their stories survive. Their names become part of cultural memory. But the Barber believes that he performed the work that made their continued influence possible. He helped circulate the myths, preserve the narratives and maintain the relationship between gods and human beings. From his perspective, the celebrated figures are beneficiaries of his labour.

His resentment therefore concerns more than personal vanity. It concerns the unequal distribution of recognition: who is remembered as the creator, who is treated as a supporting figure and who disappears from the account of how something came into existence.

This connects the episode to questions about cultural appropriation, colonial history, authorship and the preservation of knowledge. Cultural products frequently travel further than the people who created them. Stories can become commercially successful, globally influential or detached from their original contexts, while their cultural origins receive insufficient acknowledgement.

The Barber turns that problem into a literal supernatural mechanism. He has helped sustain the gods, yet he believes that the gods have excluded him from the recognition he deserves.

The irony is that he responds to erasure by planning to erase others. His proposed destruction of the gods’ presence in human memory would remove the very beings whose treatment has fuelled his resentment.

That contradiction is the heart of his character. He identifies a genuine injustice but arrives at a solution that reproduces its underlying cruelty. He wants to overturn the hierarchy of storytelling, yet his ambition is to become the supreme authority over every story.

The episode is strongest when it refuses to make the Barber’s grievance entirely unreasonable. His pain gives the conflict emotional weight, even though his intended response is destructive. A more conventional villain might want domination simply because domination is desirable. The Barber wants recognition because he believes he has been denied something fundamental.

His tragedy is that recognition and control become indistinguishable in his mind.

Does this make him an effective Doctor Who villain?

Yes, although not without limitations.

The Barber’s scheme is imaginative, his presence is unsettling, and his grievance connects the supernatural plot to questions of cultural power. Ariyon Bakare’s performance also helps establish a character whose menace emerges through composure and controlled theatricality rather than constant displays of aggression.

However, the episode could have developed his history more fully. We understand the nature of his grievance more clearly than we understand the precise events that transformed it into an all-consuming desire for revenge.

A little more evidence of his original relationship with the gods, the work he performed and the circumstances in which his contributions were forgotten might have made his eventual choices even more tragic. The episode gives us a compelling concept and an emotionally understandable motive, but it sometimes moves too quickly from the explanation of the injustice to the revelation of the plan.

There is also a broader question about how the story handles historical erasure. The Barber’s anger is rooted in a problem with genuine social and cultural significance, but the resolution necessarily brings that problem into the familiar moral framework of Doctor Who: the villain must be persuaded to abandon his destructive ambition, and the community must find a way forward.

That is understandable for a family adventure. Nevertheless, the episode could have done more to distinguish between personal forgiveness and meaningful recognition. A villain relinquishing his revenge does not automatically resolve the injustice that produced it.

The conclusion is emotionally satisfying, but it leaves some of the Barber’s underlying concerns open to interpretation.

4. Hair, memory and the physical form of storytelling

Hair is one of the episode’s most effective recurring motifs. It connects the ordinary business of the barbershop with the supernatural machinery of the plot, while introducing a more specific discussion of Black identity and cultural memory.

At first, the Barber’s repeated haircuts appear to be an unsettling variation on the familiar horror of losing control over one’s own body. But the process has a larger purpose: the hair continually grows back, allowing the Barber to harvest it repeatedly as a source of power.

The barbershop becomes a kind of farm, with human hair functioning as a renewable resource. Ellams has discussed this idea explicitly, describing the relationship between the regrowth of hair and the replenishment of a crop. He also associates the coiling and curling of Black hair with an infinity spiral, suggesting continuity, renewal and the endless reinvention of stories.

 

This is a clever piece of symbolic construction. Hair grows, is cut, is reshaped and grows again. Stories likewise pass between generations, acquire new meanings and return in altered forms. Neither process is simply linear: each contains repetition and transformation.

The symbolism also works because hair is personal. It is connected to identity, appearance, family, culture and individual choice. In a Black barbershop, the act of cutting and styling hair can have particular social and cultural significance. The episode recognises this by treating the shop as a place where cultural knowledge is shared rather than simply a location where people have their appearance altered.

Its strongest sequence develops this connection through the story of African-American enslaved people using braided hairstyles to communicate information and assist escape. Ellams explained that he learned about these narratives through his partner, whose Jamaican family background gave her a different relationship to the history of slavery and its cultural memory. He incorporated the idea as a point of connection between the Doctor and Abena.

 

This moment matters because it demonstrates that cultural knowledge is not uniform, even among people who share a broad racial or diasporic identity.

The Doctor’s Black appearance does not mean that he automatically knows every aspect of Black history. Nor does Ellams assume that his own Nigerian background gives him direct access to every African diasporic experience. Instead, the episode suggests that cultural understanding develops through exchange: people learn from one another, inherit stories and discover connections that were previously unfamiliar to them.

The distinction between Nigerian experience and African-American history is particularly important here. The history of slavery in the Americas, the cultural adaptations developed by enslaved communities and the traditions of contemporary Nigeria are connected through the wider history of the African diaspora, but they are not interchangeable.

The episode uses a specific historical narrative to build a connection across those experiences without suggesting that they are identical.

There is, however, a qualification worth making. The popular account of enslaved people braiding detailed escape maps into their hair has been repeated widely, but aspects of that particular historical claim are disputed and difficult to verify. The episode’s broader point about hair, identity and cultural resistance remains meaningful, but the specific claim should not be treated as conclusively established history without further evidence.

As drama, the scene is effective because it gives the Doctor something more valuable than a clever fact with which to impress the Barber. It provides a way for him to recognise Abena’s experience and establish solidarity with her.

Hair becomes a record of identity that cannot be understood simply by looking at it. Its significance depends on the stories, experiences and cultural knowledge attached to it.

That is one of the episode’s strongest achievements: a physical detail becomes the bridge between mythology, history and character.

5. The story engine and the Nexus: science fiction as a metaphor for culture

The central science-fiction concept is unusually well suited to the episode’s themes. The Barber’s machine is powered by stories, while the enormous spider and its web provide a physical representation of the connections between them.

The result resembles a cosmic information network. Stories travel between people and cultures, sustaining beliefs and influencing how communities understand their place in the universe. The machine gives these relationships a literal form, allowing the Doctor to confront a problem that is simultaneously technological, mythological and ethical.

This is where Doctor Who is particularly effective. The programme has always used science-fiction devices to make abstract ideas tangible. Time travel turns history into a destination. Regeneration makes changes of identity visible. Alien technology can externalise questions about memory, consciousness or power.

Here, storytelling itself becomes a form of energy.

The concept also provides a way to understand the relationship between myth and belief. The gods depend upon stories to maintain their connection with humanity, while the Barber claims responsibility for helping those stories survive. The machine therefore represents an entire system of cultural production: stories are created, transmitted, repeated and transformed, and the people who participate in that process influence what survives.

Yet the machine also introduces an uncomfortable possibility. What happens when stories are no longer shared freely but extracted from people for somebody else’s benefit?

The captives’ stories are not treated as gifts. They become compulsory labour. The Barber turns the social act of storytelling into a system of exploitation, making the engine a metaphor for what happens when cultural expression is separated from the people who produce it.

This is a particularly strong extension of the episode’s concerns about historical recognition. The problem is not simply that the Barber has been forgotten. It is that storytelling has become a mechanism through which other beings acquire power while the people supplying the material lose control over it.

The web is equally significant. A web links individual strands into a larger structure, just as stories connect people, places and periods of history. It also suggests the possibility of manipulation: a figure controlling the web can influence how its connections function.

The episode’s giant spider is therefore more than a striking visual. It belongs to a coherent symbolic system built around interdependence, entanglement and the circulation of stories.

There is even a useful parallel with the internet. The Barber’s network allows stories to travel across boundaries, but connectivity does not guarantee fairness. A system can spread information while concentrating power in the hands of those who control its infrastructure.

That interpretation is not necessarily a direct allegory for digital platforms, but it follows naturally from the episode’s interest in authorship, ownership and the distribution of cultural influence.

The main weakness is explanatory rather than conceptual. The episode introduces the machine, the Nexus, the gods, the Barber’s history and Abena’s connection to Anansi within a relatively compact narrative. Some of the rules become difficult to follow because the characters are simultaneously explaining the system and arguing about its moral implications.

The ideas are richer than the amount of time available to clarify them.

A little more visual storytelling, or fewer competing revelations, could have helped the audience understand how the system operates without reducing the mystery. Nevertheless, the engine is one of the episode’s most original inventions because it unites the plot and the theme rather than simply providing a mechanism for the Doctor to defeat.

6. The Doctor as a story in his own right

The episode is also a story about the Doctor’s identity, and this is where Ncuti Gatwa’s casting becomes especially significant.

The Fifteenth Doctor’s visit to Lagos gives him an opportunity to experience belonging in a way that differs from his usual role as the extraordinary outsider. He is still an alien traveller, but his Black appearance allows him to move through this particular environment with a different relationship to the people around him.

Ellams has said that Gatwa’s Doctor makes it possible to tell stories in which his appearance changes how he moves through particular parts of the world. The episode uses this possibility without suggesting that racial identity determines every aspect of a person’s experience.

 

The Doctor’s connection to the barbershop consequently becomes more than a character detail. It allows the programme to explore what it means for a traveller who belongs nowhere permanently to find a place where he feels welcome.

This also creates a revealing parallel with the Barber.

Both characters have an intimate relationship with stories. The Barber believes that stories have defined his existence and denied him recognition. The Doctor has spent centuries becoming a collection of remembered experiences, relationships and previous identities.

Ellams has described the Doctor’s body as a kind of walking library, containing the voices and experiences of previous incarnations. That idea is reflected in the episode’s use of earlier Doctors and its treatment of the character’s history as something that remains present within him.

 

The parallel is elegant. The Doctor is not simply one individual with a long biography. He is a character whose identity depends upon the accumulation of previous stories.

Regeneration allows him to change while retaining a connection to his past. The programme’s history is therefore both an inheritance and a creative resource.

This makes the Doctor an ideal opponent for the Barber, who wants to impose a final authority over storytelling. The Doctor embodies the opposite principle: continuity through change.

His life has meaning precisely because it can be retold. New incarnations do not need to erase the old ones for the character to remain recognisable. Instead, the differences between them become part of the whole.

That is a particularly appropriate idea for an episode written by a poet and playwright who is bringing his own cultural experiences into an established television universe.

The inclusion of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor adds another layer to this exploration. Her appearance connects the episode to unresolved questions about the Doctor’s history, while reinforcing the idea that identity can contain stories that have not yet been fully understood.

However, the continuity references can also distract from the episode’s more original concerns. For viewers deeply invested in the Doctor’s mythology, these moments offer exciting possibilities. For others, they risk drawing attention away from the Lagos setting and the Barber’s cultural and personal grievance.

The balance is not always perfect, but the references are thematically relevant rather than purely nostalgic.

7. Abena: the most important opportunity the episode only partly fulfils

If the Barber represents the exploitation of storytelling, Abena represents the danger of allowing somebody else’s account of the world to define your future.

Her connection to Anansi, and her history with the Doctor, complicate the apparent distinction between hero and villain. She has her own reasons for distrusting the Doctor, and her willingness to help the Barber emerges from a history of disappointment and a desire to regain control over her life.

She is not simply an accomplice who needs to be persuaded to change sides. Her decisions arise from an experience that the Doctor has not fully understood.

This gives the episode a potentially fascinating opportunity to explore the position of women within mythological traditions, particularly in stories where powerful male figures determine the circumstances of other people’s lives.

Anansi’s trickster identity is usually associated with cleverness and ingenuity, but the episode chooses to focus on the consequences of his actions for his daughter. Abena’s history makes the familiar idea of a trickster’s clever bargain feel less amusing when viewed from the perspective of someone whose freedom has become a stake in that bargain.

Her anger at the Doctor also matters. She believes he failed her when she needed help, and the revelation of their earlier connection forces him to confront a past action that he cannot simply dismiss as another adventure.

This is an important complication for a character who often moves through the universe as its most capable problem-solver. The Doctor’s good intentions do not guarantee that other people will experience his actions as good. He may have intended to lose the original bet, but that does not necessarily resolve the consequences for Abena.

Her story therefore challenges the assumption that the Doctor’s moral judgement should automatically be accepted by everyone around him.

Unfortunately, the episode has limited time to explore these questions. Abena’s history, her relationship with Anansi, her grievance against the Doctor and her involvement in the Barber’s plan all compete for attention.

Her eventual freedom is meaningful, but a longer story could have given her more space to explain what she wants beyond escaping the Barber’s influence.

This is also where a deeper engagement with African mythology might have enriched the episode. Abena’s relationship with Anansi could have provided a sustained exploration of inheritance, authority, gender and the obligations that arise between parents and children within a mythological framework.

Instead, her connection to Anansi largely serves the immediate narrative. The episode establishes an intriguing premise without exploring all its implications.

That is not a failure of the character herself. It is a limitation of the amount of narrative space devoted to her.

The episode recognises that Abena deserves a future beyond the stories other people have imposed upon her. It could have gone further by showing more clearly what that future means to her.

8. Does the episode make the most of the opportunity to tell an African mythology story?

The answer depends on what we believe the episode is trying to accomplish.

If the intention was to provide a detailed exploration of a particular African mythological tradition, the episode only partially succeeds. Anansi is central to the concept, but his traditional stories and cultural context are not explored in great depth. The appearance of several other gods broadens the mythological canvas, but it also disperses attention across a collection of references.

If, however, the intention was to use African folklore as the foundation for an original story about cultural memory, belonging and the ownership of narratives, the episode is much more successful.

Its greatest strength is that it does not treat mythology as something belonging exclusively to the distant past. Stories remain active in the present. They shape identity, influence relationships and determine how people understand their histories.

The contemporary Lagos setting is important to this argument. It allows the episode to present African cultural life as something living and evolving, rather than as an ancient tradition that exists only in historical reconstructions or fantasy settings.

The episode’s relationship with Afrofuturism is also relevant here. Afrofuturism broadly explores the intersections of African and diasporic cultures with technology, speculative futures and alternative understandings of history. The Story & the Engine does not need to fit neatly into one genre to participate in that imaginative territory. Its cosmic machine, mythological network and Black central characters combine speculative technology with cultural histories that are often underrepresented in mainstream science fiction.

Ellams had previously explored these concerns in his poetry, including a poem about Doctor Who itself. He has explained that he deliberately incorporates his poetic practice into his screenwriting, particularly in the Barber’s extended speech about his identity and the nature of stories.

 

That poetic approach is one of the episode’s distinguishing features. It gives the dialogue a heightened, performative quality that suits the subject matter. The Barber does not simply explain his importance; he attempts to establish his authority through the very act of telling a story about himself.

But this is also where the episode risks becoming too abstract. The language is sometimes more effective as poetry than as exposition. The ideas are compelling, yet their accumulation can make the mechanics of the plot difficult to follow.

A stronger balance between poetic expression and dramatic clarity would have allowed the episode to explore its themes without requiring the audience to do quite so much interpretive work.

There is a related question about the episode’s cultural breadth. Bringing together several gods creates a sense of a shared mythological universe, but it also risks suggesting that all traditions ultimately tell the same story about power and belief.

They do not.

Mythologies can contain radically different understandings of divinity, humanity, nature, morality and the relationship between the individual and the community. A story that explores those differences, rather than simply collecting gods under one overarching explanation, could offer a richer account of how mythology works.

The programme has the advantage of being a science-fiction series in which almost any imaginative premise can be developed. It could return to Nigeria and explore Yoruba traditions, revisit Anansi in a story more closely shaped by Akan folklore, or travel elsewhere in Africa to investigate entirely different mythological systems.

The important point is that it should not assume one episode can represent an entire continent.

Ellams’s own comments suggest that he understands the potential for further exploration. His interest in writing about the Yoruba orisha indicates that The Story & the Engine need not be the endpoint of the programme’s engagement with African mythology.

 

That possibility is one of the episode’s most encouraging legacies.

9. The ending: redemption without erasure

The episode ultimately turns away from revenge and towards reconciliation. The Doctor’s response to the Barber is not simply to defeat him through superior technology or greater physical power. Instead, the confrontation becomes a question of what stories can accomplish when they are shared rather than controlled.

The ending’s emotional logic is consistent with the episode’s central argument. Stories cannot be reduced to the property of a single authority, because their meaning develops through the relationships between storytellers and audiences.

The Barber’s mistake is not that he wants recognition. It is that he believes recognition can only be achieved by controlling everyone else’s relationship with stories.

The Doctor offers a different model. His life has accumulated meaning through countless encounters, and his continued existence depends upon the possibility of new stories. He can acknowledge the past without allowing it to dictate every future action.

Abena’s freedom is especially important in this context. Her future cannot simply be another chapter in the Barber’s revenge narrative. She must be able to leave that narrative behind and make decisions of her own.

Nevertheless, the resolution leaves an important question unanswered: what would genuine recognition for the Barber look like?

The episode’s moral conclusion is emotionally understandable, but reconciliation is not identical to justice. A character can abandon revenge without receiving the acknowledgement he believes he deserves. Likewise, forgiveness does not automatically repair the relationships damaged by exploitation.

A more extended conclusion could have explored the possibility of recognising the Barber’s contribution while rejecting his desire for absolute control.

That would have made the resolution even more closely aligned with the episode’s central concern: the difference between participating in a shared story and claiming ownership of it.

Even so, the ending avoids the simplest possible response to the conflict. The episode is not merely about restoring the status quo after a supernatural disturbance. It asks whether a community can move forward while acknowledging the harm that has occurred.

That is a worthwhile question for a family science-fiction adventure, and it gives the story emotional substance beyond its imaginative imagery.

Conclusion: an important beginning rather than the definitive statement

The Story & the Engine is one of the more conceptually ambitious stories in modern Doctor Who. Its combination of Nigerian setting, African folklore, Black cultural identity, poetic language and speculative technology creates an episode that feels distinctive without abandoning the programme’s familiar interest in strange encounters and moral dilemmas.

Its achievements are considerable.

The barbershop provides an effective social centre, allowing the Doctor’s relationship with Lagos to emerge through community rather than scenery alone. The Barber offers a compelling antagonist whose grievance connects supernatural conflict to the politics of recognition and historical erasure. Hair becomes a sophisticated visual metaphor for identity and renewal, while the story engine transforms the power of storytelling into an imaginative science-fiction mechanism.

Gatwa’s Doctor benefits from a story that explores belonging, vulnerability and the accumulated history of his many identities. Abena, meanwhile, introduces important questions about freedom, inherited stories and the consequences of the Doctor’s past decisions.

But the episode does not fully realise every opportunity it creates.

Its mythological framework is more expansive than it is deep. Anansi provides a strong foundation, but the episode spends relatively little time exploring the distinctive cultural and narrative traditions associated with him. The inclusion of multiple gods creates a fascinating shared universe, yet sometimes reduces individual mythologies to variations on a common theme. Abena’s story could also have benefited from greater attention, particularly given the possibilities offered by her relationship with Anansi.

These limitations are significant, but they do not undermine the episode’s fundamental achievement. They identify where a successful experiment could lead to something even more substantial.

The best response to The Story & the Engine is not to demand that it explain every aspect of African mythology in a single instalment. It is to recognise that the episode has demonstrated how much Doctor Who can gain by allowing writers to draw upon cultural histories, literary traditions and experiences that have not always occupied the centre of British science fiction.

My final judgement is that The Story & the Engine succeeds more fully as an exploration of storytelling, cultural memory and Black identity than as a detailed exploration of African mythology. Its use of Anansi is imaginative and meaningful, but the story ultimately turns towards universal questions about who creates stories, who benefits from them and who gets remembered.

That is both its strength and its limitation.

The episode understands that mythology is not simply a collection of ancient characters available for modern adaptation. It is a living relationship between people, histories and the stories through which they understand themselves. Its most powerful idea is that the survival of a story depends upon more than the fame of its central characters: it also depends upon the people who tell it, preserve it and pass it on.

For Doctor Who, a programme whose own survival depends upon continual reinvention, that is an especially fitting lesson.

The next step should be to build on this foundation: to explore individual African mythologies with greater specificity, to give their characters room to develop beyond the immediate demands of the plot, and to allow the cultural traditions themselves to shape the form of the adventure.

The Story & the Engine does not tell every story it could have told. But it makes a convincing case for why those stories deserve to be told.

Further reading

These sources provide useful background on the episode’s development, cultural influences and plot.

• Den of Geek — Inua Ellams discusses the episode’s inspirations and ending. Particularly valuable for the Barber’s conception, the symbolism of hair and the writer’s intentions.

• OkayAfrica — How Inua Ellams brought African folklore and poetry into Doctor Who. An interview exploring Ellams’s Nigerian upbringing, his play Barber Shop Chronicles and the episode’s cultural references.

• TARDIS Guide — Episode transcript. Useful for examining the dialogue, character revelations and the story’s mythological framework in detail.