“A beating heart inside a brain?”
“Brilliant. What else is a story?”
The Story and the Engine marks a clear return to form for the season around it.
Once again, it is interesting that Davies’ return to Doctor Who has adopted its own structures and rhythms, so that these two eight-episode seasons are more obviously paired with one another than with the thirteen-episode seasons of his first tenure. The Robot Revolution and Space Babies were retrofuturist pastiches, Lux and The Devil’s Chord were formally ambitious attempts to do something new with the format, The Well and Boom were militaristic high-concept science-fiction, Lucky Day and 73 Yards were Ruby-centric stories about encroaching fascism.
Tree’s company.
The Story and the Engine is an interesting companion piece to Dot and Bubble, in that both episodes are – at their core – stories about what it means for the Doctor to be a person of colour. Within their respective seasons, The Story and the Engine and Dot and Bubble are both constructed as stories that simply could not work if the Doctor still looked like David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker or Peter Capaldi. While Dot and Bubble cleverly built to this concept as a twist, The Story and the Engine makes it clear from the opening scenes.
The Story and the Engine is a clever, thoughtful meditation on what it means that the Doctor now looks like Ncuti Gatwa. It’s well-observed, well-structured and well-written, a classic Doctor Who story told from a fresh angle.
A cut above?
Filed under: Television | Tagged: barber, barbership, doctor who, fugitive doctor, Inua Ellamsrussell t. davies, jo martin, ncuti gatwa, the barber | 1 Comment »
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