Who wants that story screen, though?
Recap
Omo Esosa (Sule Rimi) is getting a haircut and tells a story about how he met the Doctor when he was a boy. Images play out on a wall to showcase this story, and a light on the wall turns from red to green. The other men in the room calm visibly at this, and Omo assures them that the Doctor always comes when needed. The light flips back to red and the room shakes. Omo calls for the Doctor knowing that “it” is hungry. The Doctor and Belinda land in Lagos, Nigeria in 2019 to take another Vindicator reading. The Doctor tells Belinda that he loves it here, specifically a barbershop he frequents. Belinda notes that the TARDIS does his hair for him, but the Doctor tells her that being the first time in “this Black body,” the shop is a place that allows him to feel a sense of community. Belinda sees how much this means to him and tells him to go off and enjoy himself while she waits on the TARDIS.
The Doctor heads into Lagos, weaving through the streets and greeting folks left and right. Upon nearing Omo’s shop, he notices that there are missing signs for Omo and several other men. He finds the shop and enters, the door slamming behind him; simultaneously, an alarm goes off in the TARDIS. All the missing men (Stefan Adegbola, Jordan Adene, Michael Balogun) are present in the shop; the light goes red once again. One of the men sits down in the chair to get a haircut and tells a story about Yo-Yo Ma and a shaman. The Doctor sees the story appear on the wall and is excited, wanting to know how it works. He’s informed that he can only learn by telling a story himself while getting his hair cut. Omo is no longer the barber; there’s a new Barber (Ariyon Bakare) who came recently and seemed to magically take over the shop. A woman enters (Michelle Asante) and brings food, but the door closes behind her; the alarm goes off on the TARDIS again. The Doctor recognizes this woman, but can’t remember why—she’s working to help the Barber.
The Doctor sits down to tell a story, and decides to tell one of an ordinary life, about Belinda. He tells a story about how she correctly diagnosed a woman who was receiving the wrong treatment from her doctor, and was required to stay by the woman’s side, even though she missed her grandmother’s birthday for it. Weeks later, the woman appeared to thank her, knowing Belinda was truly responsible for saving her life. The Doctor’s story powers the “engine” better than any of the others, and the Barber and woman leave to recalibrate it, locking the door behind them. The TARDIS alarm goes off again, and it shows Belinda an image of the barbershop. The Doctor berates Omo for betraying him when he thought this place was safe for him; the men have all been missing for a long time and are missing important parts of their lives being stuck here. The Doctor insists on opening the door despite warnings from the other men, and reveals the vacuum of space outside, with a large spider machine walking across a web. He makes it back inside and explains that the web is in space and Lagos at the same time. Outside, Belinda is pointed toward the shop by a young girl, and is the next person to get trapped.
The Doctor calls the Barber a coward and demands to know who he is. He claims to be an array of gods that deal in chaos and tricks and creation: Anansi; Sága; Bastet; Dionysus; Loki. The Doctor and Belinda burst out laughing because the idea is ridiculous. The Doctor has met many of these gods and hung out with them, including Anansi, who tricked the Doctor into marrying his daughter once. Rumbled, the Barber admits the truth: He was the person who took the gods’ stories, refined them, and packaged them to be told by humanity, keeping the gods alive. But they abandoned him once achieving that power, so the Barber created this web, which he calls the Nexus, to erase the gods from existence. Doing so would prove destructive to humanity, preventing humans from being able to tell stories. The woman criticizes the Doctor, and he finally recognizes her: Abena, Anansi’s daughter. He apologizes for not helping her, but we see another aspect of him—the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin)—tell Abena that she was busy with another story at the time.
The Barber tries to force the Doctor to tells another story, but Abena stops everyone and agrees to tell one of her own. As she braids the Doctor’s hair, she tells a story about enslaved Black women, who would braid maps to freedom into their hair and pass down the knowledge to help others escape. The Engine stabilizes again; the Doctor and Belinda escape deeper into the ship and find the engine room—due to the map Abena has braided into his hair. The Barber follows them, but the Doctor insists that he’s disrupting the engine by bringing up Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story, which he goaded him into creating. The Doctor has one of his own: “I’m born. I die. I’m born.” All of the energy from the Doctor’s story, his life, begin to run through the engine and the screens in the engine room show countless incarnations. The engine can’t process the power, so the Barber has two choices: Let everyone die here, or open the door and let others escape to safety. The Barber unlocks the door. The Doctor talks him into joining them and finding a new life for himself. The engine self-destructs.
Outside the shop, which has now reverted to a normal shop, Omo apologizes to the Doctor: He knows the man is powerful, but also that he should have protected him from this as a member of his community. The Doctor offers his own apology and they reconcile. The group offer their thanks to Abena for keeping them alive, and Omo decides he’s going to retire, giving the shop to the Barber. He points out that he has no name, so Omo recommends Adétòkunbo: his late father’s name. Belinda asks the Doctor about the child who guided her as they head back to the TARDIS, but the Doctor has no idea who that might be. They continue on their journey home.
Commentary
Inua Ellams wrote this episode (and has a little acting spot as a market seller in it!), and it’s a gorgeous piece of work. There’s a lot packed into this script, so let’s jump right in.
In so many ways, this episode is an explicit gift to Ncuti Gatwa himself, his position in the canon of Doctor Who, and the labor required of him in taking on the role. We begin the episode straight away with the Doctor confessing to Belinda that things are different being the Doctor in his body. (Am I still pretty miffed that this point got glossed to hell with Jodie Whitaker’s iteration? Yes—but it’s important to every iteration of the Doctor who isn’t a cisgender white man, so I’m glad they’re making space for it now.) The Doctor needs that sense of belonging and community, so he’s sought it out in places where he fits in seamlessly. The barbershop in Lagos is one of those places.
It’s important to consider how painful this would be for the Doctor—who is now engaging in multiple levels of diaspora. Though the character may not conceive of it most days of the week, that is the nature of his existence. The Doctor was already a diaspora-of-one when he was taken in by a Gallifreyan “mother” and made the foundation of Time Lord society. The Doctor furthers this narrative by essentially adopting Earth and humanity as their second home following the destruction of Gallifrey. And now, again, because his body is different this time around, the Doctor finds himself cast out once more, and in need of new homes where he feels connection and belonging on the planet he’s chosen as his harbor.
All of this is being brought to the forefront by a Rwandan-Scottish Doctor and a Nigerian-born British writer—something that the show has never rightly tackled.
In a painful twist, that feeling of disconnect from the homeland in diaspora communities is brought to the forefront in the Doctor’s fight with Omo. The Doctor believed he’d found a safe place at the barber shop, but he’s still ultimately an outsider to them. While it’s important that they reconcile—that Omo acknowledges that he wants the Doctor in his community and therefore should have treated him as part of it—it’s still true that this experience is a constant one for the character. We get the beauty of belonging on the meta-narrative front for Gatwa himself, but the Doctor has just been forced to confront how deep this feeling can go, how specific it can become.
We’ve also got a fairly major reveal in the Doctor recalling his relationship with Abena. (Forever angry that I’m not getting to see Fugitive Doctor in a showdown with flipping Anansi while he tries to get her to gay-marry his daughter??) The memories before the Doctor’s “reset” by the Time Lords, including those from working with Division, are supposed to be in a Chameleon Arch tucked away in the bottom of the TARDIS somewhere. The Thirteenth Doctor did have some bleed-through on those memories during the Flux incident, but this suggests that those memories are either leaking through more frequently now or always have been. It’s possible that much of the time, when the Doctor mentions a thing from their past that we haven’t seen on screen, they’re referring to these pre-reset memories and simply don’t realize it; their brain is complicated and operates on so many levels, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t notice.
This helpfully gives us the treat of allowing the only two Black actors who have played the Doctor to appear in an episode together. More Jo Martin, please? Jo Martin all the time.
Another aspect here that I adore: The Barber (Ariyon Bakare is mesmerizing in this episode) makes the claim that he’s several different gods, a favored storytelling trope among plenty of fantasy writers in various mediums. It’s the sort of concept that sounds so cool the first time you ever hear it, and is diminishing returns forever after. Like yeah, we get it, humans like to tell similar stories across the world and that’s very cool! But you’re robbing each individual story of its unique patina by suggesting that they’re just scratch off versions of the same thing. And, moreover, it’s usually white writers and/or characters making this claim, smacking of the desire to basically colonize other cultures’ stories and gain some form of ownership over them. With the Barber making the same claim, I assumed the subversion of the trope was going to be in allowing a Black character that same journey, which would have still been an enjoyable change from the norm.
But Ellams turns this on its head by having the Doctor and Belinda laugh outright because the idea is, in fact, ridiculous. And the result is a much more enjoyable concept: The artist who perpetuated these stories and never got the credit for building those beings into gods.
While I wanted a little more time to dive into his desire for recognition, the ultimate point made here is far more imposing: Those stories built and shaped the world; they’re a part of humanity’s innate fabric. Removing them would kill our ability to tell story collectively—an abstract threat that manages to be far more terrifying than a specific one, and much more interesting than a multi-god being being a pain in the butt.
Everyone in this story is redeemable and everyone matters: The Doctor tells them a story of Belinda’s life (how does he know it, I wonder?), something ordinary and smart and brave that has a beautiful ending. Each of the men in the shop tells their story, places they need to get back to, loved ones they are missing. No one’s humanity is ever questioned here, and true to Doctor Who’s best ethos, there is nothing more precious than a normal human life. Because of this Doctor, this writer, this story’s heritage, it also tells us explicitly that nothing is more precious than the normal human lives of Black people. It reminds us of this again when Abena tells her story of braiding hair towards freedom, and again when the men bow down before her at the end—saying that the Doctor rescued them, but she kept them alive, like all the women they know and adore.
Mechanically, it’s one of my favorite types of TV episodes: A locked room with a few people just talking and gargantuan stakes in the background. Emotionally and contextually, it’s a tour de force that I’m sure I’ll revisit again and again.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Inua Ellams also wrote a prequel to the episode that you can read here! Ellams is primarily a poet and playwright, and it’s been noted that there are many aspects of his previous works that show up in this episode—check out Barber Shop Chronicles and The Half God of Rainfall to see some of those connections.
- There are all sorts of items related to story within the engine room, but the one that excited me most was the Jumanji game board??
- The design of the spider-bot. That is all.
- Obviously the little girl who pointed Belinda toward the shop is important, though we likely won’t find out how until the end of the season.
- I might have been a little dismayed at Belinda using the “hurt people hurt people” precept with Abena, but only because it’s a very cheesy way to point out a very complex and difficult thing. On the other hand, I am liking how adamant she is about sticking to the plan! She tries not to leave the TARDIS and everything.
- The six word story commonly attributed to Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) was not, in fact, written by him. Which makes that reference funnier, really, because then we have to imagine the Doctor getting an entirely different six word story from him. And also imagine the Doctor giving Hemingway a hard time for being the soul of brevity, which is never a mistake in my book. Thanks for that, Doctor.
See y’all next week!