#abena

Following the theme of season two, much of “The Story and the Engine,” is dedicated to exploring the nature of storytelling. In this case it explores the communal and cultural significance of having a place where one feels safe to share. When we join the Doctor and Belinda, they’re in the middle of a well-trodden topic- the Doctor needs to get Belinda home. This is when the Doctor gets the bright idea to take the vindicator to Lagos, Nigeria. The Doctor doesn’t use this as an opportunity to go ghost hunting, instead, he’s respecting Belinda’s boundaries by calibrating the vindicator only. It’s Belinda who pushes the narrative further when she asks the Doctor about Lagos. This is when the Doctor confides in Belinda that its a place where he feels safe to be himself. Belinda understands this from her own perspective and encourages the Doctor to go see his friends at his favourite barbershop, Omo’s Palace.

Before we continue, I would just like to cheekily celebrate the fact that I called it about the TARDIS doing the Doctor’s hair. I’m not saying I’m a genius, but it is kinda wild that just two weeks ago, I mentioned it, and now here it is in an episode. Should I play the lottery this week? I kid, but what this speaks to is that there is a clarity this season between the show and the audience. Clearly the crew want us to think about Doctor Who in creative ways. The show gets that the hair and costumes mean something to a wide portion of the fandom. There are whole theories about how the longer Capaldi or Pertwee are in the TARDIS, the crazier their hair gets. So believe me when I say, it’s not far off for the show to do an episode about the importance of hair.

The Doctor beams as he greets the people selling their wares in the Lagos open-air market. He calls people “Auntie” and “Uncle.” They have special handshakes and inside jokes. I understand the people at Bad Wolf Studios looked into actually filming in Africa, but it wasn’t feasible for the budget. Instead, they brought in consultants to bring authenticity to their fake Lagos set. It’s a really lovely attention to detail. When the set is full of extras, it really works. It feels like a set, but in that classic Doctor Who way. Though when the set is deserted, it does look a bit like the marbles room from Squid Game. Having just sold us on the idea that space is a premium in the marketplace, it’s automatically suspicious just how empty the street is outside Omo’s Palace. Combine that with missing persons posters and a keep out sign, and you’re going to need twelve deadlocks and a panther to keep the Doctor out.

The Doctor enters Omo’s and immediately the vibes are off. For starters, all of the shop’s clients are the men from the missing posters- Omo, Rashid, Tunde, and Obioma. And strangely, while the sign outside says Omo’s Palace, a stranger stands ready to cut people’s hair. Omo has been telling the men about the Doctor, the greatest story he has to tell. When Omo was a boy, the Doctor stopped his village from burning to the ground. Since then, Omo’s shop has become a safe place for the Doctor to come and relax. He trusts Omo, so when Omo encourages the Doctor to sit in the Barber’s chair and share a story, the Doctor trusts that it would be safe to do so. Instead, the Doctor can feel the wrongness of the ritual as the Barber’s cape holds him down as if extracting the story.

The Doctor tells a simple story about Belinda to such a vivid degree that the paintings that manifest on the wall from people’s stories look photo-realistic. The story goes that Belinda was finishing a long shift and was headed home to celebrate her nan’s birthday. However, she catches something in a patient’s symptoms that saves the patient’s life and also costs her her evening with her gran. It’s a very modern Doctor Who story for the Doctor to tell. The Doctor is always going on about the nobility of living a normal life. It’s also a cheeky way for them to throw a brief little Mrs Flood cameo in there. It is a little interesting that the Doctor’s story contained Mrs Flood. It’s almost as if Mrs Flood orchestrated her involvement. What does it mean for her to appear in his story in that moment? And why hasn’t the Doctor recognised her yet? You would think he would notice after Susan Twist. Maybe that’s part of Mrs Flood’s plan. An old lady hiding in plain sight? They’d never do it twice! That’s like robbing the same bank! 

One downside about having ADHD is that our minds wander even when we’re engaged. I’ve had conversations with people where I stop listening to them because they were so interesting that my mind wandered. I kept thinking about their point and they kept talking. I do this with books as well. And I did it with this episode. There were so many profound and interesting moments that I had to rewatch this episode because I kept getting caught up in its concepts. And I do mean caught up and not lost. Never once does the episode lose its central thread, though it does keep some aspects a bit vague. I mean all of this as a compliment. I like that it’s an episode that’s actually about something. And I like that it leaves an air of mystery. I’ve said it often in the past that I love it when stories maintain a bit of mystery at the end. I’m reminded of “The Magnus Archives” or the first season of “American Horror Story.” Two different stories, which I enjoyed thoroughly until they gave away too much information. Sometimes an enduring mystery allows us to keep thinking. Solving a mystery can put too fine a point on things. The imagination has nowhere to go.

Perhaps one of the more enduring mysteries at the end of the episode is why the missing men’s hair grows back after telling a story. I’m in two minds about this. I can imagine a few reasons why their hair grows back, but it’s never fully explained. But part of me wonders if this wasn’t either a muddled explanation or perhaps a missed opportunity. We know from reading the missing posters that the men have been gone for about five years. The youngest of the men, Tunde, was only 19 years old when he was taken by the Barber. Tunde is also a footballer, which puts a bit of a ticking clock on his absence. Every day he’s stuck in the barbershop is a day further from his prime. If the growing of the hair was because sharing their stories aged the men, then it would add to that tension. Perhaps the others take his place to keep him from ageing out of his future as an athlete. It would add an even greater sense of urgency and an element of self-sacrifice. That being said, we understand enough about the hair growth to follow the story. People tell stories, the stories power the big spider vehicle, which causes their hair to grow.

Meanwhile, every time someone enters the shop or powers the spider, the TARDIS lights up all red and klaxxony. I found myself laughing at the way Belinda speaks to the TARDIS. She has no sense of wonder for any of it, and I find that hilarious. I half expected this to be a “The Lodger” situation, where the episode is a companion-lite story by having the companion get tossed about on the very cheap to film on TARDIS set. And if it was one of those episodes, they did a great job utilising Varada Sethu’s screentime because it hardly feels like it. Belinda’s method of tapping the TARDIS console and speaking directly to it surprisingly yields results. I like that the TARDIS listens to Belinda and shows her Omo’s Palace on the viewer. I like those times when the TARDIS relents to the companion’s pathetic attempt at interfacing. She may not talk, but she listens.

Belinda struggles her way through the marketplace. It's a sharp contrast to the way the Doctor weaves through the crowd. In a brief cameo, Inua Ellams plays a stallholder who gets into a brief altercation with Belinda over what appears to be spilled yams. Speaking of cameos in this scene, was that a Space Baby standing outside the babershop? Initially I took her to be a young Abby. I expected it to be a glimpse into how she knows the Doctor. Then I get online and everyone is like "ThAt WaS pOpPy FrOm SpAcE bAbIeS!" Does it mean anything more? The Doctor seemed to shrug it off as his story leaking out of the Nexus. But considering the emphasis on storytelling at the moment, that could still have deeper implications. Kinda cool.

The introduction of Abby with her abundance of food is your classic save the cat moment. She feeds the lads so we know she’s got some good in her. However, Abby kisses her teeth at the Doctor as if unimpressed, but it’s not until later that the Doctor learns Abby and he have a history, though maybe not so much with this incarnation of the Doctor. After learning that Abby is short for Abena, the daughter of the spider god Anansi, the Doctor remembers how they met each other. In classic Fugitive Doctor style, Jo Martin makes a brief cameo where she stands in place of the current Doctor and delivers a single line of dialogue. It’s sort of her main thing. Standing and talking. One day, we might even get to see her do something. This isn’t to say I wasn’t wildly excited to see her. Honestly, the further we get from Chibnall, the happier I am to see her. I was excited by the prospect of seeing what a writer of Ellams’ calibre could do with her. I get why it was just a cameo, but damn, let a girl run down a corridor or something.

Long ago, the Doctor left Abena with her father, where he was free to continue using her as a betting chip against strange men and women. Abena learned to distrust her father and the Doctor, leaving her vulnerable to the Barber’s controlling nature. Having spent the majority of his long life feeling unappreciated as the keeper of the Gods’ stories, the Barber plans to pilot the spider to the centre of the story Nexus, where he will unravel the stories of the Gods, thus negating their existence. If you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods,” then you’ll have a good understanding of the way the Barber operates. The Gods grow strong through our stories about them. People’s faith in the Gods feeds them. Cut that off, and you cut off the life force of the Gods. Cut off the Gods and you cut off people’s capacity to think, to imagine, and to hope. Though considering the Gods we’ve met in the last two seasons of Doctor Who, I’m yet to see evidence of a benevolent God, until Abena.

The Doctor’s honesty toward Abena and the men’s prostrations bring out the true Goddess within Abena. Now it is her time to tell a story. She sets the Doctor in front of her while she weaves cornrows into his hair. She tells a story about how enslaved people once fooled their enslavers by mapping the road to freedom within their hair. They would pass these maps on to others through their hair, and nobody was ever the wiser. Neither my boyfriend nor I knew this, and we both sat there, mouths agape at the brilliance of such a concept. When Doctor Who was initially developed, there was always a plan to use the time-travel aspect of the story to give history lessons. This might be one of the finest examples Doctor Who teaching history. Not only was it fascinating to learn, but it also plays into the story. I can’t stress how much I loved this. Incredible.

The Doctor and Belinda follow the Doctor’s hair through a labyrinth in the back of the shop to make their way to the engine of the spider vehicle. The engine looked like a cross between a baobab tree and something Delia Deetz would have sculpted. It also reminded me of the TARDIS’ architectural reconfiguration system from “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.” I find it interesting that there is so much machinery and tech surrounding the Gods in this episode. As Gods go, this use of technology evokes the Thor movies over fire and brimstone, and not just because the Doctor namedrops the Thor movies. It makes me wonder if perhaps none of these “Gods,” are as magical as “The Wild Blue Yonder” would imply. Instead, it feels more like Arthur C Clarke’s idea that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The engine sits surrounded by relics of every world religion. There are books and televisions feeding stories to the story engine. The Doctor lights up the machine with the six-word story of his life- “I live. I die. I live.” The life cycle of a Time Lord. It is now apparent why the Doctor told such a pedestrian story with Belinda’s life-saving moment at work. The totality of the Doctor’s lives flickers across the screens in the typical montage of past Doctors. The Barber is excited by this surge of power to his engine, but it’s too much power for the vehicle to withstand. Oddly, it was Belinda who delivered this information. I was left scratching my head as to how she would know the engine was about to blow. That felt like more of a line for the Doctor. I guess they realised Belinda hadn’t spoken in some time. With things about to blow, the Barber’s only option is to evacuate Omo’s Palace with haste. I found the destruction of the vehicle a bit strange. The spider never comes off as a menacing creature, but as it explodes and tries in vain to claw its way out of the shop, it feels like more of a villain than a vehicle. Appropriately, the clip the engine room played of the Ninth Doctor from “The Doctor Dances,” was precisely the one this final escape brought to mind. “Just this once, everybody lives.”

When I watched this episode with my sister, she expressed surprise at the mercy shown to the Barber. But when you think of it, the last time someone kidnapped a person for a five-year journey was “Gridlock,” and Milo and Cheen weren’t evil, just desperate. The Doctor forgives Omo, who also forgives the Barber. Omo even gifts him the barbershop and his father’s name, Adétòkunbo. Omo has more important things than cutting hair, like meeting up with the girl in the blue earrings from his photo. It’s an uplifting ending that I hadn’t expected. But it’s heartening to see that not only is Doctor Who becoming more of a space for diverse voices, but one that allows for those voices to express joy. I don’t want to watch trans stories where trans people overcome death and oppression. I can read the news for that. I want to see trans people befriend the Meep. Black fans deserve these moments in Doctor Who without also having to give a pound of flesh.