How Doctor Who’s The Story & the Engine episode reclaims black narratives with fully BIPOC cast. Details explored

For a show that’s spent decades bouncing through time and space, Doctor Who has somehow managed to avoid Lagos, Nigeria. Until now. In The Story & the Engine, the Doctor isn’t just stepping into another alien world. He’s landing smack in the middle of a vibrant Black African community, where a seemingly ordinary barbershop might just be hiding something far more sinister than a bad haircut.

And it’s not just the location that’s groundbreaking. This episode packs a fully BIPOC cast, with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor front and center, and British-Indian actress Varada Sethu as Belinda. It’s a timey-wimey collision of culture, mythology, and sci-fi that feels both thrillingly new and long overdue.

For Gatwa, who’s been zipping through wormholes and pocket universes all season, this episode hit closer to home than any TARDIS stop before it.

“The Doctor goes to Lagos, Nigeria. It's just so exciting, we've not seen that before,” he said, calling it his favorite episode of the season.

And that sense of belonging, of finding a piece of home in the middle of a story about cosmic spiders and barbers who know a little too much about Anansi, makes this one feel more than just brilliant. It’s personal.

The Barber, Anansi and the stories we don’t see

When Inua Ellams stepped into the Doctor Who writers’ room, he didn’t just bring a script. He brought history. And not the kind with Roman centurions and Daleks. The Story & the Engine is steeped in African folklore, and at its heart is the Barber, a character who’s less about cutting hair and more about cutting people off from their own stories.

Ellams drew direct inspiration from Anansi, the West African trickster god known for weaving webs of stories. But he also had something darker in mind.

“What if Anansi had done the same thing as all the other gods of storytelling who would lie beneath?” he said, twisting the narrative into something haunting. In this episode, the Barber isn’t just taking hair.

He’s taking pieces of people’s lives and threading them into his own cosmic narrative.

Ellams also points to a troubling French term that got under his skin while researching for the episode.

“In French, with the Francophone collapsing, erasure, and colonization of the African representation within their knowledge systems, the term for ghost-writer is ‘le nègre.’ The term for someone who takes credit for your work without giving you any is a black person.”

That unsettling realization became the seed for the Barber, a character who collects stories like a thief, stripping away the origin and claiming the narrative as his own.

The episode also nods to the real-life stories of enslaved African women who braided maps into their hair to guide others to freedom.

“Maybe that could be this way of negotiating power and solidarity between [the Doctor] and Abena,” Ellams said.

It’s a detail that turns the Barber’s shop into a battlefield where history, myth and identity collide.

Lagos, WaterAid and the power of a barbershop ina Doctor Who

For Ariyon Bakare, The Story & the Engine isn’t just another episode of Doctor Who. It’s a love letter to Lagos. The actor, who plays the enigmatic Barber, felt a personal connection to the setting, especially after visiting Nigeria as a WaterAid ambassador.

“One of the first trips we went on was to Nigeria, Lagos, and I visited schools there and also visited a maternity hospital,” he shared in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine. “I was just shocked at how there's such a big infrastructure there, but the lack of access to clean water was so far removed from what we know.”

That experience bled into his portrayal of the Barber, a character who uses haircuts as a way to take something from people, piece by piece.

Inua Ellams framed the barbershop as a safe space for black men, a sanctuary where stories are shared, gossip flows and connections are forged.

“We don’t see Doctor Who like this,” Bakare said. “I’ve not seen one that’s done in such a way, with so much culture in it. And yet, the culture is not so far away, which we're always scared of. Actually, it's so near to us. They're just bedtime stories.”

But the barbershop in The Story & the Engine isn’t just a place to relax. It’s a place to confront your past, whether it’s the Doctor grappling with his own fragmented memories or Abena facing her desire for revenge. And for Bakare, that balance between comfort and danger is what makes this episode brilliant.

“Good’s always going to overcome evil,” he said. “And that should be whatever color, race, creed, s*xuality, gender. It shouldn't be a problem.”

Finding home between timelines and TARDIS doors

For Ncuti Gatwa, The Story & the Engine wasn’t just another Doctor Who romp through time and space. It was the first time his Doctor truly felt at home.

“The Doctor goes to Lagos, Nigeria. It's just so exciting, we've not seen that before,” he said, calling it his favorite episode of the season.

And for a character who’s spent centuries wandering the cosmos, finding a sense of belonging in a barbershop packed with black men hits differently.

It’s not just the Doctor who’s finding new connections. Varada Sethu, who plays Belinda, brings a different perspective as a British-Indian woman in an episode rooted in African culture. The clash and the connection between her and Abena becomes a subtle but powerful narrative thread. Abena, whose silence speaks volumes, is a character who’s been robbed of her own story. For Sethu, stepping into that dynamic was a way to explore how people of color navigate spaces that aren’t entirely their own while still finding common ground.

And then there’s the Doctor, caught between who he’s been and who he’s becoming. For Gatwa, that tension is what makes this episode stand out.

“We've been seeing this alien go on adventures for a long time and it's a creature that's able to walk into a room and claim space and take charge,” he said. “And so with this situation, we see that character go back to somewhere on Earth that makes him feel more at home.”

In a barbershop that’s both a place of safety and a haunting battleground, the Doctor is forced to confront the stories he’s taken and the ones he’s lost. And for an alien with more faces than a mirror maze, that kind of self-reflection is rare.

Timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly and brilliantly BIPOC

In Doctor Who, the Doctor has outrun Daleks, danced with devils and even played poker with Death. But The Story & the Engine spins something new into that centuries-old narrative. It’s a story about reclaiming space and stories and about what gets lost when we forget who they belong to.

Inua Ellams turned a Lagos barbershop into a TARDIS of its own, a place where time and tales twist and tangle like a barbershop quartet in a haunted house. Ncuti Gatwa found his Doctor more grounded than ever, leaning into his own roots while facing a villain who’s all about erasing them.

Varada Sethu’s Belinda is caught in the middle, a woman navigating a world that’s both familiar and foreign, searching for a connection that may be more cosmic than she ever imagined. And the Fugitive Doctor? Blink, and you miss her.

For a show that’s always been about rewriting time and space, this episode does something quietly radical. It reminds us that stories are powerful but only when we remember who they belong to. And in a universe full of aliens and gods, the scariest monsters are still the ones who steal what’s not theirs.

The Doctor may have seen it all, but this time, the story hits closer to home. And as the Barber says, sometimes the real power isn’t in what you take. It’s in what you leave behind.