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'Doctor Who' Recap Season 15 Episode 5: 'The Story and the Engine'
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‘Doctor Who’ Recap: Oh What A Tangled Web

By Hannah Sole | TV | May 11, 2025

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Header Image Source: BBC

Previously, on Doctor Who: We caught up with Ruby, who has terrible taste in men.

This week: Fifteen visits some pals in Lagos, and gets trapped in a barber shop that’s actually a spaceship on a spider’s back, in the middle of the original world wide web, going to blow up some gods or something. It was weird and a lot, and it didn’t consistently work, but it has some fun with the cameos, two of which we definitely didn’t see coming… Spoilers are ahead!

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I really wanted to love everything about ‘The Story and the Engine’; much of the vibe is right up my street. Weird liminal faerie-style purgatory! Gods, myths and history! The power of stories! Flashbacks and timey-wimey! Plus, we have a contemporary adventure that isn’t in Wales or London! I loved that the barber shop was a place of warmth and friendship, and that Fifteen is finding family as he explores his most recent identity. I also loved everything about the map woven into his hair, and the surprise appearance of Doctor Ruth. (Huzzah!)

I also loved that this was ambitious, that it didn’t follow a set formula, that the characters had layers and that there are stories referred to that we haven’t seen. In practice, this makes the emotional pay-off more difficult. If we had met Omo or Abena before, their appearances here may have had more oomph. However, the main challenge I had was trying to work out what was going on, and why it was so very weird. On reflection, I think it’s mostly just because it can be, and I can embrace that, even if my initial reaction was to pause the episode and scrutinise the ingredients in the ‘cold and flu’ meds I’d taken.

Omo’s barber shop has been taken over by the Barber, who demands stories while he is cutting hair with his magic clippers. These stories power the engine of his ship, which the barber shop is now part of. (So it’s a Barber Ship? No?) You can enter the shop but no-one can leave except the Barber and Abena, daughter of the god Anansi, who brings Omo and his trapped customers food as they repeatedly get their hair cut and tell stories. Their hair re-grows immediately, but they are running out of stories. Who’s got a lot of really good stories? No, not Bran. The Doctor, Omo’s buddy from a previous incident. Fifteen is delighted to pay them a visit, but not so happy to be powering a spider-borne engine through the Nexus, the OG WWW, which is formed by the experiences and connections that bind us, such as our myths, legends and stories, which power up the gods.

The Barber claims to be one of the gods, naming several as his aliases. Trouble is, Fifteen’s met most of them before, and the Barber they are not. So the Barber confesses that he is the story guy, the hype man, spreading the stories and thereby powering the gods via faith. And he is mad because he wants some credit for creating this, and instead, he has been rejected and exiled. He’s also fibbed to Abena about his reason for using the story engine; he now admits that his goal is to blow up the Nexus, to destroy the gods’ power source. This will also threaten the lives of billions of people on Earth though, as it will rupture community, faith and heritage, tearing us away from the stories that unite us and help us understand life, the universe and everything.

Abena switches sides and weaves a map into Fifteen’s hair to show him how to stop the spider-ship thing. Fifteen talks the Barber down and encourages him to write his own stories for once, to reclaim who he is and shape his own narrative. The Barber sees the error of his ways, and everyone escapes from the spider-ship before it explores. Back in Lagos, Omo gives the Barber his shop and a name, and he can live his own life with found family and peers who are nice to him. He’s still got his magic clippers but he can just have a normal natter now as he’s doing a trim.

What does this mean for the pantheon of gods? Well, we’ve found a massive power source and learned that this could be weaponised against gods in a particularly terrible way. We’ve also met a nice god in Abena, who has now forgiven the Doctor for humiliating her a long long time ago in the form of Doctor Ruth.

Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Stuff

Doctor Ruth is in the middle of another story that she hopes will be resolved soon. Will that be another crossover?

How did Fifteen remember Abena though? Thirteen hid the doodah with all the pre-One memories in the TARDIS; has Fifteen opened it up?

Remember those dolls with the ‘re-growing’ hair? Disney’s got an opportunity to do something really fun with the next batch of action figures…

Extra meta timey-wimey: the writer of this episode, Inua Ellams, wrote ‘Barber Shop Chronicles’ which played at the National Theatre. There’s some really interesting exploration of the cultural role of the location in the behind the scenes documentary.

We saw all of the previous Doctors this week thanks to the magic window doodah!

Fifteen told an excellent story about Belinda saving a patient who comes back to say thank you. This, of course, features the weekly Mrs Flood appearance at the same time. Still the most COO-EE and least subtle. At least it was over and done with in the middle of the episode though. But how did Fifteen know this story? And how does he keep missing Mrs Flood? She’s right there!

This is the weirdest and most mind-blowy Easter Egg of the week though: the little girl Belinda saw, who then disappeared, was Captain Poppy from ‘Space Babies’. Why? How? This is so deliciously random, I can’t help but think this must be part of the Glitch I’ve been banging on about for a while. If you take a sneaky peek at the episode titles for the rest of this season, you might be with me on this…

Next time: Oh lordy, it’s Interstellarvision.