Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Ncuti Gatwa, Varada Sethu, Ariyon Bakare, Sule Rimi, Michelle Asante, Stefan Adegbola, Jordan Adene, Micael Balogun, Simon Bailey, Adrian Pang, Tessa Bell-Briggs, Anita Dobson, Inua Ellams, Funmi James, Jo Martin.
Some people strive for riches beyond the point of avarice, others for power, control, influence, or even to impress; and yet the greatest authority on human existence is the abundance of tales, the intensity of stories that come flowing out of the imagination from one mind; a million pounds may buy your dreams, but it is the power and inspiration that colour life and give it meaning that wields the privilege of being human.
All we are is a collection of stories inside skin and memory, and we must endeavour to make it a superior one in the moment of high stress and confusion. It is okay to feed the narrative when the stars are aligned, when the going is good and life is more than just a stroll in the park filling in time, but when the back is against the wall, when your life depends on the best story you know filling the ears of the attentive and suspicious, then that is the moment you know your truth worth on the fragile machine we call Earth.
The Story and The Engine delves deeply into this arrangement with time, after all it is Time’s soul that has benefitted from the power of the statements, the lies, and the exaggerated constructed words, and as the fifth episode of Ncuti Gatwa’s second season opens the sense of prevailing angst and concern, of secrets spilled forces those untold accounts to the surface.
An almost near companion light story, there by insinuation and as an exposition, sees the Doctor take on the strange figure of The Barber, a being to whom requires the memories and ability to weave a story in order to power his machine, a symbol of his ego and the insidious nature within as it resembles a metal arachnid stalking Time along the thin fibres of reality.
The Story and The Engine unfortunately suffers from lack of demonstratable fear, a shame really as the previous four episodes of the series had been amongst the best since the days of Peter Capaldi’s incarnation as the mysterious Timelord; and yet it also worked within its confines as the tension between Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and Ariyon Bakare’s Barber began to simmer.
It was perhaps to the application of hair itself that stoked the fires of truth, the perhaps unknown use of braided hair as a map for those fleeing for their lives against the tyranny and cruelty of slavery being for some an eye-opening reveal as why we must ask questions and not presume what such symbolism means to the oppressed.
A detailed and enlightening tale, but one short of action and suspense, The Story and The Engine has its place in the pantheon of stories at the behest of the Doctor’s mind.
Ian D. Hall