Doctor Who Recap: A Hairytale Ending

At the end of this week’s adventure, one of the men who was trapped in the barbershop turns from the Doctor to thank Abby. “He rescued us, but you … you kept us alive,” he says, bowing. It’s the same sentiment that we see a patient express to Belinda, who put in the overnight hours to treat warning signs that no one else at the hospital cared to see. When a success story is passed down, who gets to be the main character, and whose contributions are forgotten? This episode is all about giving credit where it’s due. Obviously, because that’s the right thing to do — but also because when people feel overlooked and wronged, they sometimes become villains. (Or as Belinda so unoriginally puts it, “Hurt people hurt people.”)

The TARDIS has touched down in Lagos, Nigeria, which has a big communications technology market that will ostensibly help boost the vindicator to get Belinda home. As an added bonus, this means the Doctor can visit Omo’s Palace, run by Omo, whom he met as a child while putting out a forest fire and has since become close friends with. The shop has offered the Doctor acceptance and community as someone whose Black body means he deals with racism. Belinda understands this, and sends him off to have a good time.

But warm, colorful streets bustling with people who greet the Doctor like family lead to a dull, deserted alley with missing posters and warnings to stay away. A mysterious man known as the Barber has taken over Omo’s premises, which we later learn involved putting a time-space compressor in the door frame. This means that Omo’s Palace is in Lagos … but also on the back of some sort of giant spider structure with an engine that is using the power of stories to crawl to the gods. We’re getting weird this week!

Abby, a woman whose face is familiar to the Doctor, is the only one aside from the Barber who can leave the shop. The Barber and Abby have been holding Omo and several customers hostage inside, forcing them to get haircuts as they tell stories that are gorgeously illustrated in real-time on a window. The men’s hair grows back immediately, and Abby brings them food, but they’re starting to run out of stories, which is where the Doctor comes in.

Although the Doctor initially volunteers to speak, he changes his mind after the Barber’s cape settles on him with a seemingly painful spark. Since he can’t get out of the chair, he ends up telling the thematically relevant story about Belinda at the hospital. His story shows up in the window as camera footage, not drawings. It turns out that Omo, who correctly predicted that the Doctor’s stories offer more power, was hoping the Doctor would show up so the Barber would let everyone else go. The Doctor considers this to be a deep betrayal of trust. The Doctor does have a history of voluntarily risking his life for strangers in these exact kinds of situations, but I guess it hits different when the decision is made on his behalf by someone he trusts so much. Plus, when was the last time he had a place that he called home?

Belinda, who has been subjected to several loud alarms in the TARDIS, has now also made her way into the barbershop, where the Barber cuts his hair and declares that he has been many gods: Anansi, Saga, Bastet, Dionysus, Loki … it’s a monologue that is just as dramatic as that of the Pantheon gods who have revealed themselves on the show so far. But the Doctor and Belinda just burst out laughing — the Doctor has met “all those Story Lords,” so he knows the Barber is lying.

After Abby puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, the Barber clarifies that he is the human who told the myths and legends that strengthened the gods’ connection to humans. “They only exist now because of me,” he says, going on to explain that he used a strand of “gods’ blood and essence” to build the web-like Nexus that the spider is crawling on. He made the Nexus work on its own, but never got the recognition for his efforts. Instead, the gods threw him out, leaving him with only a desire for vengeance (and the engine that is powering said spider).

The Doctor finally recognizes Abby as Abena. She’s the daughter of the god Anansi, who once purposely lost a bet to make the Doctor marry her. Abby says she hoped that the Doctor would help her, but instead found herself “humiliated.” The camera moves to reveal that the Doctor at the time was Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, who previously worked for a secret Gallifreyan organization known as the Division and intriguingly notes that she was “busy in a different story that might be finished one day.” Left behind, Abby has stayed with the Barber, whom she believes has plans to defeat the gods and become a trustworthy, careful “storyteller supreme.”

But when the Barber admits that he lied to Abby and that his actual plan is to cut the gods out of memory (which will apparently kill them and all humans as a result), she decides to help the Doctor. Abby winks at him and braids his hair while telling a story about how people once escaped slavery by relying on women who braided escape routes into hair. The Barber is apparently not very smart, because he doesn’t realize what Abby is doing until Belinda and the Doctor are running to follow the map in his hair. The Barber revokes Abby’s door access, then heads to the engine room.

Citing the urban legend about Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, the Doctor shares his succinct life story (“I’m born. I die. I’m born.”), which is endlessly powerful due to his regenerations. He doesn’t even need to be getting a haircut. The engine — a beating heart inside of a brain — starts to overload. Faced with an impending explosion, the Barber opens the shop door so that everyone can return to Nigeria. At the last second, the Doctor convinces the Barber to also leave so that he can live long enough to write a different ending to the story of his life.

All the resolution happens in a rush. In case it wasn’t clear, the Barber point-blank states that all of this started because he wanted to be credited for his work. The Doctor suggests that he continue telling stories by opening a barbershop. In general, everyone’s in a forgiving mood. The Doctor apologizes to Omo just as quickly as he previously yelled at him to never speak to him again; Omo offers a hand to the Barber and tells him to take both his shop and his father’s name; and Abby states that she will not hold any hate in her heart toward the Barber. Fittingly, the episode about stories ends in a pretty storybook way — in the last scene, the Doctor starts to tell Belinda about Omo, starting with, “Once upon a time…”

Cut for Time (Lord)

• Doctor Who has been really into puns lately. We got a few internet-related ones this week; the Nexus was the “world wide web” that the spider crawls on, and the Doctor called the Barber a troll hiding his identity on the web. Interestingly enough, the issue of credit is pretty relevant to digital spaces, where content is often reshared or recreated without proper credit.

• The baby that Belinda sees in the street on the way to the barbershop is Poppy from “Space Babies.” The Doctor later suggests that her presence can be explained because stories were “leaking” out, so it might not have been the real her. But I hope wherever she is, Poppy’s doing well.

• I feel robbed of getting to see more of the Fugitive Doctor and Abby together. The forced-marriage trope, but Black and sapphic? I’m sure fanfiction writers are already picking up their pens. By the way, given that the Doctor recognized Abby and remembered leaving her, I’m very curious to know how much of the Fugitive Doctor’s life he remembers.

• Belinda staying overnight at the hospital when she was already leaving a 13-hour shift to celebrate her grandma’s birthday … they better have paid her double overtime for that. Mrs. Flood also made her weekly cameo in this story. How long do we think it’ll be until the Doctor and Belinda realize that she’s been popping up everywhere?

• Next week’s episode will air during the same week as the Eurovision semi-finals and final. (Ncuti Gatwa is serving as the UK’s spokesperson.) So obviously, the preview has us headed to the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest. “The Well” made it unclear how long into the future humanity survives (or ever existed), but Eurovision apparently never dies.