If the Tour has an affliction, at least one we’ll own up to, is that we tend to recast the present in the past. Sixty plus years of history to play with has a tendency to do that to people.
Watching The Story and the Engine we couldn’t help but think of The Mind Robber, the surrealist Troughton classic from 1968. Here’s a fun fact: the original Master in classic Who was not Roger Delgado in 1971 but The Master (of Land and Fiction). The Mind Robber was set outside of time and space in a world where fictional characters and mythological creatures exist. “The Master” was an English fiction writer who, aware of his own advancing age, tries to recruit the Doctor to take over his role as the creative power in this realm.
But that’s where the parallels to The Story and the Engine cease to be useful, as this thoroughly modern tale plumbs more backstory from the Doctor, up to and including a surprise appearance from Jo Martin as the ‘Fugitive Doctor,’ but the meta-textual echoes still resound. The real ‘engine’ in this story which ultimately powers events is the multi-dimensional life of the Doctor himself. And given the other meta-textual elements woven in other stories, it only makes sense that this story appear now in the larger history of Doctor Who. It was a much more deft way to do this than the show-stopping way it was done in Lux a few weeks back.
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One word about our Dynamic Ratings Table for Series 15.. Having Joy to the World so low on the Table should not connote that this was, as an example, a bad story. Rather, more to the point, it says there really hasn’t been a bad story so far in 2025. It’s all relative.
Images and caps for The Story and the Engine are now online.