Russell never gave me any sort of guidance on this. I was thinking about what happens in the barbershop, which is all the voices bickering, quarreling, and laughing together. I thought then the Doctor’s body is a codex, a walking library of who they ever were. All of those voices and regenerations are bickering as well. I consciously made that parallel. That became a direction line in my script: ‘We see shots of previous Doctors.’ Russell took that note, and the editors put everyone in. Those shots work perfectly to show the scale of the Doctor, especially to Belinda. In that moment, she also understands and gets a deeper feeling of who the Fifteenth Doctor is and all the lives he has been.
The episode introduced Anansi’s daughter and then offered one more piece of the mystery around Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor. Where did this idea come from?
I wrote a book called The Half God of Rainfall, in which my protagonist, Demi, is half Nigerian and half Greek. His father is Zeus, and I’ve been a fan of Perseus, Hercules, all of those demigods. One of my favorite series at the moment is an animated series called Blood of Zeus, where again, there’s a new offspring of a God. All of that was baking in my head. I thought about Anansi having an offspring, and there are all those stories of Anansi’s children littered around the internet. It made sense to try and create another one to sort of reflect and echo myself in my previous books, to create Anansi’s daughter here. But it was Russell’s genius idea to bring Jo Martin back, which I completely loved because Jo’s Doctor was shrouded in so much mystery. It’s so gorgeous. I pray she gets another iteration, even if it’s just a Christmas special or something. Just seeing Jo being Jo and that Fugitive Doctor, that spirit of vengeance, and there’s just so much I want to know about how the Doctor becomes Jo’s Doctor. What allows her to pick up a weapon, because the Doctor usually doesn’t do that? They run around with a screwdriver. I don’t know who’s going to write that, but I want to know the answers to the questions.
Hair was used both visually and physically in the episode, and has a deeper meaning than one would expect. Can you elaborate on how you developed the theme?
I’ve been balding since I was 25. When I was working on the Barbershop Chronicles play, I was traveling through six African countries and a city with barbers. To engage with them, I’d need to cut some hair. So it was either they’d have to give me skin cuts, as in just use a razor and scrape my head, or trim my beard, which is rapidly, rapidly shrinking over those six weeks. I began to think about how to negotiate my hair so that there was something I could use to be present and contributing to those barbershops that I found myself in. When we were working on the play, similar things, we thought about how to fake haircuts or give haircuts or who wouldn’t get a haircut, and the politics of all of that.
When it came to TV, I thought about all of those things and how to use it, and there are a couple of things. Some of it has to do with African mythology, and how black hair curls and coils into itself. I think about it as the Infinity Spiral, and that speaks to the continuity of life from Africa beyond and back. There was something around that to think about the Doctor as a never-ending being, but also stories as never-ending themselves, constantly being remade and reinvented for a new generation. In the Barbershop itself, because it keeps on growing, I thought of it like a farm. You shave off the new fruits, and they come back. Therefore, hair from the men is replenished over and over again, which the demon or evil barber can use to solicit power.
