Russell by no means gave me any form of steerage on this. I used to be eager about what occurs within the barbershop, which is all of the voices bickering, quarreling, and laughing collectively. I believed then the Doctor’s physique is a codex, a strolling library of who they ever had been. All of these voices and regenerations are bickering as nicely. I consciously made that parallel. That turned a course line in my script: ‘We see pictures of earlier Docs.’ Russell took that notice, and the editors put everybody in. These pictures work completely to indicate the size of the Doctor, particularly to Belinda. In that second, she additionally understands and will get a deeper feeling of who the Fifteenth Doctor is and all of the lives he has been.
The episode launched Anansi’s daughter and then provided yet one more piece of the thriller round Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor. The place did this concept come from?
I wrote a ebook referred to as The Half God of Rainfall, wherein my protagonist, Demi, is half Nigerian and half Greek. His father is Zeus, and I’ve been a fan of Perseus, Hercules, all of these demigods. Considered one of my favourite sequence in the intervening time is an animated sequence referred to as Blood of Zeus, the place once more, there’s a brand new offspring of a God. All of that was baking in my head. I thought of Anansi having an offspring, and there are all these tales of Anansi’s youngsters littered across the web. It made sense to strive and create one other one to form of mirror and echo myself in my earlier books, to create Anansi’s daughter right here. But it surely was Russell’s genius thought to carry Jo Martin again, which I fully cherished as a result of Jo’s Doctor was shrouded in a lot thriller. It’s so beautiful. I pray she will get one other iteration, even when it’s only a Christmas particular or one thing. Simply seeing Jo being Jo and that Fugitive Doctor, that spirit of vengeance, and there’s simply a lot I need to find out about how the Doctor turns into Jo’s Doctor. What permits her to choose up a weapon, as a result of the Doctor normally doesn’t do this? They run round with a screwdriver. I don’t know who’s going to write down that, however I need to know the solutions to the questions.
Hair was used each visually and bodily within the episode, and has a deeper that means than one would anticipate. Are you able to elaborate on the way you developed the theme?
I’ve been balding since I used to be 25. After I was engaged on the Barbershop Chronicles play, I used to be touring via six African nations and a metropolis with barbers. To interact with them, I’d want to chop some hair. So it was both they’d have to present me pores and skin cuts, as in simply use a razor and scrape my head, or trim my beard, which is quickly, quickly shrinking over these six weeks. I started to consider negotiate my hair in order that there was one thing I may use to be current and contributing to these barbershops that I discovered myself in. After we had been engaged on the play, comparable issues, we thought of pretend haircuts or give haircuts or who wouldn’t get a haircut, and the politics of all of that.
When it got here to TV, I thought of all of these issues and use it, and there are a few issues. A few of it has to do with African mythology, and how black hair curls and coils into itself. I give it some thought because the Infinity Spiral, and that speaks to the continuity of life from Africa past and again. There was one thing round that to consider the Doctor as a endless being, but additionally tales as endless themselves, continually being remade and reinvented for a brand new technology. Within the Barbershop itself, as a result of it retains on rising, I considered it like a farm. You shave off the brand new fruits, and they arrive again. Due to this fact, hair from the lads is replenished over and over once more, which the demon or evil barber can use to solicit energy.