Doctor Who: The Devil’s Chord Review

I’ll admit I’d had a great day when The Devil’s Chord aired. The evening previously I’d been able to enjoy great views of the Northern Lights from my garden in the evening, then I was wide awake so I watched Space Babies on its midnight release and then went to Portsmouth Comic Con during the day to meet Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as well as bumping into friends and family who were also at the event. So I was in a great mood when I sat down with my family to watch episodes 1 and 2 on their terrestrial airing.

Right off the bat, The Devil’s Chord starts strong with a great cold opening which introduces the threat of The Maestro, played with gusto by Jinx Monsoon, one of the pantheon of gods that The Toymaker comes from and warned us about at the end of The Giggle and I loved how Maestro took us into the opening credits by playing the theme tune on the piano.

Now I must be honest again, I’ve never been a fan of the Beatles’ music. I can’t argue that they are one of the definitive sounds of the sixties and have rightly gone down in history as some of the greatest musicians of all time. But for me, their music has always been quite dull, which isn’t too dissimilar from how they come across here, but more on that in a little bit. I’ve always been a fan of the more musical songs of the sixties, so I didn’t understand Ruby’s request to go and see them recording their first album, though I’m not so snobby that if I was in the TARDIS I’d turn my nose up at this opportunity.

While Ruby does give us a good enough reason to want to see them, author Russell T. Davies doesn’t give us a good enough reason for the Doctor to be so excited beyond the fact that they are the Beatles. But the pair wasted no time in finding a way into the EMI studios before they became the iconic Abbey Road studios. But it’s here that we bump into the first of many problems this story is plagued with.

We quickly learn that something has happened to the music or rather the sound of the sixties. The Beatles are awful, while Cilla Black is just as awful a singer as she always was. But what has happened, why is everyone so disgusted with music and just doing it as a way of getting enough money to make a living? Given how the Maestro first appears in 1925, a cool nod to the year that the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna find The Toymaker waiting for them in The Giggle, then surely music’s last legs would have been shortly after their appearance and people didn’t keep on making it and buying it on vinyl for the 35 years between 1925 and 1963 and saved millions of pounds in production costs.

A simple line explaining why it’s taken the Maestro this long to eradicate music so much would have been all that was needed, sure the Beatles were influential but so was Glenn Miller, the Charleston, Frank Sinatra and Elvis, so this episode feels a little at odds with its guest characters right off the bat. And for anyone wondering what Cilla Black was doing there, the Beatles actually wrote a number of her early songs so they had a long past with one another. But well done for finding someone who looks like her and then making her not look like her in the final episode!

It was nice though to see how excited both the Doctor and Ruby were to see some historical celebrities. I did like their reactions to each terrible song and how they would still bob their heads despite the songs being dire. It was nice to see a companion reaction where they were genuinely excited to get to meet them, with Millie Gibson selling Ruby’s delight at meeting her heroes, as companions from the modern era that’s sometimes something that they seemingly take for granted. Though even I would find it hard to not tell John Lennon not to go to New York knowing what would happen to him! But this does also pose another problem, with three of the five Beatles still alive, there is only so much that Davies could do with them, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are arguably the most famous of the Fab Four, but George Harrison is seen once and Ringo is seen here as he was seen there, one wonders if he was off narrating Thomas The Tank Engine instead of making music! Using the two more famous of the members makes sense but they might just as well have not been there once again putting across the argument that the historical celebrities in this story could have been anyone.

Davies also seems a little unsure of his continuity as he has the Doctor explain to Ruby that he is currently living in a junkyard in Shoreditch. But he doesn’t know if she is alive anymore. We know that the Time War didn’t kill all the Time Lords and that the Master seemed to only blow up the Capitol in The Timeless Children so what has happened now? I don’t care particularly about Gallifrey but if we are getting another Time War setup then I’m not overly excited about that. As nice as it was to hear a little reference to Susan and An Unearthly Child, it does make one wonder if Russell is setting up a return this is the second time he’s had a reference to family so could Mrs. Flood or Susan Triad secretly be Susan?

But when the Maestro next appears with a glorious call back to The Giggle, which my sister was delighted she spotted before me, the Doctor wastes no time in scurrying away rather than confronting the villain, maybe this is an aspect of his character thanks to his Bi-Generation which we get explained was his soul being torn in half, explaining that it wasn’t as glamourous as it looked and giving it some threat. But maybe we could get some explanation like he’s afraid to ever regenerate again in case it never happens? Just a few lines is all we want Russell, rather than just throwing things out into the ether with little to no explanation as to what is going on.

What I did like though was the reference to Pyramids of Mars, when the Doctor takes Ruby to London on the day she was born where she finds it completely devastated. It was a great throwback but I find it very hard to believe that a world without the Beatles’ music would lead to a nuclear war. However having said that, it isn’t as if we humans haven’t needed much of a reason to go to war with one another so maybe this time Russell was right. I also loved how there were bits that looked CGI and other bits that were a set for when the Maestro makes their appearance, it was a great moment, the glimpse of the sparkly heel amongst the dead London, we can say what we like about the writing but it’s true that the show finally looks like it had the budget it’s long deserved and people are using it in the right way!

Russell has clearly put some thought into this pantheon of Gods and given how Ruby’s song she sings later on is the same music used in The Trickster’s appearances in The Sarah Jane Adventures, he is surely playing with themes and ideas he’s had for many years, could Ruby be the Trickster’s daughter and he’s adapted an abandoned storyline from Sarah Jane following the death of Elisabeth Sladen? He is certainly one of the pantheons and has god-like powers and surely must be known to The Toymaker. I don’t think Maestro is genuinely the child of the Toymaker in a biological sense just something made by the Toymaker. Most of the time in fantasy and gods people are linked symbolically it might be strange otherwise that the Maestro would turn up so soon after The Giggle.

Now things start to go downhill rapidly, we’ve got a music battle but an earlier line of dialogue explains that the Maestro eats music so why does the Doctor think that essentially feeding the villain music in their battle was a good idea? I get that they have to find the lost chord but otherwise feeding the villain doesn’t seem like the greatest idea! Also, it looked a little weird that it was filmed in reverse with Jinx having to do her sequence in reverse and it looks a little weird and you’ve got the Beatles, hell – you’ve got Cilla Black – and the Doctor has to resort to a piano to try and defeat the Maestro. Having the John Lennon and Paul McCartney find the lost chord works, just about, but given how little they are in the episode I’m not sold on why we should care. This then brings us to perhaps the biggest mistake of the episode, the song at the end.

With all the Disney budget, are they trying to say they couldn’t afford to buy a piece of music from the Beatles, they had forked out a fortune to use David Bowie in the trailers so maybe they should have spent less here and more on this episode to get a proper piece of music. Or they could have used the meta-song at the end as a way of defeating Maestro with the Doctor having to inspire the people in the building to find their music and essentially having Maestro gorge themselves into oblivion? The song should have been earlier and the scene with the little dance on the crossing would have been a really sweet ending and made sure that this episode was a lot better than what we got.

All that’s left is to applaud the fantastic performances from Ncuti Gatwa, Millie Gibson and Jinx Monsoon because they are all that ultimately save what could have otherwise been a disaster. As much as I don’t like them, the Beatles – despite the episode not being about them – were seriously underused and the idea of using music as a weapon and playing with sounds with things like the theme song being used as a weapon felt underdeveloped even if there was an attempt to make it seem interesting. The Devil’s Chord doesn’t deserve to become the lost chord, but maybe one that we shelve as a lost album and come back in a few years?