What’s The Episode? “The Devil’s Chord”
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor and Ruby travel back in time to watch the Beatles record their first album, only to discover that they’re crap. Turns out music has been stolen by one of the Pantheon, Maestro, who is the child of the Toymaker. Maestro manifests as a drag queen / panto dame who jumps out of painos and wants to end all music so that… um… music plays itself or something. It’s a bit vague. Never mind though, because the Doctor and Ruby take on Mastero, which involves a lot of running around and then a music battle which they lose. Just when it looks like they’re done for, Lennon and McCartney play the magic chord that banishes Maestro who, just before departing, ponderously tells us that “The One Who Waits” is, er, waiting and the day is saved in time for a musical number to end the episode with, “There’s Always A Twist At The End”.
Is It Any Good? I’m going to say right upfront that this is going to be a tough review to write. And the reason for that is that this might be the most YMMV episode Doctor Who has ever done. It’s not quite a straightforward “musical” episode in the sense of something like Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s “Once More With Feeling” or Fringe‘s “Brown Betty” but it’s also not very far away from that too. And enjoyment of this episode is very dependent on enjoying the sort of camp, screaming-queen drag act / panto dame that Maestro represents and also a closing musical number which pretty much is exactly the sort of thing that musical episodes generally do.
The problem is I don’t like either of these two things. That means I need to at least attempt a degree of objectivity which is not, as I trust you are aware by now, something I’m either good at or want to be. But the truth is that, for large parts, this is an extremely well done episode that is simply Not For Me. I can’t bear musicals and I find drag largely tedious, repetitive, and exhausting. Other people love it and that’s fine – I would never, ever want to stop someone from enjoying it, or saying that it shouldn’t exist. And at this point I should also put my cards on the table because my lack of enjoyment of those things isn’t because I’m some right-wing nutjob. Quite the reverse – I’m an old leftie gay bloke that came out when Thatcher was still prime minister.
Still, even setting aside Maestro, there are a few obvious things to complain about here, and they again speak to rather sloppy writing. Most notably, there’s the ending. This sees the Doctor and Ruby trapped inside musical instruments (don’t ask, the episode isn’t explaining) and defeated only to be saved because John Lennon and Paul McCartney wander down a corridor and play a couple of piano notes. Handy, that.
This is unsatisfying on two levels. Firstly, the Doctor is left impotent and does nothing to defeat Maestro at all. Not a thing. Neither does Ruby. They both just sit there like plumbs until someone happens to play a piano and rescue them. It’s… not great. Secondly, though, we had a scene earlier on – actually, a great scene in the canteen – where McCartney confesses to knowing that buried somewhere deep within him is the desire for music. He suppresses it, he puts himself back in a musical closet, and Lennon of course follows suit. Having them “come out” as actual musicians, rather than suppressing themselves, would have a lovely thematic resonance with the rest of the episode, yet this massively wide goal is somehow missed. It would give weight to that earlier conversation in the canteen, it would work well with both the presence of a drag queen in the text and the fact they’re played by Jinks Monsoon (Drag Race winner) paratextually. It’s honestly weird that RTD, of all people, would miss that. Moffat? Sure. Chibnall? Yep. But RTD?
And it’s frustrating because there are a couple of fantastic moments here. Most notably, the Doctor setting up a “cone of silence” (for lack of a better term) as a one-shot trick to escape Maestro is absolutely fantastic, and the silence as he and Ruby cower in the basement is far more effective than whatever Murray Gold would have slathered over the track. Gold is actually pretty good here – one of the better innovations of the Chibnall era was putting Gold’s somewhat… um, direct, let’s say, approach to incidental music to one side and instead going with Segun Akinola’s more integrated, less ostentatious work.
We saw the Gold approach back in “Space Babies”, with the return of grating “comedy” music over scenes of variable humour in a desperate attempt to persuade of the hilarity of the situation. Gold has done spectacular work on Doctor Who but, like RTD himself, needs reigning in sometimes. His work here – “There’s Always A Twist At The End” aside, and we’ll get to that – is generally much stronger than the season opener. But the scene in the basement works entirely because there’s no sound on it at all. I’ll give the credit for that to Ben Chessell as the director but whoever was responsible made the right call.
There’s also the scene where the action screeches to a halt, the Doctor and Maestro share some screen time together so that Maestro can patiently explain how they can be defeated, then back to the action again. It’s weak stuff. The confrontation doesn’t amount to anything, there’s scads of radio writing as two beings of ridiculous power stand about explaining things to each other that they already know, then back to the plot for things to pretty much play out exactly as you would expect. Why RTD, someone who ought really be able to do better than that, fell into this sort of trap is a bit baffling though, “because he got carried away with himself” is probably the correct answer.
And if there’s any way of describing this episode, then, “carried away with itself” is probably it. There’s some good moments in here for sure but so much of it just doesn’t cohere into anything very compelling. It’s better than last week, sure, but that’s not much of a bar to clear and frankly the season just needs to be better than this.
Would You Recommend It? I think part of the problem in answering that question is that you need to know who it’s aimed at in order to be able to answer it. If it’s a new Disney+ audience member who doesn’t yet quite get the scope of what Doctor Who is capable of then, yes, I guess you could give this a recommendation, albeit a very guarded one along the lines of, “it’s not great and the show isn’t like this usually but at least it proves the flexibility of the format”. For anyone who’s seen even a couple of episodes of the post-2005 series (to say nothing of old school fans), then probably not.
Part of that also comes down to the Doctor. Ncuti Gatwa clearly has the ability to deliver on the role but so far all he’s really been given to do is play things turned up to 11 and very little else. One of the reasons the silent scene works so well is precisely because it gives Gatwa another register to play in. At the moment, he isn’t actually getting much chance to play the Doctor and the show is sitting more comfortably in a “The Adventures of Noted TV Actor Ncuti Gatwa In Space” register rather than it feeling like we’re watching Doctor Who. This isn’t really Ncuti Gatwa’s fault but with everything being played very camp and very loud there’s just not much of a sense of the Doctor coming through. Even Jodie Whittaker got more registers to play in her first couple of episodes than Gatwa’s had so far and it’s undermining anything he’s trying to do with the role.
Of course, the very divisive (and intentionally so) nature of this episode will inevitably lead it to be hard to recommend to anyone too, including this reviewer. Plenty of people will love and embrace the campy, musical, and drag elements of the episode and that’s fine, they are things that absolutely should exist and that people should absolutely enjoy. This might not be my flavour of Doctor Who but it’s still resolutely one that should exist. The weaknesses of the writing are the issue here far more than warbling drag queens or The Beatles suddenly being able to read music (something Paul McCartney, somewhat famously, has never learned to do, which also maybe gives an insight into how much research went into this episode – seemingly none).
And then there’s that final song, “There’s Always A Twist At The End”. It’s… not very good. Depending on how meta you like your TV shows to get it’s either an extremely knowing wink at the audience about the absurdity of how musicals (or musical episodes of TV shows) work or, returning to our theme (heh), the show getting carried away with itself. There’s several moments where the fourth wall is not so much broken as shattered, like Maestro striking up the Doctor Who theme on the piano leading into the title sequence or the Doctor winking directly at the camera but the final song really goes the whole hog.
I mean, ideally this is where you’d stick in some Beatles music but even with Disney money this presumably remains prohibitively expensive. And even though the Beatles themselves are little more than set dressing to emphasize the 1960s-ness of it all, it is a bit of a flaw to have an episode that conspicuously includes the band but not any of the music. The thing is, though, given the whole “twist” theme, wouldn’t “Twist and Shout” be kind of ideal here? It’s a song intimately connected with the Beatles but it’s not one actually written by them so it’s presumably a lot cheaper to license and it keeps the whole “twist” theme running. I get Murry Gold probably wanted to get one of his own songs in there but, as the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
So yes, even setting aside the Marmite flavour of this episode, there’s plenty here that just doesn’t hit the mark. The plotting is lazy, the villain commits the cardinal sin of explaining how to defeat themself, much of the set dressing is ill thought out (everything from George Martin being in front of the band recording rather than in a control room upstairs to the “60’s-ness” being more important than accurate period detail) and the whole thing just feels slapdash. It’s a disappointing second outing for the season and the real frustration is it didn’t need to be, it just required a few checks and balances to get obviously wrong things right. So recommend? No, not really. It’s not terrible, if you enjoy the campy drag aspects then there’s plenty to take pleasure for, and Gatwa and Gibson are always watchable. But this could have, and should have, been better.
The season is off to a poor one-two start.
Scores On The Doors? 6.5 / 10
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