I may seem like I’m contradicting the point I made in my Space Babies review about not being as obsessed over the show as I used to be, but I was one of the few who stayed up in the ungodly hours of the night to catch the midnight release of these two episodes on iPlayer. While my opinions on this release model are mixed to say the least, it was still a unique experience watching new episodes of Doctor Who in the dead of night in a study room in the university library. Especially when it comes to The Devil’s Chord, a really brave experiment for the show that does things Doctor Who rarely ever does.
While I wrote my Space Babies review almost immediately after I’d finished watching it, I I decided to let this one sit for a while just to see the wider community’s reactions to it and, as I expected, this is the episode people are favouring, especially those who were turned off by Space Babies’s childish elements. The Devil’s Chord certainly is eccentric, but it possesses the much-needed undercurrents of horror and darkness to make for a great balance, one that the very best Doctor Who manages to strike.
This is half down to Jinkx Monsoon, who (perhaps appropriately given her character’s background) takes a leaf out of Neil Patrick Harris’s recent performance as the Toymaker, and deliciously chews up the scenery and spits it out again. Despite all of the very blatant campness, they are genuinely menacing at points and I love it when guest stars completely envelop themselves in a role like this. The RTD2 era has given us some fantastic guest star villains and I’m really hoping to see this continue.
Monsoon is probably the best thing about the episode, as well as the fantastic interplay between Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson that carries from both Space Babies and the Christmas special, allaying all fears that this TARDIS duo wouldn’t work. That said, I’m really not keen on the implication that Ruby has already been travelling with the Doctor for six months, as a question posed by the Doctor reveals that this is June 2024, a big gap after Space Babies which carries straight on from the Christmas special.
I know certain things have to be constricted and removed from the series, since Russell only has 8 episodes to work with as opposed to the 13 of yesteryear, but it feels like we have missed out on some crucial bonding time between the Doctor and the companion, something that Steven Moffat and even Chris Chibnall managed to execute well. Bill was already interrogating the Doctor and doubting his methods and morality as early as her third episode, and Graham and Ryan had only known the Doctor for a couple of hours before her lifestyle killed Grace – we haven’t seen Ruby Sunday pushed like this yet.
The Devil’s Chord is a really packed 50 minutes of TV, even by Doctor Who standards, as the first five to ten minutes bombard the audience with a plethora of 1960s music references and trivia. Of course, the point here is that something has gone wrong, and we see the Beatles and Cilla Black singing these badly written and passionless songs to demonstrate that something has gone terribly wrong with music, but still we’ve barely had time to settle into the episode before the Doctor and Ruby are in Abbey Road Studios’s cafeteria questioning Lennon and McCartney over their lack of passion for the art form.
Once again the episode looked great, with the shot of a devastated future London looking way too good for the show that once gave us the Myrka, and the direction here too was really fantastic. Ben Chessell had a lot to juggle (effects work, musical battles, various locations) but he really brought a good pace to the script and made what could have been a frantic mess of an episode easy to watch.
While I do think this is the stronger of the two episodes that were released this past weekend, I’m not quite as positive on it as those who think it’s one of Russell’s best ever scripts. I don’t think that at all. I think Turn Left and Midnight tower above this, and I think last year’s The Giggle was a better execution of the idea of a god entering our reality and messing with it.
I think of The Devil’s Chord as a series of great moments. The scene of the Doctor showing Ruby what her London will look like if they don’t stop the Maestro is very powerful and calls to mind the similar moment from Tom Baker’s Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor using the screwdriver to mute everything was a really cool minute or so, and the final setpiece of the Doctor and Ruby breaking out of musical instruments to witness the Maestro’s “death” ended the episode on a high note. Discounting that musical number of course – I mean, it was extravagant and all that, and everyone looked like they were having a great time, but I just did not see the point of it at all.
As a full episode, I’m much more likely to remember specific scenes than I am the complete package. Oftentimes the sign of a great episode is that you can remember all the plot beats and how certain events and characters weave into one another. This is a trait of all Russell’s best scripts and indeed the highlights of any showrunner. I can put on the Bad Wolf two-parter, Heaven Sent, Turn Left, or The Waters of Mars, and I can remember the amazing way in which everything comes together. While I have enjoyed every episode of the Ncuti Gatwa era so far, I can’t really say that for any episode thus far. He’s had amazing moments, but not a full home run of an episode, something that hopefully next week’s Boom (the return of Steven Moffat) can rectify.
The Devil’s Chord is a sign of a new era of Doctor Who that knows it has great elements to work with, and a new exuberant tone that is infectious to watch. It just needs to stop for a second and work out what to do with these things.
Doctor Who: The Devil’s Chord (2024) is available to watch on BBC iPlayer
