An Hour of Who a Day: 09/30/24

September 30: "The Devil's Chord"

Now this is a bit of trivia for you: not counting Resurrection of the Daleks (which doesn't really count anyway since it was broadcast as one episode per day), this is the first time two full-length episodes of Doctor Who have debuted on the same day, as "The Devil's Chord" went out immediately after "Space Babies" (perhaps they were worried no one would come back if that was the last thing they'd seen for a week).

This is certainly a stronger episode than "Space Babies" was, but more than that, you can see why they aired it back-to-back with the previous one: in tandem, these two episodes do a really good job of showing off what Doctor Who can do. If "Space Babies" was about the future and space and monsters, this is about the past and visiting celebrities and human-seeming villains; as a contrast, it works really well. But while I can see why they aired it second, part of me wonders if it might not have been better a little later in the series.

On the surface that's a bit surprising, because, while there were some hints of oddness in that opening scene, in general this starts like a fairly typical celebrity historical. We meet some people who sound like and slightly resemble the Beatles, someone else who looks more like Cilla Black (although she wouldn't be signed by Brian Epstein until September 1963, but never mind), and a general puzzle regarding what's wrong with music. It's not until Maestro, the main villain, makes their presence known to the Doctor that things go sideways, as they start to distort the story around them. And honestly, that's not really a bad thing! Some of the best stories have a sudden shift that changes what you thought was happening. So what's off about this one?

Part of the issue may be the more experimental (for lack of a better word) nature of Maestro. Played to the hilt by Jinkx Monsoon, Maestro is a gloriously scene-chewing villain, clearly relishing every moment. Maestro is explicitly named as one of the Toymaker's children (from "The Giggle", if you'd forgotten), and in fact the giggle itself heralds their presence to the Doctor. If the Toymaker was all about games, then Maestro is about music. But where the Toymaker wanted to play games, Maestro just wants to consume music, trying to make it so that there's nothing left but the Aeolian tones of the universe, devouring even the music of the spheres. "That lament will be my symphony supreme," Maestro proclaims. So we get a villain who seems incredibly powerful and wonderfully camp, having a ball while they destroy everything. But we've had that kind of thing before, so what's different here?

Is it too weird? This is a story, after all, that features CG musical staves grabbing people and dragging them around. (Which also leads to a wonderful, slightly bizarre joke about the Doctor commenting that he thought the music that grabs Ruby was non-diagetic (in other words, not heard by the characters). Does that mean he hears Murray Gold or Dudley Simpson or Paddy Kingsland as he travels through time and space?) The sight of the music flying around is reminiscent of the music battle from 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so there's also an element of magic involved -- we're rather a long way away from the Doctor's "there's no such thing as magic" position of The Dæmons. It also seems to hinge on the idea that no one before Timothy Drake (the instructor at the top of the episode) had played that particular tritone before, which seems unlikely. So it relies on coincidence and it's borderline magic. It also feels an awful lot like the confrontation with the Toymaker in "The Giggle", when he pulled the Doctor and Donna into a theater -- only this time it's a stage in the ruined Earth of Ruby's time if Maestro isn't stopped, Pyramids of Mars-style. Coincidence, magic, and familiarity then.

But that's the thing. None of that should really matter, and viewed in isolation, it works really well. No, the main issue is that this episode feels out of place. The Doctor and Ruby seem too familiar with each other, as if they've been travelling together for some time now, and Ruby mentions at one point that she thinks it might be June for her now, which would suggest this was initially intended to be later in the season. But this issue really manifests itself in the Doctor's reaction to Maestro. He seems completely terrified by them, to the point where he runs away and hides. And at this point, we just don't know the fifteenth Doctor well enough to know just how atypical this is. (His description of the events of "The Giggle" also seem to imply a much more fearful encounter from the Doctor's perspective than what it looked like in that episode. Maybe Maestro is also making a noise at 17 Hz to scare the Doctor, like the Bogeyman in "Space Babies".) Is Maestro really that scary, or is the fifteenth Doctor a bit of a coward? It doesn't seem likely, but the point is that we don't know for sure yet: we haven't seen Fifteen in action enough.

So by no means is it a bad episode, and the performances from the main cast are once again excellent, with Gatwa and Gibson clearly both having a blast. It's got a weird ending, sure, as if they wanted a dance number but couldn't figure out how to put it into the episode proper, so they just tacked it on to the end, but that's not the worst thing ever. But it's got great energy, an interesting premise, and a sense of the show stretching itself, to demonstrate it can do more than slightly silly space stories. If it had aired later in the season (maybe around episode 5), with a better established relationship with Ruby and more familiarity with this Doctor, I don't think I would have as many reservations. I can see why they moved it up to episode 2; I just kind of wish they hadn't.

(There's always a (Susan) Twist: in this case she's the tea lady charging half a crown for two cups of tea.)