Doctor Who: The Devil’s Chord

Well, that was a right old mess.

Before Friday night (and how strange is it to be watching new DOCTOR WHO episodes on a Friday evening?) if you’d asked, I would have predicted that “The Devil’s Chord” would be the better of the two opening episodes that Disney+ was dropping in the new season, having already been made aware that the first episode, “Space Babies”, was pitched decidedly at a more kids’ show level–more akin to THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES, as Dan Slott puts it. It turned out, though, that I felt that the first episode was a lot more solid than the second, in that “The Devil’s Chord” descends about halfway through into a virtually plotless series of actions and moments that don’t seem to follow any set of rules of cause-and-effect. Stuff just happens because it happens. This was the part I was most concerned about when RTD spoke about shifting the series focus more heavily toward out-and-out fantasy. I need at least some veneer of rules of engagement. It’s the sort of thing that readers often complain about with characters like Doctor Strange, who seem like they can or cannot do anything depending on what the plot requires without any sense as to why.

I think, too, the most central problem this episode faced was baked in right from the start. It was heavily promoted as being about the Doctor and Ruby meeting the Beatles. Which sounds fun–but not so much if you can’t use even a note’s worth of the Beatles’ music. It’s akin to having Bruce Lee in your story and having him spend all of his time sitting in a chair doing nothing. If the Beatles aren’t performing as the Beatles, then they may as well be anybody. I believe Mark Waid is absolutely spot-on when he theorized that in Russell’s first draft of this episode, the victory chord that John and Paul strike at the end to inadvertently defeat the Maestro had to have been the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night.”

And if it had been, man, that would have been a triumphant moment. But it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, the budget wouldn’t allow for an actual Beatles tune, even a note of one, so the whole climax falls a bit flat.

The Maestro was a scenery-chewing delight, exuding malice and menace, but the rules governing its existence seemed muddled to me, like they were whatever the story called for at that moment. This is also the second episode in a row where, encountering the monster, the Doctor immediately runs away. I don’t think that’s a problem in any given episodes, but two in a row makes it seem like a characteristic of this incarnation, which ain’t good. I did like the quasi-callback to “Pyramids of Mars” where the Doctor takes Ruby back to 2024 to show her that time is malleable and the events in which they’ve entangled themselves in 1963 contain legitimate jeopardy from the world she comes from. That was an effective bit in 1975, and it’s an effective bit here and now. I did wish, as I seemingly often do, that the Doctor’s cleverness played a part in the victory here. I completely get the notion that the Doctor is in over his head when confronting this new Pantheon of Gods, but the thing that always makes the Doctor the Doctor is him using his cleverness to put one over on the bad guys and come out ahead. Let the hero be the hero, and all that.

And of course, the big nostalgia factor in this episode was the extensive callback to the Doctor and Susan living elsewhere in London at that particular moment. It just adds more fuel to the fire that certain folks in WHO fandom have been stoking that Susan will be making a comeback this season. Certainly, Russell has never steered into the established canon this deeply before without a good reason, so it does seem to make sense. What nobody can seem to agree upon is just which character might turn out to be Susan: Mrs Flood, the woman from the Christmas Special who knew what a TARDIS was? The One Who Waits? The mysterious woman who keeps showing up as different people in different circumstances, all watching Ruby and by extension the Doctor? Ruby herself, or her cloaked mother? Hand it to Russell to at least keep the board chock-full of possibilities. And certainly, having a running mystery building in the background has never hurt the show.

But this one disappointed, and tested my patience. Once we got to the showdown in the empty recording studio, it felt as though even plot was thrown out the window and the rest of the episode became just a mélange of things happening. The win felt unearned, and the victory musical number at the end similarly unearned–again, had that been a Beatles number, the payoff would have been far more worthwhile. And given that they set it up in the very first shot of the episode and the Doctor and Ruby go back to the TARDIS partway through the episode, how was the Juke Box not an element in how the Maestro gets defeated? The Doctor has a box full of music at his fingertips, and the show showed it right to us. And then promptly forgot about it. I wouldn’t have cared if the actual solution worked and was clever. But it wasn’t.

So I’m still very much on board. And I still trust in RTD’s skills. But I’m a bit unsettled. Next week, though, we get the Steven Moffat episode, and I can’t help but think that, no matter how much the series is shifting in its emphasis, a Moffat DOCTOR WHO is always going to play like a Moffat DOCTOR WHO. So I’m anticipating a bit of a return to center.