The Cutprice Guignol

This episode was a vast improvement on Space Babies. Which brings us soaring up to…slightly below average. Well, it’s something, isn’t it?

The Devil’s Chord, the second episode of Ncuti Gatwa’s first season, is significantly better than the episode that opened for us – though, frankly,  Space Babies was so unfathomably abysmal (seriously, I think it might be a new nadir for New Who), it would have been something of a stretch for Russel T Davies to write something worse.

The Doctor and Ruby hop back in time to the sixties to go hang out with The Beatles during the recording of one of their iconic albums, only to discover that, in this new timeline, a mysterious villain known as Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) has been thieving the very concept of good music for the last four decades.

Which sounds a little vague, because it is – the parameters of this particular villain aren’t well-defined, which is a shame. Genre fiction thrives when it’s got it’s own internal logic and rules in place, and I’m not sure I can entirely parse what Maestro’s are meant to be – they steal the songs from people’s hearts, and have basically sort of…run good, worthwhile music out of fashion over the course of four decades? But people are still making music that isn’t particularly good? Maestro is summoned by people playing decent music, but the cut-off for what that is is a bit…nebulous? I don’t hate the thought of a villain coming after a specific kind of art to consume the power of it, but I feel like exactly what that entails for the world should be a bit more clear in definition.

And the choice of The Beatles as the centrepiece for this story is…not one that works for me. I get that it will for a lot of people, and that’s totally fine – but I’m not a fan of The Beatles’ music at all, to the point that when they started playing the “bad” version of their songs, I fully did not clock that it was anything other than just…a Beatles song. They all kind of sound that uninteresting to me. It’s a totally personal thing, and I acknowledge that, but these reviews are totally personal – hence the shit TARDIS puns in every title.

Okay, and this might seem a bit silly to come people, but given how forward Russel T Davies return to the show has been with social justice issues, I was surprised to see John Lennon given (half of, at least) the heroic role in The Devil’s Chord. This is a man who admitted to assaulting a number of women and his own son – I’m not saying the show can’t include historical figures who’ve done shitty things (because, let’s be real, it would be very, very difficult to do historical episodes at all if that was the cut-off point), but for such a recent figure with such well-documented instances of domestic violence, it didn’t sit right with me.

Anyway. Jinkx Monsoon was one of the most highly-touted guest stars for this season, and here, as Maestro, I think they’re a moderate success. As part of the same pantheon of bad guys as Neil Patrick Harris’ Toymaker, they had some really big shoes to fill – the writing, the director, and the acting were on point in The Giggle, blending camp, humour, and genuinely discomforting nastiness with an alchemic touch.

Maestro certainly isn’t a bad follow-up to that character, but they do feel like something of a step down after the enormity of the Toymaker and their outing in the show. Monsoon leans more towards panto villain in the first act of the episode, and it’s not until things really get going that they settle in to a more convincingly villainous turn that blends comfortably with the camp. I’m not blown away by either Monsoon or Maestro here, but I do like them – and with such a tough act to follow, I’m not sure anyone could have lived up to what came before. The theatrical nature of Maestro gave the show a bit more room to play with staging and style, a huge improvement on Space Babies in terms of direction. Also, I liked the use of musical bars as weapons, and have no notes about how daft and fun that was.

It seems this pantheon of villains, too, is going to bring a more meta-textual narrative to the show, and that’s something I’m looking forward to seeing unfold in upcoming episodes – that little moment where Maestro played the opening notes to the credits (and, to be fair, I do actually really love the arrangement for this season’s theme music) and grinned into the camera was such a fun way of indicating their reality-bending abilities, and it’s not something I’ve really seen the show before – which is always an exciting prospect, especially this far in.

Where this episode really shined for me was Ruby and the Doctor, after an exceptionally wobbly outing for them both in Space Babies. They share this brief scene where the Doctor talks about Susan, his granddaughter, and there’s that matter-of-fact sadness that Gatwa showed in Ruby Road back for a moment – I love what he does with this Doctor’s emotional range, straightforward in his honesty, but at the same time, layering in an aching grief for what he’s lost.

Millie Gibson (aside from looking fabulous in the era-appropriate styling) was super fun in this episode too – sneaking in to the studio by playing the tea lady, singing with Cilla Black, being an ally to dramatic heartbroken lesbians everywhere – she felt a lot more settled in the role here, and that moment she witnessed the world post-nuclear-apocalypse in Maestro’s timeline was genuinely impressive. I’m not totally taken with the plot set-up with got with her so far – it feels like it’s edging into Most Important and Specialest Girl in the Galaxy territory again, and I got enough of that with Amy and Clara – but we’ll see how it pans out.

The Devil’s Chord ends with a goofy, meta musical number, which I could have done without – I get why it’s there, given the musical themes of the episode, but it’s hard not to reflect back on how fucking dreadful that first episode was and wonder if some of this budget could have been used on doing better CGI baby mouths (or, you know, firing that script out of a canon into the sun and starting again from scratch).

So, yeah, overall, The Devil’s Chord is a better episode. There are even some parts of it I outright loved. But it lands firmly in the “mediocre” category for me, with a slightly ill-defined story and a villain who didn’t quite live up to their predecessor. I’m still waiting for this season to click into place – but, with these first two episodes, I’m not exactly filled with confidence about what this era has to offer yet.

What did you think of The Devil’s Chord? How did it stack up to Space Babies? What are your feelings about this era so far? Let me know in the comments below!

If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Doctor Who reviews! I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via Den of Geek)