The Devil's Chord

Chapter the 299th, where we meet the Beatles but they don't please please us.

Plot:
[Warning: this is a bang up-to-date story at the time of writing, so beware spoilers below.] The Doctor and Ruby go to London in 1963 to visit Abbey Road studios (though they're not called that yet) and see the Beatles record their first album. They blag their way into the room where this historic moment is happening, the four Liverpool lads step up to their mics with guitars and drumsticks in hand, start playing... and they suck. The song is not one of their famous compositions, but is instead dull pap. It's not just them: everyone in the building and in the city seems to have suppressed their desire to create meaningful and stirring music. Talking to Lennon and McCartney, the TARDIS duo find out that sometime around 40 years before the idea of music became wrong and that the desperate recordings being put together in the studios are the last gasp. The Doctor has a piano taken up to the roof of the building and Ruby plays music across the rooftops; people in their homes react happily to this, but it also brings out Maestro, a godlike entity and child of the Toymaker. Maestro was allowed in to our universe when someone found and played a secret chord, and they are consuming all musical potential, intending to make the whole universe fall silent. After a short trip to 2024 to show Ruby that the Earth will be destroyed if they don't intervene in 1963, the Doctor tries everything to defeat Maestro. He isn't quite enough of a musical genius to find the chord that will banish them, but luckily Lennon and McCartney manage to find the right notes. After Maestro is gone, everyone has a song and a dance.

Context:

I've not got many stories to watch before I finish everything that's available, but the blog has been given an extra lease of life by a new season (finally) starting. As soon as the titles for the stories in this run (which I'm calling new series 14, your mileage may vary) were revealed, they were fair game for selection by the random number generation that dictates the order I cover TV Doctor Who here, and the second story of the run was the first to be selected. I still have enough left of other Doctors' stories that it shouldn't just be one Gatwa episode after another, at least in 2024, but we'll see how it goes. I watched the story and preceding season opener Space Babies on their double-bill BBC1 debut broadcast, just before the Eurovision Song Contest was shown. I was accompanied by youngest child (girl of 12) for The Devil's Chord. Middle child (boy of 14) had stayed up the previous night to watch from the iplayer with me (see First Time Round section below), the Better Half had watched Space Babies, but said she would catch the second story some other time. The eldest (boy of 17) had just finished college to start study leave for his A-levels, so obviously he was revising conscientiously (reader: he was out with his mates partying).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. I have so far completed 24 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing), classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25 and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I stayed up to watch this and preceding season opener Space Babies when they first dropped on the BBC iplayer, from midnight as the 10th May 2024 turned into the 11th. Despite my being a bit sleepy, it was very exciting. I'm not on social media anymore, so have missed any angsty or angry reaction from fans there to this new distribution style. I like the choice it offers fans to fit the show they love into their different lives and schedules. It's anyway something I'm used to from watching certain streamed shows. An example would be Better Call Saul; I remember watching the final episodes of its final series in 2022 with my breakfast once they'd arrived on Netflix, and never getting spoilered (and I was on social media a lot back then). I finally saw the thrust of the anti- argument in the letters page of Doctor Who Magazine, to which I still subscribe. According to a letter writer, this distribution has favoured the Disney+ audience over the UK-based licence fee payers. If Russell T Davies is right in his column in the same magazine, though, the long-running UK hospital soap Casualty is delivered in exactly the same way, and there's no Disney+ connection there. The idea is that the show becomes streaming-first (on iplayer as well as Disney+); as such, there will always be a decision of what time episodes drop in advance of the BBC1 evening broadcast. Midnight is just the sort of time that tends to get picked - it was the time that the Paul McGann movie became available in video stores, days before its broadcast; it was when the newly found episodes of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear became available to purchase in 2013; it's the default time of any overnight product launch, if the idea is to give it some kind of fanfare - nobody opens their doors to queues for a new game or cult novel at 2:45am or 6pm, do they? It's always midnight.

Whatever time was picked would annoy someone - Disney+ after all will be showing Doctor Who in multiple countries and timezones, not just the US. Ah, there's the rub! What probably sticks in many long-term fans' craws is that, if they don't stay up, people in the US will get to see the episodes before them; traditionally, we hate that. This then is part of a long-running and reasonably healthy rivalry between UK and US fans about who loves the show more. We lost the battle over the use of the word 'Whovian' to describe Doctor Who fans (ghastly American fan coinage not taken seriously when it emerged in the 1980s that has stubbornly stuck), but I'm still of a mind to just relax and let them see this as a victory, if they want. With the exception of the aforementioned TV Movie and The Five Doctors (held back in the UK so it could be part of a telethon rather than shown on the previous Wednesday that was the actual 20th anniversary as in the US), Doctor Who's been on in the UK before the US - or at the very least simulcast at an antisocial American hour - for 60 years; maybe the next 60 years can be their turn; after that, Who knows? One other interesting factor of this new approach for me is how it can act as a barometer of my own enthusiasm. The last time Davies relaunched the show, it took a season and a half before I was blasé enough not to watch a new episode go out live. I will record here how long it is before I'm not prepared to stay up into the wee small hours to see a new story. 

Reaction:

When Russell T Davies was first showrunner of Doctor Who, the four series he brought to screen (from 2005 to 2008) always started with a trio of lightweight stories to engage new viewers and show the sweep of what the series could do, one present, one future, one past. With more abbreviated seasons, it might not be something he does annually, but he has replicated the pattern for Ncuti's first three stories. The Church on Ruby Road handled an Earth-based contemporary story, Space Babies did the future and alien planets; so, The Devil's Chord visits history. The year 1963 feels like very recent history to me, though the equivalent in William Hartnell's first season would have been a TARDIS trip to 1902, a very different age to the Sixties just as they were starting to become 'Swinging'. We still have pin-sharp remastered recordings of the music from the era, so it doesn't feel that long ago. Perhaps this is why the show has never featured a trip back in time to meet the Beatles before, or perhaps there are other reasons (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more musings on this). It's a good hook, anyway, and it also provided Davies the high-concept idea for the story. He knew he'd never be able to afford to use any Beatles music or recordings, so the narrative becomes about their absence. Though the tone of the piece is zany and knockabout in the style of a Warner Brothers Loony Tunes cartoon, at heart there is a seriousness. Just because the story was broad did not stop it - at least for this viewer - from being deep too.

The sequence of Ruby playing a piano on the roof of Abbey Road, with people's reactions from their upper windows to suddenly hearing music again, was moving and visually rich. It's maybe a little bit of a stretch to imagine that the world would end up destroyed without music to unite us and to soothe us, but who can know for sure? It was great to see Davies visualise this by recreating the Pyramids of Mars scene of zipping forward to see the impact if Doctor and companion leave without defeating the villain (he tried to include this scene when he first ran the show, but couldn't ever make it fit). At the time of writing, I can't know if Davies is being truthful in his stated resolution not to use returning villains or monsters this year; if he is, I would expect more high concept ideas in the remaining episodes. Doctor Who in this phase of its life is large; if they can't fall back on Daleks or Cybermen or the like, the writers will need to feed the story engine with larger than life ideas. One of the ways in which Davies is achieving this is by introducing more fantasy, with the explanation seeded in the 60th anniversary specials in 2023 that the battle between the Doctor and the Toymaker in The Giggle opened a doorway into other dimensions for beings to come through that don't necessarily obey our universe's rules. This explains the presence of goblins with a science based on coincidence, as just one example. In The Devil's Chord, the link is made even more explicit: the villain Maestro is the child of the Toymaker. I'm just a little bit wary that without hard and fast rules, and with the pressure to engage an audience with high concepts and big ideas, there's a risk of a lack of discipline creeping in.

Maestro's powers making music palpable such that physical notes appear in the air was cartoonish but in keeping with what had been established of this powerful entity. It could also at a push explain the big song and dance number at the end - the Doctor arranges everyone to celebrate the return of music to their lives with a sing-a-long, and nobody needs rehearsal because of the lingering effects of Maestro somehow. It's less convincing to imagine why that would make the Abbey Road zebra crossing sound like an electric piano. And it can't explain the fourth-wall breaking. When a piece of threatening music heralds the appearance of Maestro, the Doctor has the line - and it is a killer line - "I thought it was non-diegetic". It's very meta and very funny, but it's hard to find an in-universe explanation for what the Doctor (as opposed to Ncuti Gatwa addressing the audience) could have meant by it. It's essential to balance any fantasy elements with the surrounding grounded action. Though they are not as central to the narrative as historical celebrities in other Doctor Who stories, the Beatles are still totemically important to The Devil's Chord, and they have to seem real. The actors playing Lennon and McCartney (Chris Mason and George Caple) are good, not perfect visual likenesses but capturing the spirit of the real men at this point in their lives, but with the added fictional melancholy of potential not realised. Mason's delivery of the line "But why do I wake up crying?" is a particularly good moment.

The programme has not been made to stand up to the sort of scrutiny that even a mild Beatles obsessive like what I am could exert, but I'm going to nitpick anyway. Given everything historically recorded about him, I don't think the Lennon of 1963 would display this amount of emotion to anyone, let alone a stranger like Ruby. Okay, this is a Lennon that's grown up in a very different world than the real one, so maybe that can be explained away. The glasses irritate me - Lennon didn't start wearing his trademark round glasses until 1967, and before then was rarely if ever seen wearing glasses of any shape - but it's a minor point that we can chalk up to parallel timelines as well. What's impossible to forgive is the ending where Lennon and McCartney find the piano, see the notes hanging in the air above it, and save the day by completing the chord to banish Maestro. Obviously, they are the musical geniuses that Maestro has said would be required to figure out the problem, but there's a Shea Stadium size but! The Beatles famously could not read music, and I can't see why they would learn this skill in a parallel timeline where music isn't valued. Nitpick over. Jinkx Monsoon is as good as was consistently said in all the reviews that came out in advance of broadcast. She (I'm using she/her pronouns as the actor is credited as their drag persona, and they have gone on record that when in drag they prefer she/her) is pitch perfect in finding the exact calibration for every line in every scene. The look to camera before she kills a little old lady (played by June Hudson!!!!) is very special. It's one of the most watchable OTT villain performances in Doctor Who's history, and that's an area of great competition. You wouldn't think Sacha Dhawan in The Power of the Doctor or Neil Patrick Harris in The Giggle would need scenery-chewing lessons from anyone, but Monsoon leaves them far behind.

The regular duo of Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are no slouches either; they have great chemistry and deliver performances zinging with energy. They both look good in their stylised 60s gear too ("I've got wigs galore!"). The mystery of Ruby's identity and parentage is shaping up nicely. There's also an intriguing new twist (pun intended) on Davies's Where's Wally / Waldo style repeated references. Following mentions in his first tenure of Bad Wolf or Torchwood or Vote Saxon, we now have the same background actor (Susan Twist) appearing in almost every episode in a different cameo role, having started in Wild Blue Yonder. Who is she going to turn out to be? Intriguing. The only misstep in the ongoing series arc material is a scripting decision about the Doctor and Ruby's relationship. A line of dialogue confirms that The Devil's Chord takes place for Ruby relative to June or July 2024, meaning that six months have passed since Space Babies. The abbreviated nature of the season probably prompted Davies to fast-forward their relationship thus, but as a viewer I feel short changed at what I've missed. How often has Ruby been going home in that period? How's she explained her absences? It could even be a continuity error, perhaps - if the running order got changed, maybe. There's nothing in the story that suggests they've been travelling together any length of time (would they have gone so long without the Doctor asking Ruby what time period she'd like to visit, or revealing the TARDIS wardrobe room?). It might have been better to have left this unspoken.

Connectivity:

In both The Devil's Chord and The Power of the Doctor, the Doctor meets a historical person or persons connected to at least one pop song. This is assuming that Rasputin was always and only the Master, and there wasn't a real Rasputin that he bumped off at any point. They also both include a song and dance number. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Knights (Pop Stars) and Eu. It's taken Doctor Who over 60 years to do a story featuring the Beatles. Aside from a cameo in 1960s story The Chase, not specially filmed but using footage of a Top of the Pops performance, they have never appeared in TV Who until The Devil's Chord, and were barely referenced in the interim: a couple of songs played in the background, a character had a Beatles poster on his wall, and they've been mentioned in dialogue something like three times. Given the cultural shockwave that the Fab Four produced at exactly the time Doctor Who got going, and their ongoing popularity and cachet in the years since, it feels surprising. Part of the explanation of this is that Doctor Who's early days rarely strayed into contemporary times. When the TARDIS finally did set down in Swinging London, it was focussed on one particular day (20th July 1966, fact fans); for narrative reasons too complicated to go into now, all those visits (in The War Machines, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks) fell on that same day. And the Beatles weren't doing anything particularly interesting that day (a few days later the interview where John was quoted as saying his group were "Bigger than Jesus" would be published in the US, and things would get a bit heated over there - that could make a good subject for a Doctor Who story, if Big Finish haven't done it already). After that, Who made a point of setting non-historical Earth-based stories in a time zone a few years in advance of the year in which they were broadcast. The reason for this was probably the same reason the Beatles - or any popular culture - was referenced only very rarely; it avoided making the stories seem dated.

Another reason to avoid too much focus on the Beatles was exactly because of the cultural shockwave they produced at exactly the time Doctor Who got going. Fun parallels have been drawn between the BBC series and the Fab Four at that time: both, after some build up earlier, came to public consciousness in a big way in 1963, merchandising for both became ubiquitous (the coinage 'Dalekmania' was based on the 'Beatlemania' that preceded it), they both launched a couple of films in the early to mid-1960s (there's a famous photograph of John Lennon with a Dalek at the Cannes film festival in 1965). The Beatles, though, did all of it on a much grander scale that the little TV series that could. In their 1960s heyday and in the 1970s aftermath, they were perhaps too big a subject for Doctor Who. Think of the budget trying to recreate all those crowds of screaming girls. Think of the difficulty in depicting a group that kept reinventing their look every few months. After that, though, it was too soon to revisit them as a part of history. Those behind the scenes of Doctor Who only started steering the TARDIS towards the recent history of the 1940s, 50s and 60s at the end of the classic series run, and they never featured real people in those stories. When the show returned in 2005, a type of story that did feature real people from history, the so-called celebrity historical, became more prevalent. These stories stopped short of including anyone still alive, however. The Devil's Chord is the first time that a Doctor Who story has featured a person in a historical context who's still alive when the story was broadcast. Two, in fact: Sirs Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey. Perhaps a 60-year gap is the minimum to allow for such a thing.

Or maybe it's all just a coincidence. The Devil's Chord was aired on the same evening as the Eurovision Song Content of 2024. My gut feel was that the ESC would have been referenced more than the Liverpudlian mop-tops in Doctor Who. Both the sci-fi series and the contest are long-running institutions of broadcasting, both are traditionally shown on a Saturday, and they both share a fun, camp sensibility. Yes, it wasn't a likely topic for the slightly more stuffy classic series years. In a story after the 2005 return, though, one might expect that the Doctor to mention in passing, say, that he'd gone to Brighton to see Abba perform Waterloo and win the contest in 1974; or, you might think that a Doctor Who story with an intergalactic version of the competition would be a no-brainer to have been pitched at some point. Here, Big Finish have done it already - the latter idea was a successful audio before Who came back to TV, so perhaps that's why it's been avoided. You'd think there'd be some mention, though; but, apart from Christopher Eccleston's Doctor once firing off a dismissive "Nul points" at some Daleks, nothing. The Contest has recently had more connections back to Doctor Who than the other way round, with Catherine Tate announcing the results from the UK in 2023 with an "Allons-y!" and Olly Alexander (who appeared in a fictional Dalek story in the Russell T Davies series It's a Sin) representing the UK in 2024. Is it possible that the Eurovision Song Contest is too camp for Doctor Who?! Heaven forfend! In a series that has just served up Maestro as well as a big group of space babies in charge of a spaceship, anything is possible. Give it a few years, and perhaps the time will come...

In Summary:

An excellent early season story (a Yellow Submarine, say, not quite a Penny Lane or Strawberry Fields Forever). At the end, though, it was getting just a little bit You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).  

The Power of the Doctor

Chapter the 298th, where it's getting, it's getting, it's getting kind of hectic.

Plot:
All this written down in order is going to seem like the fitful dream of a kid who's gone to bed after eating too much sugar, but here goes anyway: The Doctor, Yaz and Dan battle against Cyber-Masters (regenerating Cybermen made from dead Timelords, with the collars and everything) on a floating train in space. The Cybermen kidnap the train's cargo - a wibbly energy creature disguised as a child. With this, the Master - allied with the Cybermen and the Daleks, and posing as Rasputin in the court of Tsar Nicholas II in 1916 - sets up a planet-sized Cyber conversion machine in orbit around Earth. Dan leaves to go back to his ordinary life, finding the Doctor's adventures a bit too dangerous after he nearly got killed on the space train. The Doctor's old friends Tegan and Ace have been recruited into UNIT by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and investigate some missing seismologists and missing paintings respectively. Tegan receives a package supposedly from the Doctor containing what looks like a toy Cyberman, labelled as a Russian doll. The TARDIS tracks the Cyber-Masters to the Cyber-planet in 1916, and finds the Master's TARDIS disguised as a police box. Kate calls in the Doctor; the Doctor and Yaz arrive at UNIT HQ and meet Tegan and Ace. The Doctor seems socially awkward meeting them, and somehow gives them both a static electric shock (which also happens later with Yaz). All the missing paintings have been altered to feature the Master as Rasputin, and the Master has sent a message inviting them to a location to attend his "keynote address" on seismology. When our heroes arrive, they find the missing seismologists all dead, shrunk by the Master's tissue compression eliminator.

Taken into custody and imprisoned in the UNIT building, the Master taunts Kate, Tegan and Ace. Following coordinates sent by a rogue Dalek, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to the inside of a Bolivian volcano. The Daleks capture her. In UNIT HQ, the Russian Doll Cyberman - which turns out to have been sent to Tegan by the Master - grows to full size and splits open, then troops of Cybermen emerge led by Ashad (a clone copy made by the Master before he killed the original). Kate is taken to be Cyber-converted, Tegan stays in the building to help Kate, and Ace escapes by parachuting from the roof. Vinder, on a mission to rescue the wibbly energy creature (remember that, from the beginning?) crashes onto the Cyber-planet. Yaz tracks the Doctor down in the TARDIS; she's been taken to Russia in 1916. After doing some disco dancing, the Master uses a process called forced regeneration to make the Doctor regenerate into a copy of him. Yaz arrives, and the Doctor-Master coerces her into joining him in the TARDIS. He goes off causing mischief, trying to ruin the Doctor's reputation. The Doctor (in her Jodie Whittaker persona) appears in a realm of consciousness and meets manifestations of old versions of herself - the Guardians of the Edge - who tell her there's a way she can reverse what the Master's done. Yaz manages to escape in the TARDIS, stranding the Doctor-Master on an asteroid somewhere in space. A holographic AI version of her Doctor appears before Yaz, implanted by the real Doctor earlier who passed it off as static electricity. With that guidance, Yaz is able to pick up Vinder and Ace. The latter is dropped off at the volcano to stop the Daleks, the former hides in the TARDIS as Yaz goes back to collect the Doctor-Master.

Holo-AI Doctors (looking like the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy versions) appear to Tegan and Ace too. Ace meets Graham, who's also investigating the volcano. The Daleks set the volcanoes all over the world to erupt. With help from Vinder and the holo-AI Doctor, now looking like the Fugitive Doctor that was hiding out in Gloucester, Yaz manages to reverse the forced regeneration process. Tegan rescues Kate and they both escape UNIT HQ, just before it is blown up (Tegan having sabotaged the Cybermen's equipment with help from her holo-AI Doctor). Ace and Graham set Nitro-9 charges in the volcano. The TARDIS comes and picks everyone up, and the Daleks are all blown up. With the extended fam's help, the Doctor stops the eruptions by Cyber-converting the lava, turning it into steel. She sends Vinder back home, and then asks the wibbly energy creature (it's still hanging around) to destroy the Cyber-planet. The dying Master is still on the planet, and uses the creature's power to zap the Doctor, fatally wounding her. Yaz returns everyone else home, and has one last moment with the Doctor, the two of them sitting on the TARDIS roof eating ice cream while it floats in orbit around planet Earth. The Doctor tells Yaz she has to do the next bit alone. After being dropped off, Yaz immediately bumps into Graham and Dan - they are on their way to a support group that Graham has set up for friends of the Doctor on Earth. The meeting includes Kate, Tegan and Ace as well as some other old friends Ian, Mel and Jo. The Doctor regenerates atop Durdle Door, regaining a familiar set of teeth...

Context:

In the 1980s, episodes that were longer than Doctor Who's usual 25 minute duration (The Five Doctors feature 20th anniversary length special, for example) were sometimes chopped up for repeat or overseas showings, with new credit sequences shoved in to make them fit the majority pattern. I'd had a passing thought when I was writing the Deeper Thoughts section of The Krotons blog post in 2023 about whether any fan had created such edits of new series shows. Remembering this, I decided to experiment with my watching of The Power of the Doctor. I watched it, on my own from the BBC iplayer, over four nights in April 2024, stopping at the end of each approximately 22-minute long quarter. Like those stories in the 1980s, the arbitrary cliffhangers were a little more pedestrian than usual, but none were as bad as the ones in The Five Doctors (the Master walks down a short staircase - woo!). My Power of the Doctor episode one ended with the Doctor seeing the defaced paintings and declaring "That's not Rasputin, that's the Master", the second ended just after the forced regeneration, with the Doctor now in the Master's form at the door of the TARDIS threatening Yaz; episode three ended with the eruption of the volcanoes around the world. That's not too bad, I don't think; each section fell into an episodic structure in line with those older Doctor Who stories: episode one is about the set up of the mystery, ending with the Doctor's discovery of the main adversary; episode two sees the plan develop and ends at the Doctor's lowest point; episode three throws in the curveball of the Guardians of the Edge; episode four wraps it all up.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. As well as finishing 24 of the 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing), I have also watched almost all of the specials that came in between seasons for anniversaries, festive periods, etc. With The Power of the Doctor now covered, there is only one special left to blog (The Giggle from 2023), though there will be at least one more Christmas special shown in 2024, and - one hopes - another annually thereafter.

First Time Round:

There was a period of only approximately 18 months between my writing this blog post and originally watching The Power of the Doctor, but it seemed like a lot longer looking back. I outlined my initial reactions to the story in the Deeper Thoughts section of the contemporaneous blog post for Orphan 55, which I published two days after the Jodie Whittaker finale was first shown. It was a time of upheaval in the UK; we had in short order got ourselves a new monarch and a new Prime Minister (I'll touch a bit more on this in the Deeper Thoughts section below). The change of Doctor happening at the same time felt like it might destabilise us completely, but thankfully things have been a bit more static and calm for old Albion since then under the firm and strong leadership of David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa.

Reaction:

Brace yourselves, but - as outlined in this story - the power of the Doctor is the friends she made along the way. Yaz has a line of dialogue that pretty much says this verbatim, and the action involves a lot of people coming together to save the day who all have in common that their lives have been touched by the Doctor. It then has a resolution scene at the end bringing even more of the Doctor's old friends together to look after each other, and most importantly to look after the latest in the long line of ex-companions Yaz, adjusting to her post-TARDIS life. The friends she made along the way - it's so hackneyed that its gone beyond cliche and into meme, but the story doesn't for a moment let the commitment to this theme slip. Even the antagonist is driven by the misguided desire that he wants to become the Doctor and travel the universe with a companion; like everything in the story, this is nicely aligned with the history of the series. There's always been something of the inferiority complex about the Master, living in the Doctor's shadow. The plan also involving mucking about with Daleks, Cybermen, volcanoes and paintings is less resonant to this theme of course, but is still in keeping with The Power of the Doctor's hectic style in trying to cram in as many returning characters and elements as possible. In total, and including the regenerated fourteenth Doctor with a new old face, there are seven returning Doctors. No less than six companions return, seven if you count Dan who leaves at the start of the story but returns at the end (three are cameos including one of the very first stars of the show from 1963, William Russell as Ian Chesterton).

There's two recurring guest characters (Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Vinder) and the top three on the Doctor Who villainy chart are represented, including the latest incarnation of the Master and a recent recurring Cyberman villain, Ashad. It has clearly been written with an understanding of its place in the canon of multi-Doctor stories; weaving in all those Doctors, companions and foes almost out-Five Doctors The Five Doctors; the missing paintings and involvement of UNIT is reminiscent of The Day of the Doctor. The story was an extra commission from the BBC to form part of the Corporation's centenary celebrations (which aside from this special Doctor Who story were rather muted in the end), so perhaps it was irresistible to include a lot of the programme's history (it having endured for nearly 60 of the Beeb's 100 years by then). It's not just a multi-Doctor celebration story, though, it is the final send off for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor - was there not felt to be a risk that her swansong would be overshadowed by all these returning elements? I doubt writer and executive producer Chris Chibnall was planning to have Whittaker regenerate at the end of a Sea Devils story; Legend of the Sea Devils looks to be the story that had been hastily added to the schedule at the last minute to bump up the numbers. As far as I can see, though, it has never been confirmed exactly how much of Power's planning and scripting had been done before the request came in to provide a centenary special.

My guess is that nothing was forced upon him, and Chibnall always planned such a story to write out his Doctor; it's a bold move, and it pays off. The character of the thirteenth Doctor has always been one that surrounds herself with a large 'fam', so the gang show approach does not jar. Whittaker doesn't suffer too much from a lack of screentime, and her presence - and her absence - dominates. It's a story of what it's like to be with, or be without, the Doctor. Making it seem effortless, Whittaker embodies the Doctor in the abstract and the specific, and everything else in the story is in orbit around her. Considering all the disparate elements to be combined in the final narrative, the plotting hangs together well. The only bit I'm still scratching my head over is forced regeneration; I understand it conceptually, but the visual of it doesn't align with the intention of the character. If the Master wants to be the Doctor, shouldn't he force a regeneration on himself, making him become her, not the other way round? This would have given Whittaker a chance to do something different, playing the evil villain for a part of the running time, and would have upped the ante when the Master is trying to destroy the Doctor's reputation: anything evil he did would have been done by someone who looks like our Doctor. If he wants to travel the universe looking like Sacha Dhawan accompanied by Yaz, then he could just kill the Doctor and steal her TARDIS, after all. Of course, this story is the swansong of Sacha Dhawan's Master too, and depriving viewers of even a second of his colossal, fantastic, unhinged performance might seem like sacrilege. He'd still be indelibly stamped onto the history of Doctor Who just for the Boney M scene, mind: the Master throwing shapes and Cossack dance moves to the 1978 Euro-Disco hit Rasputin, while a Dalek and a Cyberman look on askance.

There's also the wonderful conceit of the Master using famous paintings as a calling card - the visual of a Rasputin-disguised Master in The Scream or Girl with a Pearl Earring is a joy to behold. Rasputin's historical reputation (mesmeric powers, can't be killed) makes him an obvious choice as a Master alias; what's startling and perhaps genius about this is that there is no need for him to be disguised at all (in fact it would make much more sense for all the action to happen in the present day rather than split between 1916 and 2022) - the Master presumably just thought it would be funny. Again, this is in keeping with the character's actions in the history of the show. Apart from the Master's unnecessary disguises, the other two major returns from 1980s Who are Tegan and Ace. For everyone like me, who first got into the show when Peter Davison became the Doctor, this is every bit as exciting and important as Sarah Jane Smith coming back in School Reunion, only double. The script nails the older versions of their characters perfectly. Any fan would have to have a heart of petrified steel lava not to get a bit emotional seeing both reunited with holographic versions of their Doctors. The Guardians of the Edge sequence allows some more fun cameos - David Bradley, Colin Baker, Paul McGann! Fans of a more recent vintage would be well served too; Vinder and Ashad come back, having appeared in recent seasons. Then Graham pops up. Seeing people from different eras working together is pure, distilled Five Doctors juice ("I'm Ace", "Yes, you are" says Graham). Just when you think the story might be cameo-ed out, there's Jo Martin being the Doctor one last time too. Once the story's almost over, you get another few for good luck: Katy Manning as Jo Jones, Bonnie Langford as Mel, and - I'm getting a bit emotional again - William Russell as Ian Chesterton.

With David Tennant appearing at the end, that's at least one returning face from every decade of Doctor Who's existence; if you aren't charitable enough to give it anything else, that's an almighty triumph of logistics at least. The story seems to me to be more of a piece with the three specials in 2023 than the ones preceding it in 2022. Taken together, the four stories from The Power of the Doctor to The Giggle are the ultimate celebration of the show's history and set-up for its future. Even small details like the blowing up of UNIT HQ ("I'd only just signed the lease") fit nicely, allowing Kate-Lethbridge Stewart to move into Tony Stark's Avengers Tower the following year. Also distancing The Power of the Doctor from the rest of 2022 is that there's nothing in there about Yaz's feelings for the Doctor, which had been highlighted in both of the previous two specials. I can just about buy that they've both made their peace with things after the conversation in Legend of the Sea Devils, but I still think that it should have been Yaz's decision to part from the Doctor before she changes into someone new, rather than the Doctor essentially telling her to sling her hook. The emotional arc of the piece is restored by the 'companion's anonymous' scenes at the end, though: we know Yaz's is going to be looked after. Finally, there's the most beautiful regeneration sequence in the history of the show thus far: the Doctor atop Durdle Door with energy shooting far, far out in every direction. Then, we're off again, zooming into a bright, shiny future...

Connectivity:

Despite their broadcasts being separated by 35 years both The Power of the Doctor and Paradise Towers feature the Doctor played by Sylvester McCoy, and Mel played by Bonnie Langford. Echoing the action in the 1980s story, the UNIT building escape in the 21st century story involves heroic characters travelling to the highest floor of a skyscraper building in order to escape metallic killers (these adversaries move a bit faster, though).

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Yorkshire women with blonde bobs leave their job in the same week: Fit the Second. (Note: for Fit the First, of which this is the late-following sequel, see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Orphan 55 post from October 2022  - link in the First Time Round section above.)

The UK's politics was so turbulent in 2022 that the wikipedia entry that comes up when one searches on 'UK government crisis October 2022' has a link at the top that says - I kid you not - "This article is about the crisis that ended Liz Truss's premiership. For the crisis that ended Boris Johnson's premiership, see July 2022 United Kingdom government crisis", emphasis mine. In the UK, it was the year of three prime ministers, and - with Whittaker turning to Tennant, and it being common knowledge that Gatwa was waiting in the wings - the year of three Doctors too. After Johnson and Truss came Rishi Sunak; it's not that Sunak was exactly competent, but just by not being a clown car on fire he managed to usher in a period of relative stability. Was that local political turbulence followed by relative calm echoed somehow in the world of Doctor Who at the time? A lot of fans are very critical of the run for which showrunner Chris Chibnall was responsible, the stories from 2018 up to 2022 and The Power of the Doctor. Putting aside any subjective judgements about the quality of the stories (and there were times in those years reading fan discussions on the internet that I hoped like hell that people would put aside their subjective judgements about the quality of the stories) the production of the show did face more challenges than at any other time in its history. For a start, the world outside the show, that at some level needed to be reflected in the stories - Doctor Who always counterpointing its far-out space action with the recognisable and the grounded - was changing very rapidly.

This can clearly be seen in the story Revolution of the Daleks, a festive special shown on the 1st January 2021. The story was made as part of the series that aired a year earlier, with filming happening in the autumn of 2019, and the script was presumably written a while before that. The character of politician Jo Patterson, played by Harriet Walter, is ruthlessly fixated on public order and then becomes prime minister, so has too many things in common with Theresa May to be coincidental. May, though, had been out of power for nearly 18 months by the time Revolution of the Daleks got to an audience. As we saw above, May was just one of three prime ministers during Chibnall's time (with only a hair's breadth from it being four), so it was hard for scripting to keep up with real life; perhaps connected to some of that governmental instability was the biggest impact to the making of the show in this period, the Covid-19 virus. No matter what else was depicted in the story, it couldn't have predicted lockdowns, mask-wearing, vaccines and Joe Wicks TV workouts. It feels a bit unfair of fate that Chibnall didn't get to make more Doctor Who when the restrictions were eased, but he left at a time of his own choosing, and went out with a bang with The Power of the Doctor. It's a story in which you'd be hard pressed to discern any compromises indicative of it having been made in the aftermath of a pandemic. That he made any Doctor Who at all after Revolution of the Daleks, let alone such bold and brash and visually impressive fare as Flux and the 2022 specials, is a source of wonder to me. Once he'd left and Russell T Davies had taken up the showrunner job again, though, the money really started to flow and even greater things became possible.

Imagine if Chibnall were to comment publicly during Davies's period in charge, talking loudly and constantly about how he could do better? He'd never do such a crass thing, of course, and probably never want to do it. The world of television production seems to be more polite and honourable than the world of politics, because no such restraint exists there. In April 2024, Liz Truss - one of those quick-changing 2022 prime ministers and architect of one of the aforementioned 2022 crises - published a book with her plan to "Save the West", and was on the interview circuit expounding on said plan. Liz Truss was prime minister for 50 days. For a chunk of that short time, party political activity was suspended because of the funeral of the monarch, otherwise it might have been even shorter. She crashed financial markets and lost control of her own MPs in the space of a very few weeks, and her tenure ended in utter failure. With that track record, for her to have the sheer gall to lecture anyone on how to run anything is another source of wonder to me. I'm not equating her dismal record in any way with Chibnall's; whatever you think of the quality of his work, though, you know and I know that he's never going to publish a book on his plan to save Doctor Who, and will only ever say positive things about his successor. I sense a part of online Doctor Who fandom wants the Truss approach, however; and that, base and lowest common denominator as it is, she's scratching a similar itch in politics fans on a certain stripe.

If you like one showrunner more than another, it can get pretty tribal in the rarefied atmosphere of social media sites. When Steven Moffat took over from Davies, I read a lot of posts by people who imagined that Moffat was sneaking in references in his stories that took pot shots at the previous house style. They were convinced that he was in some way critical of Davies, even though there was no evidence of this in any of his public pronouncements. Moffat has hopefully, finally, put that to bed by agreeing to come back as a hired hand (he's writing the third story in Davies's first Ncuti Gatwa season, Boom). For anyone that might be imagining that Davies has any issues with his immediate predecessor, I'd direct you to the comments he makes in Doctor Who Magazine issue 603 about the controversial Timeless Child plotline that Chibnall introduced to Who and which Davies is developing further in Gatwa's episodes: "That's a gift handed to me by my predecessor... it's an honour to take it on from him" and "There's so much story in it!". Maybe we could all take a lesson from this interconnected and respectful approach when it comes to Doctor Who and to politics. Liz Truss knows that she's unlikely ever to hold high office again, but she will have seen from certain UK populists of recent times, who have made a living of sniping from the sidelines while not having the responsibility of any direct power, that this doesn't mean she can't have influence. It is telling that a lot of the interviews she gave in April 2024 were aimed at the hyper-partisan US; without extreme polar opposite tribes, who possibly don't represent the nuanced reality that sits between the poles, many negative things - including online Doctor Who flame wars and Truss's book - might not need to exist.

In Summary:

The Power of the Doctor was inside of us all along!