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).