the m0vie blog

“Why have I never done that before?”

The Devil’s Chord is, to put it frankly, a mess.

It is an episode that is trying to do so many things. It is an attempt at a celebrity historical featuring the Beatles. It is a journey into the history of Doctor Who. It is an attempt to build up lore to play into the larger arc of the season around it. It is an attempt to argue for the very idea of art as something with intrinsic value at a time when writer Russell T. Davies is openly lamenting the erosion of the BBC. It is an effort to introduce a new memorable villain, played by a notable guest star. It is an attempt of that classic trope, the musical episode.

There is a sense that all of this is too much. The Devil’s Chord is bursting with ideas. Like Wild Blue Yonder, it feels like an episode written by a showrunner who has had more than a decade to kick around new ideas for Doctor Who and is bristling to get them into the show. While Wild Blue Yonder was able to make those ideas cohere into a single narrative, The Devil’s Chord fractures and breaks under the sompeting impulses driving it.

Unfortunately, The Devil’s Chord strikes a bum note.

This Venom sequel is not what I expected.

As with Space Babies, there is a sense that The Devil’s Chord exists at a crossroads between Russell T. Davies’ past approach to Doctor Who and his understanding of the show as an evolving beast. To an older viewer, The Devil’s Chord makes the most sense as the classic celebrity historical. While there were examples of the form in classic Doctor Who, Davies embraced the genre with incredible enthusiasm. These were big, populist stories – they tended to premiere early in a given season. The basic structure of the episode finds the Doctor and companion thrown into a fun adventure with a famous historical figure.

In The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor teams up with Charles Dickens. In Tooth and Claw, the Doctor meets Queen Victoria. In The Shakespeare Code, the Doctor hangs around with William Shakespeare. The Unicorn and the Wasp was a rare mid-season example, in which the Doctor and Donna got to spend time with Agatha Christie. These stories were big and broad. They were accessible demonstrations of how Doctor Who might work. This is a show about time travel, so why wouldn’t the Doctor travel back and get to meet famous people? It’s such a straightforward hook into the show.

Of course, the series has gone back and forth on the concept in the years since Davies’ departure. Steven Moffat seemed to gently mock the concept, with the Eleventh Doctor meeting Churchill and the Daleks in Victory of the Daleks. Allowing for the earnestness of Vincent and the Doctor, many of Moffat’s later celebrity historicals tended to spoof the genre. The Eleventh Doctor seemed disappointed to meet Nixon in The Impossible Astronaut. The Twelfth Doctor hung around with imaginary figures like Robin Hood in Robot of Sherwood and Santa Claus in Last Christmas.

In contrast, Chibnall embraced the earnestness of the celebrity historical, turning the show into solemn veneration of these guest stars, showcasing Rosa Parks in Rosa, Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan in Spyfall, Part II and Nikolai Tesla in Nikolai Tesla’s Night of Terror. However, these stories tended to avoid the sense of fun and adventure that defined Davies’ earlier examples of the genre. In many cases, Chibnall seemed to aspire towards educational content.

“More like Abbey Side Road, am I right?”

The Devil’s Chord pushes back on that a bit. It is a consciously ahistorical celebrity historical, set in an alternate past where music has been destroyed. It is a way to feature the Beatles without having to fork out the massive amounts of money that would be necessary to actually feature any music from the Beatles. Of course, there’s a broader question about what the point of making an episode featuring the Beatles but not their music would be, evoking the spectre of Stardust, the infamous David Bowie biopic without any David Bowie songs.

To be fair, the Beatles are tied up in Doctor Who lore. They are icons of sixties British pop culture, which makes them a logical fit for Doctor Who. They even appeared (after a fashion) in The Chase, a classic (if gonzo) serial. It isn’t a bad idea to have the Doctor cross paths with the Beatles, particularly in the context of the season following the sixtieth anniversary. This is perhaps the smartest thing about The Devil’s Chord, which uses the Beatles as a window into exploring the show’s own history in a way that avoids feeling self-congratulatory.

That said, there is a sense that if The Devil’s Chord is going to feature the Beatles, then it needs to feature the Beatles. There’s probably a decent version of this episode that treats the Beatles as an absent centre and one that foregrounds them, but the problem is that The Devil’s Chord tries to split the difference. It features the Beatles, but it doesn’t feature them too heavily. So the Beatles appear at the start of the episode, but Paul McCartney and John Lennon are the only members to get any focus. Then they drift out of the narrative for forty minutes, before conveniently wanding back in at the climax to save the day.

This is not a satisfying way to structure the story. It makes the Beatles so central to the narrative that they can’t be ignored, while also completely removing any agency or characterisation. Paul McCartney and John Lennon are positioned as emotional levers on which the episode is supposed to turn, but they are much less central to the story than Charles Dickens was to The Unquiet Dead or that Shakespeare was to The Shakespeare Code. Indeed, Churchill is a much more central figure to The Wedding of River Song than the Beatles are to The Devil’s Chord. Given how hard the episode leans on them, this is a problem.

Instrument of destruction.

Of course, the reason that the episode has so little space for the Beatles is because it’s doing so much else. The most successful facet of the episode is the internal nostalgia, the sense in which this is an episode about Doctor Who. After all, like Remembrance of the Daleks, this is an episode that takes the Doctor back to London in 1963. The script isn’t exactly subtle about this. From the roof of the recording studio, the Doctor points the way to Totter’s Lane, explaining to Ruby that his journey really began there.

As with Space Babies, it’s odd to see Davies leaning so heavily and so explicitly on the show’s history and continuity, particularly as part of a premiere aimed at new audiences. After all, this season has been sold as “season one“, a logical jumping-on point. It’s weird to hear Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor talking more bluntly about the events of An Unearthly Child than any of his recent predecessors. Indeed, the revival has been teasing references to Susan for quite some time, in episodes like The Pilot, but it’s strange to hear the Doctor just come out and explicitly say her name.

There is a sense in which The Devil’s Chord is, none-too-subtly, doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of lore. In this sense, the presence of the Beatles feels like a distraction, a way to guide the audience’s attention away from the story’s actual form and purpose. The Beatles are so incidental to The Devil’s Chord that they feel like an excuse to bring the Doctor back to London in 1963 so that he can acknowledge the beginning of the show’s classic run. It’s clever, but it’s also frustrating.

The Devil’s Chord also serves the function of tying the broadcast of An Unearthly Child in 1963 to the invention of television at the start of The Giggle. The episode’s teaser finds the Maestro escaping from a piano when a sequence of notes unlocks their prison in 1925. This is the same year as the invention of television, and the Toymaker’s corruption of that young medium into a vehicle for contagious insanity. Of course, the Maestro has a more direct connection to the Toymaker, but it’s a deft bit of continuity work that threads The Giggle to An Unearthly Child.

A-Paul-ing behaviour.

Once again, there are echoes of Davies’ earlier work on the franchise. In Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, Davies threaded the threat of the Trickster and his “brigade.” They threatened to corrupt and erode reality itself. That narrative thread never really went anywhere, and so it’s interesting to wonder whether the focus on the Toymaker and his associates is perhaps Davies revisiting the concept, pitting the Doctor against a set of malevolent, reality-bending tricksters.

There is a clear sense that The Devil’s Chord is an “important” episode in the still-developing arc of the larger season. Even just thematically, it is very notable that the Maestro is revealed to be the child of the Toymaker, and that their own offspring, Henry Arbinger, is seen skulking around at the climax of the episode. Like The Church on Ruby Road and Space Babies, this is effectvely another story about abandoned children and the strange threads of cosmic reality that bond them all together.

As such, it’s interesting that the Doctor should mention Susan by name. The character has haunted Doctor Who since the beginning. Everything the show has revealed about the Doctor in the decades since its creation generates tension with the very idea of Susan, to the point that the expanded universe had to create “the looms” to account for her. The Doctor left Susan at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth because Carol Ann Ford wanted to leave the show, but Susan remains an enigma. She’s a question that it is very hard to answer within the context of what Doctor Who became.

She also makes sense in the context of a season about abandoned children. Davies has done a good job salvaging “the Timeless Child” into a narrative about a child given up for adoption, parallelling the Doctor and Ruby. However, this reframing of the Doctor’s past also evokes what happened to Susan. The Doctor abandoned her, in much the same way that they were themselves abandoned. It’s interesting to wonder whether Davies might be building to Susan’s return to tie into “the Timeless Child”, uniting the show’s past and present. Is it possible, for example, that Ruby is the descendent of Susan somehow?

“Up on the roof…”

It’s a solid thematic hook, and there’s a sense that The Devil’s Chord is less a self-contained episode than it is something of a clearing house for the larger season around it. Indeed, the episode’s core theme ultimately feels like a reframing of the central concept of The Giggle: the relationship between humanity and mass media. In particular, the power that mass media holds over human beings. In The Giggle, television corrupted and eroded social bonds. In The Devil’s Chord, it is suggested that music is what holds people together.

After all, the Maestro’s consumption of music leads to an apocalypse straight out of Pyramids of Mars. Ruby struggles to understand how the end of music as an artform could lead to nuclear winter. “I think without music, the human race goes sour,” the Doctor explains. “Without any way of expressing a broken heart, they go to war without realizing why.” It’s a very romantic notion about the role and the purpose of art, serving as a counterpoint to the corrosive power of television in The Giggle.

Tellingly, the Maestro uses the instruments the way that the Doctor uses the TARDIS. When they emerge from a piano, Ruby is confused. “How can they be inside the piano?” Ruby demands. “The piano wouldn’t work!” She’s correct from a logical perspective. There’s only one way that the Maestro could be inside the piano while other people are able to play it. The musical instrument has to be bigger on the inside. Indeed, the horror of the climax, as the Doctor is locked in a drum and Ruby in a double bass, is that they aren’t bigger on the inside.

Of course, this is ultimately an argument for Doctor Who as much as it’s an argument for music. Davies is making a big Moffat-esque argument for the power of stories and art to transform and to liberate. The characters in The Devil’s Chord all seem aware of the nature of their reality, locked in a story just as much as the “bogeyman” in Space Babies. The Maestro looks into the camera as they play the show’s themesong. Ruby listens to it on the jukebox. Both the Maestro and the Doctor wink at the audience. The Doctor is caught off-guard by the Maestro because he “thought that [music] was non-diagetic.”

To be fair, this Maestro is only marginally less concerned with the life and times of Leonard Bernstein.

This is central to a lot of Davies’ work in recent years. Davies has advocated for the importance of these sorts of stories. Indeed, Davies was in part inspired to return to Doctor Who by his work during the pandemic, in which the show provided a very real help to fans – particularly younger fans – struggling with the pressures of lockdown. The Devil’s Chord is ostensibly about the importance of music, but it is also about the importance of stories in general.

The Devil’s Chord imagines the end of music. In this grim alternate present, the Beatles are recording in their studio as one last farewell to the artform. This reflects the way that Davies has talked about the BBC, and his certainty that the service is going to be privatized, and what that will mean for the state of the creative arts in the United Kingdom. Indeed, Davies has all but explicitly stated that his primary motivation in signing a distribution deal with Disney+ was to protect Doctor Who from that inevitability. That fear seems very present in The Devil’s Chord.

Indeed, the episode opens with a discussion of Beethoven’s composition of Moonlight Sonata, which was inspired by his own impending deafness. It was the work of an artist very aware that their own faculties were fading and that their time was limited. “All that rage and fury,” Timothy Drake muses of the composition. “Out of which, something beautiful.” In some ways, this feels like Davies’ own meditation on art, with much of Davies’ best work – from Years and Years to It’s a Sin – motivated by his own anger and frustration.

This is already a lot to pile into an episode. As with Space Babies, there’s a sense watching The Devil’s Chord that Davies is trying to cover as much ground as he would in a thirteen-episode season, but with far less narrative real estate. As a result, the individual elements of the script bristle against one another, with the show seeming to shift focus from one scene to the next. Is The Devil’s Chord an episode about the Beatles? Is it about Doctor Who? Is it about the BBC? Is it about setting up the season finale? It seems like The Devil’s Chord is about all of this, and more.

Off-key.

The problem is compounded by Davies’ decision to make The Devil’s Chord a musical episode. Well, sort of. The Devil’s Chord is an episode about music, and it features several extended musical sequences. There is a credited cameo from Murray Gold. It culminates in an elaborate musical number about how “there’s always a twist at the end.” However, the musical beat always feel like an afterthought. The character’s play a few chords, hum a few bars and sing a few lines, but the show never truly embraces the idea of a show-stopping musical, one of the rare genres that Doctor Who has yet to fully explore.

Indeed, there’s a sense that The Devil’s Chord is no more or less musical than a random episode of the Capaldi era, in which the character would casually mess around with his electric guitar, occasional even playing the show’s theme song. The Devil’s Chord can’t commit to the bit. The musical numbers aren’t big enough or memorable enough. The choreography isn’t impressive enough. Indeed, even the sequence at the end of the show, with the Doctor and Ruby playing the zebra crossing like the giant piano from Big, feels curiously out of synch and out of time.

It’s easy to understand why this is. Musical episodes are tough. They require big budgets, extensive casts, lots of rehearsal time and essentially a short album of original music. That’s hard to do on productions that are properly resourced and which have plenty of pre-production time. It seems next-to-impossible with the demands that exist on Doctor Who. Indeed, it seems like the next episode, Steven Moffat’s Boom, might be a smaller episode in a concentrated location with a tight cast to allow more time and money to be allocated to The Devil’s Chord.

The Devil’s Chord is an episode that is doing so many different things, all of which need to be executed flawlessly and in harmony. Unfortunately, none of the elements work on their own and few of them manage to cohere. The Devil’s Chord is a failure, albeit a noble one. After five years of watching Doctor Who aim for mediocrity and failing, it is at least refreshing to watch a big swing that doesn’t connect.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: abbey road, doctor who, music, musical, russell t. davies, The Beatles, the devil's chord, the giggle, the maestro, the toymaker |