There are a few off-key moments, but Jinkx Monsoon strikes all the right notes as they play The Devil’s Chord
Hoo-boy, where to begin? Almost strategically designed to be divisive, THE DEVIL’S CHORD sees Davies at his most provocative and most undisciplined. In an episode which punches not just through the fabric of space and time but through the fourth wall too, you can almost here him cackling away at the keyboard as word after word brings this madcap musical mash-up to life.
Of course, DOCTOR WHO is no stranger to timey-wimey anomalies but THE DEVIL’S CHORD may be the first episode to ever feel a bit of a temporal anomaly in its own right. There’s something about the episode that doesn’t quite hit the right notes. Or, to quote Eric Morecambe, it hits all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order – and that’s the thing. THE DEVIL’S CHORD feels like it should come later in the season. It invokes the concept of a harbinger and the episode’s resolution acts as another shout out to “He Who Waits”, advising that his arrival is not just impending, but imminent. There’s also the fact that as the episode begins, The Doctor checks in with Ruby’s sense of what time it is for her, letting us know that six months have passed for her, and for Earth while simultaneously suggesting that she’s not been a constant companion in the TARDIS. It’s a little jarring to be a mere two episodes into the season and already have a convenient Big Finish gap.
When the Doctor offers Ruby the chance to go anywhere in space and time, Ruby chooses to go back to the sixties and watch The Beatles record their debut album. When they arrive, though, the music doesn’t live up to they hype. Of course, we the audience, know it’s because something happened back in 1925 when Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) began to drain music from the world.
Having hailed the return of imaginative storytelling, it’s something of a perplexing development to have Russell T Davies conducting a variation on one of his most recent themes. Out go the Spice Girls and in come The Beatles and Cilla Black but in nearly every other respect, we’re watching a near note-for-note reprise of THE GIGGLE. We have the instigating action back in the 1920s, with effects rippling forward in time as the Doctor and companion hurtle backwards in time to meet at Abbey Road studios in 1962. We have the scenery-chewing larger-than-life villain, a member of “The Pantheon” (make a note of that, it’s sure to be important later), and, in fact, none other than the daughter (implied to not be an only child) of The Toymaker himself, who is empowered and constrained by the rules of their nature. We’ve had the embodiment of games, now we’ve had the embodiment of music. Want to bet “He Who Waits” is the embodiment of stories? It sure would explain the repeated allusions to stories, storytelling and Maestro – and the Doctor’s – apparent awareness of the viewers themselves and the existence of the non-diegetic universe. Never mind “are we the baddies?”, perhaps the audience should be asking “are we the Gods of Ragnarök”? THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY may have pushed the very limits of the metatextual self-awareness during the classic run, but here THE DEVIL’S CHORD smashes right through it with a destructiveness the Doctor usually reserves for Ruby’s stepmum’s poor old flat. Maestro almost flirts with the camera, tipping us the wink and fingering the DOCTOR WHO theme tune into being as they sit at the piano. Music and sound have permeated the series so far, from the Goblin song in THE CHURCH ON RUBY ROAD through the Bogeyman’s ultrasonic atmos-fear to reach an apparent early crescendo here. But this clearly isn’t the end of the movement. Maestro’s harbinger is lurking at the end, suggesting a return in the not-too-distant future and let’s be honest, Jinkx Monsoon is too much fun to only use once.
There are certainly frequent moments of classic Whovian horror in THE DEVIL’S CHORD and Jinkx Monsoon’s performance invites the audience to enjoy the symphony of sci-fi shenanigans almost as much as they’re enjoying playing it but again the sloppiness which afflicted SPACE BABIES rears its head here, while the inclusion of The Beatles feels more than a little played out. YESTERDAY did this story better, and even then, it wasn’t all that.
Gatwa continues to imbue his Doctor with a fascinating mixture of cocky swagger and sudden self-doubt. He’s certainly quicker to fear than many of his previous incarnations and it’s a shame that in only his third episode he’s left to be saved by a deus ex nostalgia, with Paul McCartney and John Lennon somehow doing what a millennia-old Time Lord couldn’t do. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been much of a fan of The Beatles and have always been even less fond of the hagiography with which they’re treated in virtually all of fiction).
Ultimately, THE DEVIL’S CHORD suffers from the same problem as THE GIGGLE: it’s too preoccupied with looking ahead to what’s to come that it doesn’t really keep its eye on where it is now, or what it’s doing. It’s an odd thing to say in an episode astride which Jinx Monsoon stands like a colossus, but I wish we’d gotten more of Maestro. Not necessarily in the hammier, over the top schtick but in the quieter periods where the scale of their plans and ambitions – to “absorb the music of the spheres” itself – could have been explored in more depth.
As it is, THE DEVIL’S CHORD is a typically Davies-esque exercise in gleeful foreboding, which itself is yet another indicator this episode might originally have been meant to land later in the season, probably right before a two-part grand finale. This early in the season, though, and this early in The Doctor and Ruby’s relationship, it feels overweight and unbalanced. The Doctor’s identity is back in on the agenda, alongside Ruby’s identity. She’s clearly connected to “He Who Waits”. And “He Who Waits” would appear to be the big bad of The Pantheon, but there’s a growing body of evidence that The Doctor may be a member of The Pantheon himself. The living manifestation of time, perhaps? The Lord Temporal indeed. And why invoke Susan’s name so very prominently. Sure, we’re used to Nu-Who teasing us with references without intending to follow-up on. The Terrileptils, the perennial teasing of The Rani, but the mention of Susan feels different. Could Susan somehow be related to Ruby? Is she the woman at the church?
Which leads us to perhaps the most intriguing – and then downright absurd – moment of the episode. The Doctor himself winks to the camera (having also made a reference to the existence of the non-diegetic) and tells us (and Ruby) that there’s always a twist. And he’s right. Since Ncuti Gatwa has been the Doctor, there has always been a Twist: a Susan Twist to be precise, with the so-named actress popping up in each episode in a different, minor role. She’s certainly the series’ leitmotif but perhaps she’s the Pantheon’s embodiment of cameos? Time will tell. It always does.
