The Devil's Chord: Ranking - N/A (but #180ish)

 

"The Devil’s Chord” (15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 2, Dr 15 with Ruby, 11/5/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joe Collins and Phil Collinson**, director: Ben Chessell)

Ranking: #180ish reviewed  13/5/2024

 

'And now, it's number one, it's  intergalactic top of the pops featuring those intergalactic Beatle tribute albums available now to buy at His Monster's Voice: The Ice Warriors "Please Freeze Me', 'Wirrn The Beatles' 'A Hath Day's Night' All-Cast Recording: 'Help!' The Wire 'Rubber Sucked Out Your Soul' The Menoptera 'Evolver' The Daleks 'Sgt Pepperpot's Lonely Hearts Club Band' The Vespiform 'Let It Bee', Zarbi 'Ant-Thology' Because every planet has a Beatles'.

‘If you remember the sixties you weren’t there’ famously said Jefferson Airplane (and Hugo scifi nominee) Paul Kantner. Unless, of course, you were there in a parallel dimension created by a demonic overlord.

Every fan gets one story that feels so right for them that it feels like they wrote it. Just as the fact that the Dr Who fanbase is so wide that probably every story has a different fan that was made to represent it (and if you happen to be reading this as the fan that ‘Orphan 55’ was written for then I’m very sorry and hope you feel better soon). ‘The Devil’s Chord’ is mine. Most of you probably don’t know but I started off my writing career (such as it is) as a music writer: not only is there an Album Archives Guide to The Beatles out there to buy but also solo books dedicated to John, Paul and George (sorry Ringo!) I can almost guarantee that none of you are aware of my scifi-romance series ‘Kindred Spirits’, in which the universe has twelve inhabited planets full of aliens who have to learn to work together, in which music, as much as anything, is the glue that holds us together and stops us attacking each other (and if Russell T Davies wants to borrow my Intergalactic Peace Orchestra for the sequel, made up of all different types of aliens, he’s very welcome). Put them together and you get ‘The Devil’s Chord’, a story about a Godlike entity with special powers who takes over the Earth not by starting a war or even pushing humanity into starting a war but by taking away all music, so that instead of bonding over the minutiae of Beatle trivia we end up beating each other up in an endless war. Though for me the sudden-ness with which the Earth suddenly started breaking out in wars is directly related to the rise of Spotify and streaming (seriously: it used to be the ‘job’ of musicians to bring issues to our attention we hadn’t noticed but then streaming paid so little and record labels cared so little about investing in new talent that there just isn’t any niche music being made any more because it doesn’t pay – instead the only ‘breakout’ stars are those who appeal to the most common lowest denominators so they don’t dare upset anyone) I approve of Russell’s measure that things started going wrong when The Beatles split, when they were no longer around to hold us together. George Harrison once made the famous quote that the world used The Beatles as an excuse to go crazy, but as I said in the essay in my Beatles book much more than that I always saw the world as using The Beatles as an excuse to go food: a lot of our social changes in race, in gender, in class, in generational class warfare, in knowing that there was more purpose to life than being a cog in a relentless industrial wheel, all stems from The Beatles. Other people added to it sure, other people are adding to it even now, but the jump they created from the ‘past’ to what we think of as the ‘present’ is seismic and their influence is still being felt in ways beyond music. Of course Ruby’s first request to travel back in time is going back to see The Beatles. I’m amazed no companion made it before. I’m beginning to like her a lot after finding her the weakest link in ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ and even more so when it turns out that she’s the first truly musical companion we’ve ever had (the closest till then has been Ace with her 1980s ghetto-blaster and Susan grooving to John Smith and The Common Men in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ set just a few months after this.

Talking of which Russell T missed a trick here. Ruby requests going back to seeing the making their debut album ‘Please Please Me’ recorded in one great big long session on 20th February 1963 (bar the two singles that were already out). But Whovians have always been fonder of the second album ‘With The Beatles’, which was released the day before ‘An Unearthly Child’ went out (just imagine that as a weekend: Beatles album out on the Friday afternoon, news of JFK’s assassination filtering through that evening, Dr Who debuts the next night. I was worn out this year with a Dr Who double bill and Eurovision). The Beatles were huge scifi fans and watched the show when they could (you can hear the band discussing BBC2’s marvellous ‘sister’ series ‘Out Of The Unknown’ during the ‘Let It Be’ sessions, in a scene sadly cut from the ‘Get Back’ series also on Disney Plus). Famously there’s a clip of them performing ‘Ticket To Ride’ in the 1965 Who episode ‘The Chase’ on holovision, but the BBC tried really hard to get them to make an actual in-concert performance, dressed up to look like old balding men at their 50th anniversary gig at the Cavern in (gulp) 2012; they were all eager to do it had they had the time and not been busy making second feature film ‘Help!’ round an American tour at the time. Many episodes have name-checked The Beatles since too though, across the 1960s, the association between the two was more of a telepathic link of reflecting society: just look at how ‘The War Machines’ is the last Who story to go out before the release of ‘Revolver’ (in which swinging London is hip yet led by machines that point towards a darker underbelly in the nation’s capital), how ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ episode two aired a day after the release of ‘Sgt Peppers’ (both are obsessed with Victoriana and start off light before a gloomy second half that concludes with a ‘final end’) and how ‘Abbey Road’ was a bittersweet goodbye that looked forward and back and ended with a plea for peace and equal give and take mere weeks after ‘The War Games’ did the same (though, admittedly, Patrick Troughton doesn’t turn up thirty seconds after being put on trial by the timelords to sing ‘Her Majesty’. Worse luck). It’s even more than though: both The Beatles and Dr Who are dedicated to making the world a better kinder more tolerant place; it’s just that Who does the same for more than one world. Don’t think it’s a coincidence we got this episode as part of a double bill before Eurovision too: the plot about how music can be weaponised but how at its best can be a message for peace is perfect for the most politically troubled event in the singing contest’s 68 year history, with Ukraine there but not Russia, Israel there but not Palestine and the Dutch entry kicked out for (depending who you believe) protesting against Israel’s inclusion or beating up a photographer (or quite possibly both). Given Maestro’s links to The Toymaker from ‘The Giggle’ (although as her entrance is greeted with three knocks I was surprised she wasn’t The Master) she’s also what you might call a ‘Puppet On A String’ while the world goes ‘Boom Bang A Bang’ (before music rises like a phoenix).

Anyway, a universe without the Beatles is surely as unthinkable as a world without Dr Who, so Russell ups the ante straight away by having their life play out not quite right. There they are, the Doctor and Ruby in the actual Abbey Road (EMI, the record label that owns it, has been in dire financial difficulties for a while now and rents Abbey Road Studios out to anyone, which is also why we get a stupidly pricey Beatles box set every Christmas that costs at least £200 more than they should)  eager to see history happen when The Beatles open their mouths for that all-time classic ‘My Dog Fred’. Clearly something has gone very wrong and the look on team Tardis’ faces is priceless (it’s the same as the look I have on my face when people tell me The Spice Girls invented feminism, a mere thirty years after Janis Joplin and Grace Slick did it properly). Well, you think, maybe they’re just having an off day (or recording one of Ringo’s songs) but in the studio next door Cilla Black isn’t fairing much better. Even in the bigger, lusher studio no 1 reserved for orchestras it all sounds a mess (what a shame this story isn’t set a little later so Pink Floyd could have got in on the act too; I like to think The Hollies are in the car park preparing to record their first single). They say never meet your heroes: actually practically everyone whose ever met any of The Beatles for real has loved it (give or take Ringo’s grumpy no autographs phase) but that is true of parallel worlds: when the Doctor and Ruby talk to John and Paul (poor George and Ringo get short shrift this episode) they discover the awful truth: music took a wrong turning around the 1920s and it no longer exists, beyond a few tone-deaf ditties. That means no singing, no dancing, no love songs, no Eurovision, no…gulp…lengthy music review sites by anoraks like me! Paul (at least I think its meant to be Paul, the actor likenesses aren’t the best) talks about it being embarrassing making music, John (in his anachronistic granny glasses) talks about giving it up for a proper job. Both of them look puzzled though, as if they can sense the flow of chords in the back of their minds they can’t quite get a hold of. 

Around this idea is wrapped an intriguing plot I wish they’d made more of around tritones, a sequence of chords long said to be demonic and for a time banned by the Church from being performed (why? Well, our best guess is that it’s the sequence of chords for ‘amen’, as heard at the end of most religious hymns, in reverse – and as a lot of satanic rituals involved doing things in reverse that surely meant the same for music too). While, honestly, a lot of Murray Gold’s rather overwritten scores using tritons have made me feel otherwise there really is no such thing as a ‘devil’s chord’. And yet it’s a very Dr Who concept to work a story round that, to have a demonic presence hiding within those chords. Alas Russell doesn’t seem to know how to progress a story from there so the idea gets dropped as early as the opening tag scene, where Maestro suddenly pops up and harasses a music teacher named Timothy Drake whose teaching a pupil decoy named Henry Arbinger who turns out to be ‘harbinger’ for this being’s plans to rid the world of music. It feels as if he’s going to be a big character (and that this is going to be a plot along the lines of ‘Amadeus’ and Mozart’s jealous rival Sallieri) but in fact we never see him again. Nor, too, do we hear anything more about the concept of a ‘lost chord’ that, once heard, can unify us all in peace and true harmony (presumably that’s what Ncuti is trying when playing the Abbey Road piano but a few myths and legends from other planets and an explanation of bat it would do would sell that scene so much better). There is, as far as I know, no one connected to the real world of music named Timothy Drake and yet the name must mean something given that Russell quite deliberately has him saying his name when he could have just been ‘A N Other music person’; the closest I can find is a character in the Marvel comics (where it’s the real name of Batman’s sidekick Robin).

And surely ‘The Devil’s Chord’ is based more on a comic strip as anything else because, after such a strong beginning, the story goes greatly downhill. Like ‘Space Babies’ we’re in the broader, more cartoony end of Russell’s writing and what could have been a powerful character piece ends up being another bit of brash bold colour, with musical notes that end up actually appearing in the air and cosmic tuning forks, that never quite connects. There are good reasons for this which might be why we’ve never had a musical Who episode before now: music is hard to show visually and Dr Who is a very visual programme. The Beatles’ music is so expensive and so fiercely guarded by their litigation-loving company Apple that to use any of it would have cost the budget for half the series, even with Disney money (which is also why the sound of ‘Paperback Writer’ playing in a bar in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ had to be removed from the soundtrack CD and replaced with Dave Dee Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch).

There’s a moment in the story where everything goes silent for one very weird moment that’s quite a Dr Who type moment, but that aside there’s no easy way of demonstrating music bar having Ruby and a few others playing the piano (one of them, the old lady attacked by Maestro when playing the piano, is 92-year-old costume designer June Hudson, whose most notable in Who circles for designing Romana II’s costumes and who Russell heard had always wanted a cameo in a Dr Who episode so he wrote her one). Maestro is a big cartoony villain, like the Toymaker on steroids, and while Jinx Monsoon is a really good actress who plays the part exactly as it’s written i.e. unhinged, her presence over-topples this story considerably. A story about music and togetherness quickly becomes an exercise in shouting and over-acting and the scenes where the Doctor ends up trapped inside a kettle drum while Maestro cackles and taunts most unmusically is one of the hardest to stomach in a little past sixty years, joining the worst of ‘Space Babies’ in surely making most of the potential news fans (and quite a percentage of the old ones if my social media is anything to by) switch off in droves. The result is in danger of looking like another larger-than-life show that was big in 1963 and every bit as wacky but which leaves me cold, ‘The Avengers’ (shudder).  Had this story been a cartoon from the beginning, had it featured a cartoon band (The Archies? No not that literally – say ‘The Spice Girls’) it would have made sense. But the lurches in this story from major to minor are way too clumsy so that instead of being swept up in the music you’re left going ‘ooh, that was a bad note’. Let’s just hope Maestro is (de) composing somewhere so we don’t have to see her again…

And then to top it all we end with a singalong because ‘there’s always a twist’, even though the twist was so 1962 and no one would have been caught dead dancing it in 1963 (besides, what the Doctor, Ruby and extras are performing here is really more of a frug)in an awkward wink to the camera that suggests Russell T Davies has been watching too many Dennis Potter plays and High School Musical films for inspiration when he should have been watching ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Even for the sort of fan that thought the Goblin song from ‘A Church On Ruby Road’ worked, sort of, once, if you didn’t think about it too hard and only watched it drunk on Christmas Day, this moment is awful and rather spoils the whole episode. Indeed most of the last ten minutes, with Maestro over-acting and Ncuti trying to match her while fighting over the Abbey Road piano (Mrs Mills! All the Beatle references they could have included and they name-checked Mrs Mills!), is truly awful. Usually Russell’s really good at judging a mood and having a script hang together (albeit with a penchant for sudden endings that come out of nowhere) but he really drops the ball on this one.

Perhaps his hands were tied by not wanting to go near the parallel world Beatle projects that already exist: the execrable ‘Yesterday’ (where we’re seriously meant to think Ed Sheeran is on The Beatles’ level) and Big Finish’s superlative 5th Doctor story ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’, in which Susan’s rave favourites find fame instead of the fab four. There are many ways they still could have played it though: The Beatles could have been busking outside  Abbey Road while a failed bunch of wannabes (like, say, The Dave Clark Five) got big instead of them. Or a parallel world where Brian Epstein was from somewhere other than Liverpool. Or a worlds where the only songs allowed all had to be military marches and The Beatles tried to find a way to hint at peace underneath it all, culminating in  finale where John still got to sing ‘Give Peace A Chance’ to the masses during his honeymoon. Or they could have had the Doctor inadvertently saving John Lennon’s  mum Julia from being run over thus taking away his great drive to make a band and become rich and famous and heal the world. Or they could have had The Maharishi turning out to be infected by The Great Intelligence and make The Beatles perform evil music (‘The Abominable Snowmen’ is pretty close to that as a plot as it is). Or they could have done it like ‘The Rutles’, a parallel world band who are almost like the real thing but not quite. Doing it this way raises too many plotholes: why would any teenager back in 1963, when pocket money was rare and things were pricey, waste any of it on a wretched song about a dog? Why, without the influence of their beloved rock and roll acts from the 1950s, were The Beatles inspired to make music at all? How can Abbey Road afford to stay open – why isn’t it, say, an Abbey? And what the performers there play is still technically music, so shouldn’t Maestro be popping her head up during all their sessions?  
This episode still plays all the right notes though (if not necessarily all in the right order) and there are lots of individual scenes that I love. The Beatles’ song about a dog which, even if you half think is coming, is still very funny. Maestro’s chilling line that the sound of a nuclear winter ‘is the purest music of all’. The fact that Ruby plays the piano on a rooftop just before Maestro turns up (mirroring the peak of music when The Beatles quit just after their own performance atop their Saville Row headquarters) that causes her and the Doctor to leg it down to a basement to start all over again (a basement that looks a little like The Cavern Club’ where The Beatles started their career). The ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ style trip to an alternate future 2024 where Maestro wins and the world is at war, which was nearly as powerful when they did it in 1976 and such a neat trick that I’m amazed modern Who hadn’t tried it before. The fact that the world is saved (again) by Lennon and McCartney playing a chord suspiciously like the one from ‘A Day In The Life’. The Doctor’s sadness when talking about his first self being over there in Totter’s Lane somewhere with Susan, a grand-daughter he no longer knows is alive or dead and Ruby’s natural instinct to give him a great big hug, something none of his other companions thought to do – even Rose (although that in itself is questionable if Maestro successfully changed the timelines: the main reason Susan came to London in 1963 was to hang around swinging London and listen to pop music, though admittedly The Common Men do it for her much more than the fab four for some reason); presumably without music Susan no longer asks to come here, the Doctor doesn’t kidnap Ian and Barbara, the Doctor continues to be the crotchety old git he was when we first met him and the series looks very very different – having that plot strand in parallel, of the Doctor’s lives unravelling directly because of the removal of The Beatles from his personal timeline, would have made for a far better story that Maestro shouting at people and playing Peekaboo. They even go to the trouble of parking the same beetle car seen on the ‘Abbey Road’ album cover (which in ‘our’ universe seems unlikely to be there – it was tracked down years later to belong to a tourist who didn’t even know he was parked near Abbey Road who was most puzzled that it ended up on screen and who missed the hasty messages from the session photographer asking to have it towed away in case people read too much symbolisation into it being a ‘beetle’ car). 

Aside from The Beatle aspects The Doctor-Ruby partnership continues to shape up to be one of the better ones now that it’s got going and they spar off each other well. I like the new character touches they’ve given Ruby: after being the blandest and most generic companion of the lot in ‘Church’ (did Russell intend for Rose Noble to be the new companion then change his mind for some reason?) Ruby is being fleshed out nicely now, with her musical abilities, the lesbian friend Trudy she stuck up for and wrote a song about and the fact that she’s already looking out for the welfare of this mad stranger whose walked into her life, worrying about how he’s affected by stuff instead of just worrying how him being affected by stuff is going to affect her. Ncuti struggles a little more this episode compared to his last three, but then I defy any Doctor-actor to have been able to make the scenes of banishing Maestro by playing a tune on a piano look natural; he’s much better when talking about his tragic past than he was doing something similar in ‘Space Babies’ and his fright in meeting another plaything of The Toymaker after the ;last one ‘literally tore me in half’ is well played. We don’t often see the Doctor scared and this one, especially, seemed confident enough to face up to anything.

Mostly though this story will be remembered for The Beatles and as the biggest cultural icon of the 20th century, some of the few figures from the past that modern children will instantly recognise (well, the real Beatles anyway – the casting really could have been better) and even learn about in schools these days (why didn’t do that in the 1990s? That’s one time I’d have been guaranteed an ‘A’!) it’s inevitable they would turn up eventually. And even more inevitably now that Doctor Who is competing for space with the latest flux of Beatle documentaries and films on Disney Plus (I guess an actual Disney crossover is still a little too on-the-nose for now, although I’m looking forward to seeing Ncuti teaming up with Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear to defeat The Master and his/her hapless assistant Goofy one day, ‘Roger Rabbit’ style. The Rani is practically Cruella De Vil as it is. While if Christopher Eccleston never returns to the show Dumbo has the ears for it. In all seriousness if they ever do a Who crossover with Wall-E, my favourite of all the Pixar films – preferably with K9 along for the ride – I would be one very happy fan). While the story doesn’t use them as well as it might (this is the Lomax caricature cartoon Beatles TV series from 1964-66, not the ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ Beatles) it’s great that John and Paul save the world between them when even the Doctor can’t and the theme that music is humanity’s greatest strength and how awful and fragmented and angry and bitter and warlike the world would be without it, is the perfect plot for me. This might well end up being the hippiest Who story ever, in fact, just beating ‘The Space Museum’ (with a special mention for the ‘hippies turned establishment of ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ which in many ways is this story’s opposite) – even if, perhaps aptly, it rather looks as if all the people in charge of making it were on drugs. All that and filming inside the real Abbey Road too has made me a happy fan, for all my gripes. Although I can’t help but feel that there’s an even better story to come from the same source. The (Doctor) Who maybe? (‘Talkin’ ‘Bout My Regenerations!’) I mean, Pete Townshend wrote an entire (unfinished) concept album around the idea of a ‘lost chord’ that would unite us all: ‘Lifehouse’(which sort of became ‘Who’s Next’) has always struck me as the perfect Dr Who story, about the importance of community during terrible times. Or how about a sequel where The Rolling Stones come up with the triton themselves while recording ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ and unleashing a more monster-like villain out into the world? Or how about we just have The Spice Girls being sentenced to life imprisonment in Shada? So yes, it could have been a lot better but at least this story’s hearts were in the right place. In The Beatles discography I put it around a Wings LP, say ‘Wings At The Speed Of Sound’ or ‘Back To The Egg’: some great ideas and some lovely moments but way too many overdubs and production gloss with a habit for writing any old nonsense as filler in between the moments of pure inspiration. I do wonder what The Beatles would make of this story if they saw it. I hoped they’d appreciate the message that love and music is all you need, even if they struggled to recognise themselves. Maybe one day we’ll get that scene intended for ‘The Chase’ after all?  

POSITIVES + The costumes! Ruby walks out the Tardis wardrobe looking like Twiggy and the Doctor looks like Jimi Hendrix circa 1963 (when he was touring with Little Richard’s band). Both actors seem more natural in these costumes than in their everyday ones. They do, however, look far too hip and American: most of Britain wasn’t that hip yet and you think they would raise a few puzzled expressions (they’re clearly not at Abbey Road to make the tea looking like that; such clobber was expensive: if you want to know what everyone was really wearing back then ‘An Unearthly Child’ does a pretty good job).     

NEGATIVES –Not to make a song and dance about it but, seriously, what was that ending? While many Dr Who stories might well have been improved by a closing musical number (‘I was there for one brief shining moment in dear old Gallifrey!’ ‘Don’t Cry for me Andred and Leela!’‘Ood Glorious Ood’ ‘Face Of Boejangles’ ‘The Time Warp’) a song about The Beatles isn’t one of them: every time they’ve tried to do a ‘Mama Mia’ and use Beatle songs in place of a plot it’s gone horribly wrong (let’s be honest ‘Mama Mia went horribly wrong too though there seems to be an odd pact not to talk about how wretched it really is). It’s a moment that’s incredibly un-Beatles, incredibly un-Doctor Who and serves no purpose other than creating a storm of angry protests from old time fans who are currently hanging onto this series by a thread. In a story about how music unites us all it seems suicidal to put this here. And it’s not even a good dance, it’s the sodding twist! 

BEST QUOTE: ‘Sometimes genius is just hard work’.

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Seriously, if you even vaguely liked this episode and have a love of The Beatles and Dr Who you need to buy ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’. Released as part of the 1963 themed’ 50th anniversary stories back in 2013 it’s my favourite 5th Dr story including the ones that made it to television, a moving tale about the thin line between success and failure and how all of our lives might have turned out differently with even a slight nudge in a different direction.  For The Beatles it’s the continuation of National Service past 1960, which means that they have to disband and their audience never become interested in rock and roll and instead turn to other more warlike things (basically what happens to them is what happened to Elvis when he went into the army). It’s a fun story with a serious message about exploitation by businesses (and aliens), highlighted by Nyssa’s shocked response (they don’t have rock and roll on Traken!) and a twist about the Common Men’s origins that throws new light on Susan’s interest in them that I won’t spoil here. All I can say is: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! 

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