The Fantasy Review’s review of Doctor Who Season 1, Episode 2, The Devil’s Chord.
The Devil’s Chord is episode 1 of the 2024 season 1 soft reboot of Doctor Who. The episode was written by Russell T Davies and aired in 2024.
This recap and review of The Devil’s Chord is filled with spoilers, so don’t read the article if you are yet to watch the episode.
Previous episode: Episode 1, Space Babies – Review & Recap
Spoiler-filled Recap & Review of The Devil’s Chord
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The cold open to The Devil’s Chord is one of the best in season 1. It not only looks beautiful, set in an old hall with some gorgeous colour gradient layered over in the edits, but the tone and atmosphere – set by the music and the dialogue – are bewitching.
A piano teacher, Mr. Timothy Drake, is showing his student how to play the devil’s chord, which is a tritone that was apparently banned by the church, although this perhaps is not historically accurate. It makes for a fun premise to a Doctor Who episode though.
As the teacher plays a tune on the piano using the tritone, the lid suddenly crashes down and something/someone knocks from inside. The kid looks happy and not at all scared, so is delighted to see his “daddy” when Maestro comes joyously laughing out of the piano.
It turns out that the student, Henry Arbringer, is a harbinger (see what they did there?) for Maestro, and with his prelude for their arrival complete, the god of music makes the creepy kid disappear.
Maestro calls the teacher a genius composer, who never realised their full potential, with all those songs he never made wrapped around his heart. Maestro then takes all that potential music from Timothy Drake and eats it, killing the teacher.
They then turn to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, and start playing the Doctor Who theme tune on the piano, and the title sequence begins.
I’ve Got Wigs Galore
The Doctor Who theme tune ends, the final notes coming out of the jukebox on the TARDIS, leading Ruby to ask the Doctor if they can go to see The Beatles recording their very first album. It turns out that her mum’s ex-girlfriend, Clare, was very much into vinyl and loved The Beatles, playing all the albums when Ruby got home from school.
The Doctor is very excited, exclaiming that everyone just asks to go to Mars, or Bethlehem (haha), and takes them to see the Beatles, landing on the 11th February, 1963. They both get very excited about picking out their outfits, and they both come out of that dressing room looking amazing!
Yes, there is a lot of excitement, a lot of grinning and childish playfulness, and that seems to be the vibe of these two in the TARDIS together. We have seen some of this very excitable Doctor with his companions before with the 11th and the Ponds, or the 10th with Rose or Donna, but this is the most excitable the Doctor has ever been.
The way they use the large TARDIS set in The Devil’s Chord really goes to show the benefits of creating something this epic in scope. Along with California Soul playing in the background, the Doctor and Ruby come out of the dressing room from a door at the top and swagger around in a loop, hyping us up for the coming story.
Shabbey Road
The Doctor and Ruby go to the EMI Recording Studios (which will one day be called Abbey Road Studios). They walk in through the studios and watch The Beatles recording a new song, but it turns out they are… terrible.
So, they give up and check out Cilla Black recording in a different room. And she is… also terrible.
Not to mention the band playing Three Blind Mice…
In the cafeteria, the Doctor and Ruby work out that music has gone from the world. He calls it “the highest form of thought” and notices events in the newspaper that never happened. He says, “the whole human race is taking a different path.”
Before they split up to talk to Paul and John, Susan Twist shows up again, offering them cups of tea. This is her third appearance, I believe.
So, they talk with John and Paul only to discover that they are making rubbish music on purpose, giving music its last gasp in the world before settling down to “get a proper job” or something. Music is in its final dying days, and the band members just want to go home.
This is an emotional scene, especially with Paul talking about his dreams of music he can’t quite reach out and pluck into existence. When he does sing a little from one of these ideas, he suddenly stops, and Maestro peers out at the Doctor and Ruby through reflections.
You Called?
The Doctor’s response? To have a piano installed on the roof of a building, of course! From on the roof, they notice what the Doctor called “a darkening” around the city of London, which looks a bit like smog.
The Doctor points over the city and tells Ruby that he, in the past, lives in Totter’s Lane. This is of course his first incarnation, played by William Hartnell, who lived in a junkyard with his granddaughter, Susan.
This mention of Susan was so abrupt and jarring that many of us thought it would be relevant, and I still hope it means a return of the character in future seasons, but right now it was nothing more than a red herring for Susan Twist’s character/mystery box reveal at the end of season 1.
The piano gets set up on the roof and the Doctor asks Ruby to play a tune:
“At this moment in time, Ruby Sunday, you are the only music in the world. Let’s see what happens if you bring music back.”
The Doctor peers out over London while Ruby plays her song – one she wrote herself – and we see several people opening their windows, taking in the music. The music suddenly stops when Maestro starts laughing – in the same tone and rhythm as The Toymaker did in The Giggle – terrifying the Doctor.
He and Ruby run and he tells Ruby to hide. Ruby is surprised, saying the Doctor never hides, but I am not sure how she has so much confidence in him? Okay, sure he went face-to-face with the Goblins in The Church on Ruby Road, but all she saw was him playing with rope and singing a song.
Then, in the previous episode, Space Babies, he literally runs away from the Bogeyman and screams in terror (to be fair, that’s because of the way it was designed), so she has never seen the Doctor be badass against a villain before. So, for all she knows, hiding is exactly the sort of thing he might do.
Apparently, The Devil’s Chord was supposed to come out later in the season, but it got moved, so this might explain this line, plus Maestro’s final line at the end of the episode.
Music is Mine!
The Doctor and Ruby are hiding from Maestro while the god searches for whoever played music, claiming that all music is theirs. The Doctor takes an educated guess and uses his sonic to block out all sound in the surrounding area (it’s just a magic wand at this point), to the point that Maestro can’t even hear themselves.
Maestro breaks through whatever the Doctor did to sound and head towards the basement/cellar Ruby and he are hiding in, but gets distracted by a woman playing the piano (one who heard Ruby from her window).
Maestro jumps back into Ruby’s piano and pops up in the woman’s room, killing her and giving a little wink to the camera.
The Doctor and Ruby hear Maestro leave and go back out onto the street. He realises that Maestro must be part of the pantheon and fears the god, as facing the Toymaker tore his soul in half and he worries he won’t survive that again.
“…the power of these creatures is so vast, the whole world could slide into the pit.”
Ruby still holds out hope, saying that she was born in 2004 (way to make me feel old) and she had music all her life. So, the Doctor takes her into the future and shows her a destroyed Earth:
“…without music, the human race goes sour. Without any way of expressing a broken heart, they go to war without even knowing why.”
Ruby is only alive because she is travelling with the Doctor in the TARDIS, but everyone else is very dead. While the Doctor consoles Ruby, Maestro appears.
Daddy Was So Bad To Me
Maestro knows it was the Doctor making music in 1963, and was the same person who bound the Toymaker in salt, calling the Doctor “the Lord Temporal.” They also reveal that they are a child of the Toymaker.
Maestro is the living embodiment of music itself, and Ruby makes the good point that with the destruction of the planet, there is no more music, so “how is that a win?” The god, however, doesn’t see things the same way:
“The sound of a nuclear winter. The purest music of all…And every song that goes unsung feeds me.”
They plan to continue growing in power, feeding off the unsung songs of humanity, until they can “reach out and steal the music of the spheres,” eventually destroying the universe so they can listen to “aeolian tones across the whole of creation.”
The Doctor then asks how Maestro entered the world, and says they have to tell him – to play by the rules and not cheat. Being related to the Toymaker, Maestro had to give a response. They were brought into the world by a genius who found the lost chord, so the Doctor surmises that if the right combination of notes can bring the god into the world, another combination could rid the world of them.
Maestro is not concerned, however, as they do not see the Doctor as the right kind of genius to get the right notes. It is at this point that the god describes the Doctor as “timey-wimey” and presses the first 3 notes of the Doctor Who theme tune – inside the episode itself, not just at the beginning as a joke from the writer of the episode – what is happening here?????
The god begins playing a tune, controlling the TARDIS, so the Doctor and Ruby run into the ship and he manages to get them back to 1963 – which is the only thing he can do, he says.
The Notes of Banishment
The Doctor and Ruby land back in 1963 and run back to Abbey Road. As they exit the TARDIS, they hear it make a sort of groaning sound. The audience might think it has something to do with Maestro, but the Doctor looks confused and says it’s “something else,” which we will find out about in episode 8.
In the studio, the Doctor plans on recording the right tune to banish Maestro from reality – what he calls the “Notes of Banishment”. Before the Doctor can even finish tuning John Lennon’s guitar, Maestro’s musical-note-magic-stuff grabs Ruby by the legs and drags her into Studio 1 (which is where they saw the orchestra trying to play Three Blind Mice earlier).
He manages (eventually) to catch up with Ruby in Studio 1 and finds her suspended in the air with the magical-notes-things and Maestro standing between the Doctor and his companion. He tells the god to leave Ruby alone and fight him instead, but they say:
“But she’s the only human left with music in her heart. Playing lovesick songs for heartbroken lesbians. And that just makes me hungry…for all those delicious songs.”
Jinkx Monsoon was the perfect casting for the role of Maestro. They play the half-mad god of music like they were born to play a musical villain. If we never see Maestro again – which I really hope we do – they will be my all-time favourite one-off villains in Doctor Who.
Maestro does, however, let Ruby go after discovering a secret song in her soul, the same song that was playing when she was born. The god is confused as to how a song could have that much power, “power like him. The oldest one.” We know who they were talking about now that all the episodes are out, and this is unfortunately a plot point that is ruined for me.
Skip this paragraph if you don’t want spoilers for Empire of Death.
If Maestro didn’t kill Ruby just now because she has a magic song in her, because of the mystery of her mother confusing Sutekh, that is an incredibly weak plot armour moment that spoils just how wonderful The Devil’s Chord really is.
Spoilers over for Empire of Death.
“This creature is very wrong.”
Maestro about Ruby
The Doctor gets all confident, pulls out the famous Mrs. Mills piano which The Beatles used to play many of their most famous songs. He says it has the potential to “send you back to hell” and starts playing some funky tunes.
The Doctor and Maestro then begin a “music battle” where they take turns playing mini tunes on their instruments, sending up little magical notes in the sky. It’s a fun, insane scene that I certainly expected from Doctor Who and I enjoyed it.
However, the entire time it feels like Maestro is playing with them, but the Doctor thinks he might have found the lost chord. He is one note away from getting the chord right and hits a “bum note,” so Maestro traps them both in instruments.
There is Always a Twist at the End
While the Doctor and Ruby get trapped in instruments, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are in the hallway and they work out the final note of the chord. They play the chord and Maestro is once again trapped in a piano.
Before they disappear into the piano, Maestro says, “the One Who Waits” is almost here, as yet another indication that The Devil’s Chord was not originally supposed to be episode 2 in the series, but it was meant to be later on.
With Maestro gone, the Doctor and Ruby run out onto the rooftop and can hear the city around them playing instruments and making music once again. Everything has returned to normal.
Then, the Doctor takes Ruby to one side with a “warning” – he says:
“With all my adventures throughout time and space, I have to tell you…there is always a twist at the end.”
The 15th Doctor then looks to the camera and winks before one of the most insane endings of a Doctor Who episode takes place – the cast has a musical number.
Now, about that wink. I think it serves the narrative in two ways. First, it reclaimed control from Maestro, who had been breaking the fourth wall throughout the episode, controlling the narrative, so the Doctor winking here is regaining control of his story. And second, I think this is the writer’s way of telling the audience that the musical scene we are about to witness is tongue in cheek.
Concluding Thoughts to this Recap and Review of The Devil’s Chord
Apart from some of the plot points that are ruined in hindsight from a lacklustre and unsatisfactorily explained ending in Empire of Death, The Devil’s Chord is one of the best episodes of the season, and is certainly Russell T Davies’ best episode of season 1.
This episode has everything, from a god-like villain who the Doctor fears he cannot beat, to some insanely quirky, mad fun that we could only ever see in Doctor Who. This show was always at its best when it did something odd like this, having a villain or a world that did not play by the rules we are used to.
For example, The Mind Robber with the Second Doctor, or The Three Doctors when John Pertwee was the “current” Doctor. These episodes (mostly) take place in a world and against a villain who does not play by the rules, so the Doctor has to adapt to these new rules to defeat them.
As we see in The Devil’s Chord, this experimentation really pays off and makes for an exciting, new story that will become a classic in its own right in the decades to come.
