Jinkx Monsoon is having a wonderful time and so was I, for about half of this. “The Devil’s Chord” drops the Doctor and Ruby into Abbey Road Studios in 1963 to meet the Beatles, and instead finds a god of music who has eaten every good tune on Earth. As a villain showcase it’s terrific. As an episode about the Beatles it barely exists, and the ending is the second musical number since Christmas, which is starting to look like a habit instead of a flourish.
This is where the shape of the new era gets clearer. Maestro belongs to a Pantheon, a family of godlike beings that includes the Toymaker, and the show is openly building a mythology of gods instead of aliens with technology. That’s a real change in what this programme is. This is the episode that commits to it, and I’m not sure I like the trade.
Maestro is a magnificent creation
Monsoon plays Maestro as a performer bored by everything except their own act, and every scene they’re in crackles. The design is superb, part music hall and part silent-film villain, with a constant physical restlessness that makes them genuinely unpredictable to watch. The best stretch is Maestro moving through the studio absorbing sound while the world goes quieter and flatter behind them. It’s a properly good idea done simply, and a piano falling silent mid-chord is more unsettling than any amount of shouting. The show has always been strong at making an absence frightening.
The rules are nicely judged as well. Maestro can be summoned by a specific chord and banished by another, and is bound by the conventions of performance in a way the episode plays with instead of explaining. There’s a moment where they have to stop mid-threat because a piece of music resolves, and the frustration on Monsoon’s face is funnier than any line. There’s also a lovely, nasty beat where Maestro senses Ruby’s musical ability and stops dead, hearing something in her that shouldn’t be there. It’s the first time the arc has felt like it’s doing something instead of being announced, because a villain notices it instead of the Doctor explaining it.
The 1925 cold open is the strongest few minutes of the episode. A piano teacher and a pupil sit in a cold room, a chord gets played that shouldn’t be, and Maestro arrives out of the instrument itself. It’s shot like a horror short and sets out the villain’s rules without a word of explanation. If the whole hour had held that nerve, this would be a different review.
The Beatles are a backdrop
Here’s where it thins out. The premise is that without music, John and Paul are dull men with no ambition and the sixties never happen, which is a strong hook the episode does almost nothing with. The Beatles get a handful of scenes as flat, incurious blokes and are then sidelined so the plot can happen elsewhere. There’s no real sense of what’s been taken from them, because the episode hasn’t got time to show me who they’d have been. Not using any actual Beatles music leaves a hole exactly where the emotional payoff should be.
The same thing happens with the bigger idea. Without music the twentieth century curdles and the world ends in nuclear fire, which is an enormous claim made in a single scene and then abandoned after a few seconds of grey, ruined London through a window. Compare it to how The Idiot’s Lantern handled a creature stealing something from ordinary people, grounded in one family on one street. That episode knew the theft only matters if you’ve met the person being robbed. Here it’s civilisational and abstract, and the stakes are vague to match.
The Doctor is properly frightened
The best character work is in how the Doctor reacts to Maestro. He doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t produce a plan, and at one point he actively hides. There’s a scene where he tells Ruby he’s met one of these things before and barely survived, and Gatwa plays it as a man who genuinely doesn’t want to be in this building. A villain the Doctor can out-think is a puzzle, but a villain he’s simply afraid of changes what he is in the story. Gatwa is very good at playing fear without playing weakness, and the two-hander at the piano is the strongest acting in the episode.
Then the Doctor and Ruby play the right chord to banish Maestro, and the episode ends with a full song-and-dance number on the street outside the studio. I didn’t hate it, since it’s well shot and everyone commits. Combined with the Pantheon business, though, it tells me where the show is going: away from the science fiction problem-solving that’s been its engine for sixty years and toward fantasy where the rules are whatever the story needs. I can see why you’d call that a bold and deliberate reinvention, and I remain unconvinced, because the thing being traded away is the bit I like most. What keeps me coming back is the two of them, who dress up for the sixties and plainly enjoy each other’s company before it all goes wrong.
Rating: 3/5. It was ok. Jinkx Monsoon is worth watching for on their own, and the sound-drain sequence is the best idea the era has had so far. The Beatles material is wasted, though, the emotional stakes never land, and the musical finish tips an already uncertain tone over the edge. Watch it for the villain.