We’ve got a two-episode premiere to get us started, which typically means one trip to the future and one to the past…
Recap—“Space Babies”
The Doctor gives the usual spiel to Ruby about the TARDIS and who he is and where he came from, acknowledging this time that he recently learned he was adopted. He brings Ruby back in time to see the dinosaurs; she asks if she’ll change all of the future by stepping on the butterfly, which he insists is nonsense. Then Ruby steps on a butterfly and turns into a completely different species. The Doctor breathes some of his regeneration energy back into the butterfly and things revert. The Doctor flips a special control on the TARDIS console to help with future butterfly effect instances, and they land in the future on a space station.
The station turns out to be an automated baby farm, carrying a monster in the lower levels, and run by space babies; the infants aren’t actually infant-aged but children trapped in baby bodies. There are no parents aboard, only a nanny AI to help take care of the children. Captain Poppy (who is a baby, of course) wants to know if they grew up wrong, since they’re not meant to be like this; they were supposed to grow like regular kids. The Doctor tells Captain Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) that no one grows up wrong, no matter how strange their lives may be—something he has had to internalize as well.
The Doctor notes that Ruby seems to be creating connections and similarities wherever they go, and when he asks her about it, he starts having a flashback to being at the church where she was left, and the memory changes… and then it begins to snow around them on the ship.
The Doctor and Ruby continue to investigate and meet Jocelyn (Golda Rosheuvel), the human woman who is actually the nanny, abandoned because she refused to leave the babies alone; she keeps herself hidden from the children because the ship doesn’t have infinite resources, and she doesn’t want the children to see her die when she runs out of air. She explains that when the planet that created said baby farm went into a recession, the government abandoned the farm, but it was against the law to destroy the children. The babies are effectively refugees, but they can’t make it to a nearby planet that might take them because nothing on the ship is working properly.
Ruby notices that everything on the ship feels like a fairytale: babies, nanny, bogeyman. The Doctor asks about the monster, and Jocelyn tells them that it appeared around the same time that the children did. The Doctor knows there’s something strange about the monster because he was afraid of it when he saw it, which is unusual for him. When they go to investigate, the babies interfere to prevent them from getting hurt, and the Doctor realizes that the damaged ship is running on stories to keep everything going—it created a bogeyman (from the kid’s literal bogeys) as part of the narrative.
Knowing that, the Doctor can’t let anyone kill the bogeyman—it’s the last and only of its kind, you know—and when Jocelyn almost sends the creature out the airlock, the Doctor saves it. He then figures out how to use the ship’s refuse to power the station so it can get to the nearby world that will accept the babies as refugees. The Doctor tells Ruby that there is one thing he can never do; take her to the church where she was left as an infant to find out who her mother is. He gives her a TARDIS key of her own.
Recap—“The Devil’s Chord”
In the 1920s, composer Timothy Drake (Jeremy Limb) is teaching a little boy (Kit Rakusen) piano, and remembers a strange chord from his own instruction as a child: The Devil’s Chord. In playing the chord, he releases Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), who sucks all the music from the man that he will ever create. From there, they proceed with their plan…
Ruby tells the Doctor that she wants to see the Beatles record their first album, which he is delighted to provide. The two of them get dressed in the wardrobe room for the occasion and walk to the soon-to-be-known-as Abbey Road Studios, getting themselves into the booth as the Beatles begin to play… but the music is dull and wrong in every sense. Visits to other recording booths unearth more of the same, and the Doctor and Ruby begin asking around, interviewing John Lennon (Chris Mason) and Paul McCartney (George Caple) about when music changed. It turns out that things have been going wrong since the ‘20s, and now music is essentially gone from the world.
The Doctor has Ruby play piano on the roof of the building, and she plays a piece she wrote for a friend after a breakup. Everyone begins to listen, but that calls out Maestro. The duo run, and the Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to block sound for long enough to get away. It’s a one-time trick, however, and won’t work again.
Ruby insists that this can’t have effected the future because she knows music from her own life. The Doctor takes her back to her own time to find a devastated world, the future rewritten. The Maestro shows up there too, and insists that all music belongs to them. The Doctor is determined to challenge them, so they remind them of the rules of fair play that the Toymaker set in place, and the Maestro admits that they were released by a genius who found the right chord… so another right chord could banish them. The Doctor hightails back to the ‘60s, and the Doctor and Ruby head back to the recording studio to find the right chord.
The Maestro takes Ruby, and finds that there’s a hidden song in her, music that was playing the night she was born. This confuses Maestro, who insists “he” couldn’t have been there. The Doctor uses the Mrs. Mills piano to find the banishment chord, and he and Maestro have a music battle, but he blows it on the final note. As he and Ruby are about to be consumed by Maestro, John and Paul find the piano and play together, hitting the right notes to send Maestro away.
The Doctor and Ruby are relieved that things turned out well, but the Doctor knows that the Toymaker gave a warning about his legions: Others are coming. But the Doctor tells Ruby that with him, there’s always a twist at the end. This leads to a full-out swinging ‘60s song-and-dance number to the same tune.
Commentary
Someone’s back on his “Last of the Time Lords” bullshit—it’s this guy right here! I love it, and I won’t apologize for that.
Is it too dramatic? Of course it is. But I never appreciated the retcon that brought the Time Lords back for a multitude of reasons—among them being the Time Lords are awful and also don’t retcon major plot points when your only reason is “I don’t believe the Doctor would allow this to happen,” which was, in fact, the reason Steven Moffat gave for upending that choice in the 50th Anniversary Special—so I was all too happy to let the Master redo the thing that Doctor was forced to do.
These two episodes are a great illustration of Russell T. Davies’s desire to bring more fantasy into Doctor Who on this shuffle. That was part of the plan in using the Toymaker for the final 60th Anniversary Special; the reset the Toymaker provided was meant to adjust the universe settings a bit, which is why we’re getting so much story and silliness and performance out of the antagonists.
Having said that, “Space Babies” is doing a lot of the same things that “The Church On Ruby Road” did, which is odd for a first season episode. (Even if the script does hang a lantern on it at the beginning… Ruby “connecting” things doesn’t make sense of a whole plot being that similar.) We’ve got infants in peril again, and a monster out of storybooks, and the hilarious thing about Who where sometimes the Doctor is okay with committing murder and sometimes he decides it’s the most wrong thing a person can do and would never. I appreciate that the Doctor chooses to connect with the bogeyman this time around as the Goblin King’s death was barely considered and pretty brutal. I appreciate even more his moment connecting with Poppy and trying to feel good about who he is all over again, with even more baggage than the last time he was the Last of the Time Lords.
There are some excellent bits of commentary in the first episode around anti-abortion movements being unwilling to take care of children once they’re born, and refugee crises demanding that displaced populations find their way to help rather than the other way around. But the entire conceit of the episode is so intensely goofy, my worry is that those comments get lost between all the poop jokes and weird baby CGI. I do love the nanny filter, though. And I do love that Doctor Who is bombastically silly as a rule—there’s just a time and a place! You’ve gotta pick your moments for the heavy stuff.
A lot is going into the mystery around Ruby’s mother, which has me nervous. I love a gentle season arc, but if you harp too much, it gets harder and harder for the answer of the mystery to live up to the build. Hopefully we’ll ease off on it now that it’s been reestablished? Give Ruby a chance to shine on her own terms, because she’s a lot of fun, but we still don’t know her very well yet.
The best thing about “The Devil’s Chord” is Jinkx Monsoon, without a doubt. In fact, the choice to make the episode half-vaudeville and half-drag show is the strongest thing about it. Monsoon is clearly having a ball, the costume is on point, the music is fabulous. And the awfulness of the songs once Maestro has taken the music away is perfect. And the mystery they provide, the sense that they know so much that they’re not saying… it’s all such good stuff.
That said, I’m not a fan of how The Beatles are used in the episode. It’s too obvious, the actors are not at all suited to the roles, and they’re barely relevant to the story… which in turn feels like a Hand-of-Disney move. Disney+ is responsible for giving Who a shiny new budget, after all, and the streamer is deeply invested in churning out as much Beatlemania as it can half a century on. (The re-release of the Let It Be documentary literally premiered two days before this episode dropped—you can’t tell me that wasn’t a “synergy” move.)
It would have been more interesting for Ruby—who is herself a musician—to have a deeper well of knowledge on music and want to see a more surprising artist or band. But more importantly, if there wasn’t a pressing desire to use The Beatles as the historical figures of the episode, they should have been left out. For a show that usually has so much fun with historical figures, this was wildly lackluster. Also, I’m surprised that they never made a joke about the Second Doctor; his hair was supposed to be a nod to the Beatles’ popularity at the time, and it would’ve been hilarious for the Doctor to mention it.
As for the end number, I’m of two minds entirely. To a certain extent, I’m loving the choice to go full ‘60s beach party movie and let everyone boogie to their heart’s content. Conversely? Big “Bilbo Baggins” vibes on this one. The Leonard Nimoy classic, that is. I think giving it just a little more setup would have ameliorated the cheesiness. Come on, just a little throwaway line about residue from the resurgence of music making everyone ready to go Full Musical. Give us the tiniest why, we’re already here with you.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Okay, but it is great for the show to acknowledge that maybe there is a switch to flip on the TARDIS that makes it okay for the Doctor and pals to be wandering around in time, not mucking things up with Butterfly Effects. It’s probably not called the “Butterfly Compensation Switch,” though. Not in Gallifreyan, at least; the real name is probably very boring.
- The Doctor calling Poppy “Popsicle” and “Pops” is my favorite thing in the whole world.
- Thinking a lot about how it’s a right of passage to have something either disgusting or horrific happen to you for your first adventure in the TARDIS: Rose had to see her planet die, Amy got covered in space whale vomit, Clara found a child about to be sacrificed to a parasitic god, Martha had to fight reality-bending witches and got drugged then kidnapped, Bill discovered that food she ate was fertilized with dead bodies of murdered humans, Donna went to friggin’ Pompeii and had to convince the Doctor not to let everyone die…. Ruby doesn’t realize that being covered in snot is on the milder end of that spectrum. (Though the post-music apocalypse is worse.)
- Not the Doctor telling Ruby that he can’t bring her back in time to see her mother because he’s definitely thinking about how well that went with Rose and her dad.
- Sorry, but I’m having a very hard time believing that the Maestro wasn’t just another name for the Master—the words literally mean the same thing. And it would be extremely on brand for the Master to try out another gender before the Doctor gets the chance yet again. Having said that, I’m curious as to whether Maestro wasn’t the one who picked up the gold tooth that the Master resides in. (They did play his intro on the piano…) Also, does the Toymaker have a bunch of kids or just the one?
- When the Doctor said “Please don’t hate me” to the TARDIS, I maybe teared up a little.
- The Doctor tells Ruby when they’re back in the ‘60s that he’s currently living there with his granddaughter, Susan, as 1963 was when the show began. This is the first time that the Doctor has suggested that he’s unsure what happened to Susan due to the ripple effects of the Time War and possibly the Flux. He doesn’t know if he could see her, because he’s not sure that she hasn’t been wiped away. Which is extremely tragic, but certainly helps explain that niggling lack of family visits. It’s also the first time that the Doctor has attempted to explain exactly how he has a granddaughter… and he doesn’t seem entirely sure, in fact. Timey wimey, and all that. This explanation makes more sense than the Doctor simply having a partner, and them having a kid who had another kid, at any rate.
[Update: Comments were closed over the weekend, but are now open.]
See you next week!
Regardless of whether or not it was a good idea for Moffatt to bring Gallifrey back in “The Day of the Doctor,” it felt pretty ridiculous to me that it was destroyed again only six years later, and under even less plausible circumstances. That being said, there is something particularly resonant about this Doctor talking about genocide, given Gatwa’s background, and at least this way he’s not responsible, so everyone can have their cake as well as eat it.
By the way, I was assuming the Doctor was talking about this second Time Lord genocide, not the Last Great Time War (or the Flux, which didn’t even happen until after all the Time Lords were murdered – in fact it may be a reason why Tecteun was willing to pull the trigger on the universe in the first place) when he referred to it rolling across time and space and possibly killing Susan. I’m assuming the reason he hasn’t found out for himself is that not knowing is easier for him to deal with than learning she died.
I like having the Time Lords around, even just as a check on the Doctor’s excesses, and having them all killed off off-screen again wasn’t my favourite thing in the world – but even though they were brought back, the reappearance was used to show how the Doctor had outgrown them and had no connection to them (which I think was a miscalculation by Moffatt, I suspect he just didn’t know what to do with them once he brought them back and probably should have left them lost until someone more invested had a plan). I think Chibnall left the door slightly ajar in not telling us how they were all killed and I was always expecting some reversal where aha they’re not all dead after all, but RTD obvs prefers them out! And I think it works for the most part, although I also keep anticipating some other race/organisation setting themselves up to police time and being a hundred times worse!
I thought Space Babies was a good time. It was a bit “Doctor Who 101” but I don’t hold that against it, because it’s trying to launch an era (I know The Church on Ruby Road technically launched the era, but that was several months ago). The plot was absolutely ridiculous, but I can usually roll along with ridiculous Who as long as it knows it’s ridiculous and embraces that fact. It does suffer from a few significant plot issues, the biggest one for me being that the reason the space babies never physically aged wasn’t properly explained. However, overall I enjoyed myself watching it.
I don’t see a conflict between the fact that the Doctor killed the Goblin King and the fact that he saved the Bogeyman. First, I’m not even certain that the Goblin King’s death was intentional. Second, the Bogeyman was created to be scary, but there’s no reason to believe it ever actually hurt anyone. Regarding the messaging around reproductive rights, the welfare state, and the ongoing refugee crisis, it certainly wasn’t lost on me, but I already care about those issues. I can’t really say how someone who is oblivious (or hostile) would take the way they were delivered.
I agree with both your points. The Doctor pulling the goblin ship down was not a calculated strategy, but a last-ditch desperation move. He had no idea if it would even work, it was just the only play he had and it’s sheer luck that he didn’t kill baby Ruby in the process. So there’s no way he killed the Goblin King intentionally. On the other hand, he probably would have if it had been the only way to save others. But in this case, the (ugh) Bogeyman was just another victim of a mindless accident.
As for “The Devil’s Chord,” Jinkx Monsoon was absolutely the best thing about it. If you’re going to do an episode with a threat as half-baked as “music sucks now so humanity is doomed,” you need a villain who can really sell it, and they knocked it out of the park. And I agree that the Beatles weren’t particularly well-used (apart from Ruby’s enthusiasm, they could have been literally any early 60s band). However I don’t think it’s useful to speculate about whether or not Disney had a hand in their inclusion.
The ending musical number was odd. I’m not against it in principle (the idea that the world is rejoicing in the rebirth of music), but the choice of music was jarring, and it went on so long that it started to feel like the story may have just run short, even though I know that’s not actually the case given the episode’s length.
However, what left me with the most mixed feelings about the episode was that I’m not sure it’s a good idea to portray the new Doctor as being this uncertain of himself this early in his tenure. I was under the impression that the point of his bigeneration was to free himself from his trauma (so Fourteen could go and work on it), but apparently the act itself was traumatizing enough to make him wary to face someone like the Toymaker again. I guess we’ll see where that goes.
I didn’t mind the idea of the ending musical number — it fit the general silliness of the piece — but for a song that was meant to be celebrating the return of good music to the world, I didn’t find it much better-written than the deliberately terrible songs from the first act. I’m not even sure it actually qualified as a twist, in the sense of the song style meant to accompany twist dancing in the 1950s-60s such as Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and the Beatles’ (and others’) “Twist and Shout.”
And you have a good point that it’s too soon to have the Doctor this afraid and hopeless so soon after his debut. We should’ve gotten more standalone adventures before diving into a Toymaker followup. RTD used to know how to build an arc slowly, but here he seems to be rushing things.
I think this is due to the short episode count for this season. There is only 8 episodes (including a two part final). We are already a quarter of the way the season.
Aw, heck. Seasons have gotten too short. It may work well for a serial telling a single story, but it’s bad for the pacing of an episodic series, leaving too little room to breathe or play around.
I keep wondering if the One Who Waits will turn out to be the Master of the Land of Fiction – although I doubt it, to be honest – but after the Toymaker it’s another force outside the universe that would cause chaos if in the “real world”. And then there will be winks to the audience galore!
If the Doctor had joined in with the Beatles in a rendition of “Twist and Shout,” that might have justified their appearance.
I’m pleased to see that the new Big Two (and their incarnation of the show) continue to be enormously charming – it will be interesting to see how they (and the rest of the production) keep up that sort of energy over a whole darned season, should they choose to do so – and find these two episodes quite entertaining.
Since my reaction to those episodes was much the same as our illustrious reviewer, one will only add that The Maestro is, in my opinion, quite possibly the most repellent villain in my experience of the show (Having watched Ten and Eleven consistently, more or less kept up with Twelve, then increasingly fallen away towards the end of his tenure and afterwards).
It took me a while to work out why my reaction was so extreme – when I say ‘Repellant’ I mean DO NOT WANT, Do Not bring back, seal the beast away for the sake of our souls! – but then it struck me that The Maestro hit almost exactly the same buttons as Mr Tim Curry in the role of Stephen King’s IT: something pretending to the style of a cartoon villain while acting in the role of an Abuser.
It’s a combination that never ceases to revolt me.
For all the emphasis on The Doctor is the Last of the Time Lords (which I’m okay with as the Gallifreyan and Time Lord civilization seemed to be heavily caste based, among other things), I do keep thinking about the Master (isn’t the first rule for the Master: Never believe the Master is actually dead?), they named dropped the Rani (who is also in the running for don’t believe it even if there is a body and I would enjoy seeing come back), There’s also Clara Oswald and Her gallivanting around in a stolen TARDIS, and Jenny the cloned “daughter”. The home world/culture/civilization which is definitely cause for grief but there’s a lot of other possibilities still open.
On the other hand, having The Master and Maestro absolutely tearing into each other over their names and antagonism with The Doctor while the Doctor is looking on in bafflement is an entertaining thought.
“Space Babies”: Fun in a lot of ways, but I could’ve done without the crude humor. A lot of it seemed gratuitous — why did the program prevent the babies from growing normally? Why did the Doctor feel the need to correct himself with “babies — Space Babies!” every time? But there have been sillier things in Doctor Who.
This Doctor is much more open and forthcoming about himself than many of his predecessors. Made it a bit too infodumpy, perhaps, but there was some good character stuff there as he bonded with Ruby. And it really hit me to hear the Doctor refer to the fate of the Time Lords as a genocide, remembering that Ncuti Gatwa is a refugee from an actual genocide in his native Rwanda. And then we got a story that, for all its silliness, was about refugees needing to find a place that would take them in.
I don’t quite buy the idea that he can’t take Ruby back to her origin because it would create “the darkest paradox” and all that. Didn’t they just do a gag about the “butterfly filter” preventing paradoxes? (I guess it was nonfunctional when “mavity” happened.) Also, we’ve occasionally seen characters interact with their pasts before without catastrophic results, I think. Well, sometimes there are paradoxes or changes that have to be fixed, but sometimes not.
“The Devil’s Chord” had its moments, but it was just too silly and incoherent for me. I mean, they’re talking about this as a world of no music, when it’s being portrayed as a world of bad music. The episode never explains why any music is tolerated, or reconciles the continuing creation of bad music with the pretense of music being gone entirely. It’s not good when a story directly contradicts and undermines itself between one scene and another. And music battles with actual cartoon notes flying around and having physical form are just too silly.
If the whole season arc is going to be this kind of total nonsense with the Toymakers’ arbitrarily powerful and eccentric brood, I’m not looking forward to that. The three holiday specials had a marvelous variety of tone, “Wild Blue Yonder” being a particular standout for its eerie minimalism and cosmic horror. So far Gatwa & Gibson have had three consecutive exercises in broad, fanciful whimsy and overindulgence. Let’s mix it up some more, okay?
For that matter, I’m tired of companions being at the heart of season-long mystery arcs instead of just being companions. I’m just gonna say it — I’m tired of season-long arcs in general. It’s really contrived and repetitive when every season of every show has to have some big overarching narrative tying it together. Can’t we just go back to telling individual episodic stories? Season arcs were an impressive innovation when they were new, but not so much when they’re formulaic and obligatory.
I did like the bit of fourth-wall breaking: “I thought that was non-diegetic.” Does that mean the Doctor always hears the background music? Although of course, some fans are losing their minds over it and complaining about how it’s broken the series, even though the Doctor’s been breaking the fourth wall since William Hartnell wished “a Happy Christmas to all of you at home” in episode 7 of “The Daleks’ Masterplan.”
Yes to all this. To be honest, I love when Doctor Who gets meta – other shows do it and it’s great if used sparingly and who else should be able to stare out at us other than the Doctor. A full on Bugs Bunny approach would be too much, but I went yeah, sure why not when they started dancing.
The only problem was invoking the Beatles and then using a song that wasn’t even close to what they did, even at the start of their career! I don’t know if it was just Murray Gold or if they had Neil Hannon on hand as they often do, but it was a bit too “song for a television show”.
I totally agree about Ruby’s mystery arc (and season arcs in general). It’s giving me “Impossible girl” flashbacks from Series 7. Clara turned out to be a lot more interesting when the show started writing her as a person instead of a puzzle to be solved. Hopefully we’ll get there with Ruby sooner rather than later, because I really like the actor.
On Facebook, writer Steven Thompson just pointed out the obvious thing we all missed: “The Devil’s Chord” is kind of a riff on Yellow Submarine.
https://www.facebook.com/booksteve/posts/10168747191605076
“You have the androgynous, over-the-top villain who wants to take all music away. We’re shown the dark, gray results of this. The heroes arrive in a most unusual mode of transportation and have to save Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and bring back LOVE. When they learn that newer meanies are on the horizon, they even do what the Beatles did–they go out singing!”
I haven’t seen that film in 40 years. Guess it’s time to revisit it.
As noted, the Doctor has a daughter out there that he doesn’t know about, so maybe Georgia Tennant can come back and provide a connection to Susan.
The disappointment for me was that the Doctor was in Maida Vale in 1963, needing a musical genius to save the world, and he didn’t go round the corner to fetch Delia Derbyshire.
I would have loved it if Ruby had played an actual Beatles tune, or at least had quoted a little bit of Beatles music, in her rooftop (!) performance. Even so, I found that scene with the various people looking out their windows in wonderment to be quite emotional.
I guess that even with Disney money, they didn’t want to shell out for the music rights to Beatles songs. Come to think of it, avoiding song licensing payments might have been a driver behind the plot, built around bad fake songs being heard in place of the real ones we expected.
I feel like if you don’t want to pay for the Beatles, you shouldn’t put them in your episode. It would have been nifty if the band Ruby was obsessed with was John Smith and the Common Men, but that would have been too inside baseball to work for a general audience.
I think having the Beatles was justified for the bait and switch of their music. Though it was impressive that it sounded like a Beatles song while still being completely horrible.
I did like the whimsy of these episode–that they remember that Doctor Who isn’t all serious and fancy–but I do hope they also do some more grounded episodes as well. With luck the big bad we’re warned about won’t show up until the finale and we can get some non-arc episodes.
So far I’m enjoying the new series immensely; both these episodes were a lot of fun. I was particularly impressed by Jinxx Monsoon as the Maestro – it was like having Bette Midler as “Special Guest Villainess” on an episode of the Adam West “Batman”. And yes, I mean that as a compliment.
On the use of the Beatles; I didn’t expect any actual Beatles music (costs, if nothing else; I was gobsmacked when “Mad Men” licensed a snippet of “Tomorrow Never Knows” for an episode – the producers admitted it blew their budget), but I was impressed by the deliberately terrible song the actors played; it was an excellent pastiche, musically if not lyrically. As for comments that any band would have sufficed -no. You don’t need to be a Beatles fan to admit that they were the single most powerful influence in the last 60 years of Western popular music, and possibly popular culture of that period in general; their use brought home the power and impact of the Maestro’s machinations.
There were of course a lot of nods and titbits of genuine Beatles history, even down to the presence of their friend Cilla Black, who actually was recording at the same time. There were some other bits that only those of a certain age or background (ie, old pharts like me who grew up with a lot of British cultural influences) would probably have caught: I literally laughed out loud at the “Mrs Mills piano” and the Doctor reminiscing about the great times he had with Mrs Mills. I implore those scratching their heads to Google “Mrs Mills music records” and you’ll get the joke.
i agree though, that a mention of John Smith and the Common Men would have been a nice nod. Still, we got an acknowledgement from the Doctor that he was already there in 1963, over in Totters Lane, and even better, a name check of Susan! I already had a pet theory that the elderly neighbour in “The Church on Ruby Road” who recognised the TARDIS might be the Doctor’s long-lost granddaughter; could this be a further indication? Though experience shows that my “Who” theories are inevitably wrong……
I haven’t watched Who in a minute, but I may tune in for Jinkx Monsoon, whomst I love
I didn’t get the Doctor correcting himself from “babies” to “space babies” either. Like, I’ve seen that kind of running gag before, of course, but if a point was made of that being the proper nomenclature for some reason I missed it.
The Doctor being terrified of the antagonist in both episodes made them a poor choice to air (upload, stream, whatever…) in succession — while his uncharacteristic fear had a certain rationale in each story, his repeated self-conscious observation in the first that he doesn’t get scared almost seemed to queue up Ruby telling him in the second that, yeah, he actually does on a regular basis.
I was floored by our first glimpse of George Martin but entirely underwhelmed by the poor likenesses of the Beatles and honestly found the whole episode surprisingly meh beyond the Maestro. The supposed Devil’s Chord that conjured them from beyond was not so taboo, although I’m letting myself believe that the perfectly ordinary resolution that saved the day was a sly homage to the end of “A Day in the Life”.
Yeah, that was another thing that didn’t work for me — how the hell can there be a “secret” musical chord? The term “devil’s chord” is historically used for the tritone, which apparently tended to be avoided in Western music due to its dissonance, but it was hardly secret, and hardly something that would be impossible to stumble across by accident. If all it took was playing the chord once to release the Maestro, it would’ve been happening all the time. So that was a nonsensical setup.
Also, seemed to me that the “banishing chord” really was more of a sequence rather than a chord. Maybe it was still a chord because the two Beatles showed up and played it together (maybe? I was kind of confused as to their role right there) but that with the fact that it defies even deeply forgiving suspension of disbelief that there was something that summoned the Maestro that had never been played before. (I might have had an easier time if said summoning chord was in one of the other scales humanity has invented.)
Another puzzling thing, the opening scene, the piano instructor was chastised by the Maestro for not noticing anything peculiar about his student’s name. I’m not sure “Harry Binger” even tangentially makes one remove the “ry” and create Harbinger. Though, Maestro does not seem to be one to make a great deal of sense all the time anyway, so suppose that works. And Harbinger kid shows up during the Twist so I guess that was the twist.
It was “Henry Arbinger,” not “Harry Binger.” By convention, it would be abbreviated as “H. Arbinger,” which is something an alert observer could have noticed.
And yes, it’s impossible that the chord wasn’t played before, since the music teacher himself must have been taught it at some time in the past. So the question is, of all the times throughout history that the “forbidden chord” was played, why did the Maestro choose 1925 to make their entrance?
Well, I have heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord.
No mention that Susan Twist who plays the mysterious neighbor who knows about Tardises from The Church On Ruby Road appears in both episodes? She was one of the crew on the space station who was leaving under protest in Space Babies and she was serving food in the background in Devil’s Chord. I know she has been listed as being in the cast in several episodes this season. I don’t know if she is supposed to be the same character each time or if there is something else going on. A sharp eyed viewer also noted that the actress was in Wide, Blue Yonder as the housekeeper to Sir Isaac Newton. Interesting that she is in an episode that did change gravity to mavity, which has stuck.
Also of note, the elderly lady who played the piano was played by Laura June Hudson, who was a costumer for Doctor Who during the Tom Baker era. This is more of an interesting cameo than anything else.
No, Mrs. Flood (the mysterious neighbor) was played by Anita Dobson. Susan Twist was an unnamed woman at the club where Ruby played. https://tardis.wiki/wiki/Susan_Twist
Pausing here for a bit of appreciation for the way Ncuti Gatwa plays the Doctor. Confident but vulnerable, happy but with a dark side. He’s growing to be my ideal Doctor.
The bit where he gleefully scares the space babies was great.