The new season of Doctor Who, which has effectively rebooted the show again, with a more newbie friendly approach to the show’s 6 decade lore, debuted with its first two episodes available back to back.

The season opener, Space Babies, was a light, more comedic affair with very Who moments of scares and political commentary. Subtle, it wasn’t, but it was an awful lot of fun.

With Jinkx Monsoon’s Maestro the villain of the week in The Devil’s Chord, subtlety is once more thrown out of the window.

The Doctor and Ruby land in swinging 60s London, with the aim of watching The Beatles record their first album.

Upon reaching the studio and witnessing the sessions for themselves, however, it doesn’t take long to realise that something is very wrong.

Music has been lost as a form of expression, and the awful lyrics and tunes that the Fab Four are recording are the first, big clues that something big is lurking in the shadows.

That something is Maestro; as performed by the aforementioned Monsoon, they’re (appropriately, given which company is holding the pursestrings for Doctor Who’s big budget episodes now) like an evil Disney Queen sprung to larger-than-life; it’s quite something to see this cartoonishly evil antagonist cackling and contorting themselves through the story.

There’s fourth wall breaks, some genuinely heartfelt, emotional scenes centering around the importance of music and an absolutely astonishing silent sequence that truly blew me away.

It doesn’t all land successfully; for example, the final musical number is wonderful, but seems to be building up to something that never quite materialises.

There’s a far too subtle reference to a six month timeskip, which explains why Ruby says that the Doctor ‘always’ does this or that, even though to us it seems like they’ve barely been together for a day.

A few other niggles are present too, but this episode certainly, and pretty interestingly, if nothing else, pushes past the boundaries of what Doctor Who can be and has been, introducing lots of lore building that’s sure to lead us to a spectacular finale for this all too short season, which is comprised of just eight episodes.

We’re already a quarter of the way through it on day one!

In any case, The Devil’s Chord was an episode that had some absolutely brilliant moments, was another great showcase for Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor (and companion, Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday), featured an instantly iconic villain in Maestro, and went to some very unexpected places in terms of its tone and new lore.

It didn’t all work for me and I’m not entirely sold on the reliance on fourth wall breaks yet (though the seque into, and out of, the Doctor Who theme was utter genius), but no doubt explanations are coming.

Given that there’s only six episodes left of this season, it’s not as if we’ll be waiting long to have those mysteries revealed.

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