I Thought That Was Non-Diegetic (Doctor Who: “The Devil’s Chord” Review)

Written by Tom

And now, quite surprisingly, a direct sequel to “The Giggle“. Russell T Davies has done several interviews about this series of Doctor Who and how he plans to install a new Pantheon of Gods for the Doctor to fight, of which the Toymaker and Maestro are the first and the second. (The Goblins and the Bogeyman are echoes of the Pantheon, not being Gods but myths who slipped into the universe in their wake.) He’s also done several interviews about “The Devil’s Chord” where he’s talked about how strangely written it is, claiming that it has less of a plot and is more several things happening all at once, most of which are designed to set up ideas for later in the series. Watching the episode, it’s hard to disagree with his assessment. Much like “The Giggle”, “The Devil’s Chord” isn’t really structured like anything else I can think of.

Let’s do what we did with “The Giggle” and summarise the plot. A pianist plays The Devils Chord, a magical series of forbidden notes that unleashes the Maestro into our universe. The Doctor and Ruby arrive in 1963 to watch the Beatles record their first album, only to find that the music everyone’s playing is absolutely terrible and that no-one has any respect for the art form. The Doctor sets up a piano and asks Ruby to play it in order to see what happens. Turns out the Maestro appears who the Doctor immediately recognises as an echo of the Toymaker and is absolutely terrified by. Ruby, not buying into the danger, gets taken by the Doctor to the present day to find out that the human race without music have little more than wiped themselves out. The Maestro reappears and explains that they want to control music so that they can feast on all the unsung songs before announcing their ultimate intention to eat the Music of the Spheres. The Doctor and Ruby figure out that if the Devil’s Chord brought Maestro into the world, then there must be another set of chords that’ll banish them from it. They run back to 1963, face Maestro again, get most of the way to figuring out the chord, then mess it up and get trapped in some musical instruments. Luckily, John Lennon and Paul McCartney turn up to figure out the rest of the chord, banishing Maestro and resetting history. Only there’s always a twist in the tale, which is apparently a massive musical number and the fact that zebra crossings work as pianos now.

Throughout all of this is a bizarre breaking down of cause and effect. Let’s look at a single example. The Doctor takes Ruby to the modern day and shows her that if the human race didn’t have music, we’d have destroyed each other through nuclear armageddon by now because apparently music and war are the only two ways we have of collectively expressing emotions. This is an idea that somehow manages to completely ignore all other art forms such as paintings, stories or, I don’t know, television. The connection between “no music” and “nuclear annihilation” just isn’t that strong. That said, it’s also an idea that has a lot of fascinating implications. It’s notable that the two members of the Pantheon that we’ve met so far both attack humanity by targeting specific media forms, the Toymaker working through television while the Maestro works through music. This is an era of Doctor Who that’s heavily focused on the idea that art represents a collective good. And so the Pantheon represent the corruption of this idea, bastardising the media in order to divide us while taking ownership of art that should belong to the masses. In this regard, it’s not hard to figure out who the Pantheon are meant to represent: we’ve got a good old “media moguls are destroying society for profit!” allegory alongside a Doctor and companion who represent art being used as a social good. As such, the image of a music-less humanity destroying themselves is actually here to communicate the message that “once you take art away from the populace, you cause the death of society”. Like last week, RTD is using his Disney+ money to produce a damning critique of Disney.

Space Babies! (Doctor Who: “Space Babies” Review)

Written by Tom

While discussing “The Church on Ruby Road”, we talked about how it was a partial remake of “Rose” done for 2024. Well, here we have the natural follow-up: a remake of “The End of the World”. The Doctor takes his companion to a space station in the far future; the main cast is made of a large collection of strange, high-concept people; the whole thing is designed to establish a baseline for what we can expect from this new version of Doctor Who; and part of that baseline is that the series is going to be absolutely insane more often than not. There’s even a scene where the Doctor changes the companion’s phone to be able to call people across time and space, allowing them to call their mother.

This said, the imagery of this episode is bonkers to a degree that Doctor Who has rarely reached before. It’s an episode about a space station that’s run by talking babies who control everything through specialised prams, and no matter how strange that sentence might sound, it looks weirder in action. Part of this is obviously to show off the Disney+ money and what Doctor Who can do nowadays, otherwise you wouldn’t decide to do an episode where 99% of your cast are all special effects. On the other hand, “talking babies” is one of those infamous special effects that never quite works, the result being that the cast remains firmly in the realm of the uncanny for the entire episode. Add to this a range of absurd details both big (the babies knowing how to use a flame thrower) and small (Eric’s tiny sword that he holds while going to confront the monster) and you get an episode which never allows you to forget how strange it’s being.

The strangeness isn’t being used as a barrier towards liking the characters though. The fact that Eric is a baby with a constantly scared face and also willing to fight a monster with his tiny sword is both a) utterly absurd, but b) really endearing. There’s a straightforward embrace of the weird in this episode that previous seasons wouldn’t have touched. “The End of the World” was a strange 45 minutes of television but the aliens were deliberately slightly ropey, alluding to Doctor Who‘s past as a cheap sci-fi show, and Rose was constantly put at loggerheads with them, the show’s relationship to strangeness being a strained one where acceptance of the weird had to be built up to. “Space Babies” meanwhile features Ruby immediately getting on board with every single mad thing she hears, her reaction to the Space Babies being complete adoration from the off.

Goodbye Susan, Goodbye My Dear (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P6: “Flashpoint” Review)

Written by Tom

Ian jams the Daleks’ bomb from being to get anywhere near the Earth’s core. Susan and David knock out the energy generator which allows the Daleks to move around, immobilizing them. The Doctor gets into the Dalek control room and, with Barbara’s help, instructs the Robomen to turn on the Daleks, leading to a full-on revolution. The Daleks’ bomb explodes, though is far away from the Earth’s core to stop it destroying the planet. (It merely uses a volcanic eruption that takes down both a forest and a city, while still remaining safe enough that you can apparently stand just outside the entrance to the Dalek’s mine it was in and survive the blast.) After seeing David and Susan profess their love for each other, the Doctor decides to leave Susan on Earth, figuring that this is a better place for her to grow up than he could provide.

While the serial in general has been a bit wobbly at getting the whole “action sequence” concept to work, the dispatching of the Daleks in this serial was actually pretty satisfying to watch. The plot might be surprisingly reliant on items introduced this episode to work (such as the incredibly convenient Roboman Control Unit that everyone just so ends up being near) but it’s still satisfying to see the two things added to the Daleks during this serial (their static electricity dishes and the Robomen) be turned against them at the end. There’s also something very funny about the Doctor and Barbara putting on Dalek voices while commanding the Robomen, despite there being no indication that that’s actually needed. It’s one final leaning into the fact that the show sees the Daleks as these slightly ridiculous creatures which run mostly on iconography, setting their final end into motion by essentially parodying them.

Alas we then get to Susan leaving the show, and it’s worse than we thought it was going to be. Ever since the Sensorite serial, the show has been pretty staunch that Susan’s relationship with the Doctor has been a problematically paternalistic one that’s stopping her from reaching her full potential as a person. As such, having her go off to marry someone is actually quite a clever ending for her, showing her moving on from the Doctor’s paternal gaze and taking on an adult role within a family of her own, rising into a full female equivalent of him. The issue with this though, as we’ve discussed before, is that she has to be the one to make the decision to get married herself, otherwise her leaving doesn’t become her growing into someone more in control of herself as much it becomes her exchanging one male she’s subservient to for another. She has to be the person to propose.

How Long Do You Think We’ve Been Going Down Now? (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P5: “The Waking Ally” Review)

Written by Tom

The Slyther, a giant beanbag which waggles its little arms around a bit, falls off a cliff. (Well, it never did seem to have eyes.) Everyone’s on their way to the mines. The Doctor, Susan and David are heading there through the sewers, taking the occasional break so Susan and David can slap each other with some dead fish. Seeking a break from their trip to the mine, Barbara and her friend stop off at the house of two random women, only to be ratted out to the Daleks and, well, taken to the mine. Meanwhile Ian’s already in the mine, walking around and being generally ineffective before getting himself stuck in a giant rocket that the Daleks are going to use to destroy the Earth’s core.

The overall structure of this serial has been three linked travelogues in which Team TARDIS get separated at the start, go through their own adventures, and reunite at the end. It’s a clean and sensible structure, yes, but not fantastically enacted. The fact that Team TARDIS are going to reunite at the mines at the end is essentially a coincidence, Barbarba and David just so happening to make similar decisions to go to the same mine that Ian just so happens to have been dropped off at. The times at which each character makes their decision to go to the mine have also been spread out across the six episodes, never happening at the same time. As such, at no point does the “everyone gets split up; everyone goes back together” structure feel particularly purposeful – we’re watching three functionally random plotlines over the course of six episodes, all of which happen to end at the same place and the same time.

The weekly structure perhaps doesn’t help this thing. Four weeks in, it’s slightly difficult to remember exactly why Barbara and her friend are going to the mines. (To join the rebels there, I think, these presumably being the people Ian hung out with last episode, though there wasn’t a lot of them and do the rebels really want to be hanging out at the entrance of the main place where the Daleks send their political prisoners?) Elsewhere, other parts of the script seem to have been written under the assumption that we would forget things from last week. When did the Doctor recover from his tiredness in order to join Susan and David on their exhibition, for example? It’s not hard to make the narrative jump required here, but it is a change to the status quo that the script is trying to hide in the week between two episodes.

It Must Be the Effect of those Drugs (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P4: “The End of Tomorrow” Review)

Written by Tom

David diffuses the Robomen’s bombs. The Doctor falls asleep. David and Susan go into the sewers where they come into contact with a bunch of rebels. The spaceship Ian’s in lands near some mines where he comes into contact with a bunch of rebels. Barbara and her friend continue their journey across London by stealing a truck from a museum and using it to run Daleks off the roads. The episode ends with Ian being attacked by the Slyther, a thing the Daleks have that’s hanging around the mines.

When writing these essays, serials tends to naturally split themselves into two types. The first are serials which aggressively change their status quo every few episodes, providing new perspectives on their central themes as a way of keeping themselves fresh. The Marinus serial is the obvious example of this style being taken to the extreme, though the Sensorite serial structuring its six episodes as a two-parter and a four-parter also show how this can be used. The second type are serials which very quickly establish a status quo and then provide it for as many episodes straight as the TV schedule requires. The Marco Polo serial really is seven episodes of people moving between several tents in China and nothing else, while the French Revolution serial is six episodes of unsuccessful comedy and French rebels whispering at each other.

From this blog’s point of view, we greatly prefer the first type as these are the serials which give us to the most to write about. Meanwhile, the relative monotony of the second type makes writing about them a real slog – you eventually end up with nothing to do but say “Yes, the positives and flaws we identified in Episode Two are still here”. Which is the problem we’re starting to get with this Dalek Invasion serial. Here’s the serial summarised: “A functional but uninspiring script keeps getting ruined by terrible direction in the studio and saved by some genuinely iconic location footage”. Beyond this, there’s little to do but catalogue the most memorable errors in the studio, complain a bit about the script, and then highlight just how good the location footage is. (For example: The filmed-on-location scene where the human slaves are forced by the Robomen to pull a cart across a train track is genuinely horrific. Alas, this is immediately contrasted by the studio shots of Ian supposedly watching this happen, stood on a hill set that makes no attempt to look like it’s even remotely in the same location.)

I Never Had Any Real Identity (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P3: “Day of Reckoning” Review)

Written by Tom

The human rebels attack on the Daleks doesn’t go well, though at least the Doctor gets removed from the Dalek ship and Ian survives by hiding in the floorboards. Barbara and a few of the remaining rebels travel across London to another rebel base. The Doctor is reunited with Susan and her new friend David; they make plans to go to the rebel base too. Because we need a cliffhanger, some Robomen randomly put a ticking timebomb next to where the Doctor, Susan and David coincidentally happen to be sitting.

Let’s begin with the critiques: there are parts of this episode that are straightforwardly non-functional. The big one is the giant fight between the Human Resistance and the Daleks which starts the episode, formed of a pretty much continuity-less collection of shots in which as many humans as Daleks get visibly killed. We are then informed for three scenes straight that, despite appearances, the fight was actually a curb-stomp battle in which the Daleks massacred pretty much all the humans. Only the rest of the episode is made entirely of an endless supply of rebels popping up out of nowhere to interact with our main cast, all of whom are survivors the battle. It’s all very confused – the script doesn’t really know what it wants to be and the visuals are fighting against the few things it can decide on.

The Daleks themselves aren’t handled particularly well either. One scene requires a Dalek to walk up a ramp, look around, then go back down the ramp. It does this, only it wobbles around an awful lot, manages to back itself into a wall while doing so, and frankly looks unable to slow down as it little more than falls down the ramp. Our readings of the Daleks as being fundamentally absurd creatures can cover a lot, but when the main power of something is coming from its supposedly imposing image, things like this become harder to excuse.

Indeed, you do get the sense that the production team have bitten off more than they can chew here. This feels odd because the production of Doctor Who has often been its strongest element, covering to no shortage of script defects through pure spectacle. There have been several previous serials which are little more than the production team showing off what they can do, ranging from the Marco Polo serial’s lavish recreation of China to the miniturisation serial’s requirement for an awful lot of giant props. And yet the one thing they can’t seem to do is action sequences. This is usually not too much of an issue as Doctor Who tends to be pretty high-concept and talky for an action-adventure series, its occasional fight scenes being used as seasoning in scripts whose focuses are usually elsewhere. But when you have episodes like this which are almost entirely built out of tense action sequences connected by whatever genre bullshit you need to justify the next tense action sequence… for all that this is meant to be a marque Doctor Who serial designed to get the punters in, this is not a story that actually plays to the show’s strengths.

Motorised Dustbins (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P2: “The Daleks” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor and Ian are kidnapped by the Daleks and put in a cell with an intelligence puzzle in it. The Doctor beats the intelligence puzzle easily and thus becomes the Daleks’ next candidate for conversion into a CyberRoboman. Meanwhile, the English Resistance has come up with a new anti-Dalek grenade that they use to storm the Dalek’s ship.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the big set piece of the episode – the thing which is unique to it instead of leading to/from the episodes next to it – is a logic puzzle about refracting light through glass. After successfully reintroducing the Daleks through the second most iconic shot of Doctor Who‘s first year, the script uses them to deliver a half-formed science lecture on refraction, because it’s GCSE science that we’re interested in here and not the apparent end of the world via alien invasion.

Indeed, the Daleks are odd creatures here. Apparently they build their prisons as escape rooms in order to find the cleverest humans. Why? So they can figure out the best candidates for… being turned into mindless android servants. It’s a baroque audition process to say the least, and are we sure that intelligence is the metric they want here?

I Know London and It Isn’t Like This (Doctor Who: The [] Invasion of Earth P1: “World’s End” Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS land in a particularly disused dock in London. Susan manages to twist her ankle and block access to the TARDIS is one action, an act of inconvenience that’s notable even by her standards. Ian and the Doctor go for a walkabout, investigating a nearby warehouse containing androids called Robomen and signs that they’re in the future. Susan and Barbara get caught up with a local militia, going with them to their secret base. The Doctor and Ian returns to the docks, only to be surrounded by the Robomen and one of their masters.

Of course, the main part of this episode that people will remember is the cliffhanger. I’m tempted to ignore it though: there’s going to be a whole five other episodes with which to map out the cliffhanger’s implications and we have a whole other twenty-four minutes of episode to discuss this week. Indeed, the episode makes it quite easy to ignore its cliffhanger given that the thing is not foreshadowed at all – literally nothing of this episode indicates who the serial’s villains are going to be until one of them gets revealed at the end. Is this a fair reading though? Certainly, the Radio Times issue that got released on the same day as “World’s End” broadcast leant on the episode’s cliffhanger pretty hardcore, literally putting the identity of the villain’s on the front cover and dedicating multiple articles to them. Hell, one of the photos on the front cover is literally from the cliffhanger. So a twist ending that comes out of nowhere isn’t what’s happening here. We know what the cliffhanger is going to be from the off. Instead, the strange thing about the preceding twenty-four minutes from an audience point-of-view is just how little everything fits the cliffhanger. Having set up a far future Earth where an army of humans are fighting a group of robot zombies, where the hell are the episode’s villains supposed to fit into the plot?

It’s not that connections to the villain’s first appearance aren’t being made. In the first episode of the villain’s first serial, Team TARDIS ventured out into a petrified jungle defined by its eerie stillness and quiet. What happens in the first episode of their second serial? Team TARDIS venture out into London and find it eerily still and quiet. Throughout the last serial, we also discussed how the villains and their world were partially built out of the iconography of the Cold War and the atomic bomb, the stillness of the petrified forest being the stillness of a post-apocalyptic landscape where all life had been eradicated. Here, this gets ported onto London, the unspoken presence of the villains turning it into what London could become should the Cold War go south. I mean, we even have Robomen, a collection of ordinary people who’ve been turned into zombies through brainwashing, as obvious a metaphor for brainwashed communists as you could expect from the writer of the Key of Marinus. “World’s End” is 100% an It Could Happen Here type story about the British vs. the Soviets.

Down the Overflow Pipe (Doctor Who: Planet of Giants P3: “Crisis” Review)

Written by Tom

During a cliffhanger reprise where everything’s been reshot and is now completely different, we see the Doctor and Susan hide in the sink’s overflow pipe, thus avoiding being drowned. Team TARDIS reunite, try to use the telephone to tell the police about the businessman (it doesn’t work), then decide to just set fire to the shed before legging it. Meanwhile, the businessman rings up the government, pretending to be the civil servant he shot in order to file a fake report extolling the virtues of his dodgy pesticide. He does this terribly though, to the point that the telephone operator gets a policeman involved to arrest the guy. Team TARDIS then return to the TARDIS and reverse the miniaturisation.

Originally, the minitaurisation serial was going to be a standard four episodes long before Verity Lambert had the final two episodes cut down into one. You can see how the original serial would’ve split the material, the business with the phone being episode three and the business with setting fire to the shed being episode four. You can also see why the edits were made – the business with the phone ends up being a complete dud that fails to resolve everything, meaning that the original third episode would’ve been twenty-minutes of literally nothing happening. It’s perhaps not the best when a full quarter of your series’ opening serial does nothing but highlight how pointless it is.

Even with the cuts, this issue still largely exists. The fact remains that Team TARDIS literally do nothing to resolve the pesticide plotline. The phone operator figures out that the businessman is shady on her own, and she’s the one who gets the police officer to turn up and arrest the businessman. At most, Team TARDIS save the businessman’s accomplice from being shot, but even that’s barely worth anything when the policeman arrives and arrests him a few seconds later. After this, everyone runs back to the TARDIS and manage to reverse the shrinking pretty easily without the help of anything from the pesticide plotline, implying that its purpose was really was to just get in Team TARDIS’ way and pad the story to last more than twenty minutes. Much of the plot really has been an exercise in running out the clock with weird stuff in order to fill up the schedule.

Sympathy and Understanding from an Insane or a Criminal Mind (Doctor Who: Planet of Giants P2: “Dangerous Journey” Review)

Written by Tom

The cat walks off. When the businessman and his scientist friend arrive to dispose of the government official’s body, the minaturised Team TARDIS scarper, Ian and Barbara hiding in a nearby briefcase. Alas, it’s this briefcase that the scientist picks up and takes inside his shed/laboratory. Ian and Barbara investigate the lab and figure out that the businessman and scientist are manufacturing overly effective pesticides. The Doctor and Susan climb up a drain pipe to rejoin Ian and Barbara, ending up in a sink. Team TARDIS are almost united, only for them to have to scarper again when the business and scientist reappear. The Doctor and Susan hide in the sink’s drain pipe while the scientist washes his hands. This leads us to the best cliffhanger Doctor Who‘s done so far – a shot of the scientist taking out a sink plug, the credits rolling as the sink slowly drains.

After last week set up a pretty complicated collection of elements, this week’s episode settles into something much simpler, becoming the type of pragmatic “how do we survive this environment” adventure narrative that’s commonplace to Doctor Who by now, albeit in an environment that’s more high concept than usual. This is good for us though as it allows us to look a little deeper at the exact mechanics of how the serial’s absurdism works, something I slightly scrimped on last time in favour of everything else going on in the serial.

Let’s take some examples. Last week, Ian and Susan were made to cower from the sudden blotting out of the sun; a jump cut revealed that this was being caused by a somewhat bumbling government inspector walking past, completely unaware that Ian and Barbara were even there. Last week’s cliffhanger of Team TARDIS being threatened by a cat was resolved by it getting bored and running off. The plot content of this week’s cliffhanger is the Doctor and Susan apparently being violently drowned, but the visual content is a thirty-second shot of a sink draining. Each beat works via a mechanism in which something that is life-threatening to the main characters turns out to also be something completely innocuous from the perspective of a normal sized person. It’s this duality and disconnect that makes the episode specifically absurd – that everything in it is both patently ridiculous and genuinely dangerous at the same time.