The Devil's Chord

I've loved this series so far with "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" but this episode was just lacking. I'm a big fan of Jinkx Monsoon and her singing but this role did not work for her. I couldn't tell if it was the writing, acting, or a mix of both but Maestro wasn't a scary villain, just annoying and frankly cliche. The whole episode felt bland, even when music was in the world. It was a long and boring ride that barely kept me awake. There was no point to The Beatles being in it except to provide a reason for the Maestro to get entangled with the Doctor and Ruby and for writers to be able to drop non discreet references every 5 seconds. The ending was confusing and the way they beat Maestro was lacking depth and the climatic element were all used to getting from Doctor Who.

Go back to the stories you used to tell Russell.

Sorry Guys but as someone that has followed Doctor Who from the 70's and actually watched every episode ever shown on television (including the very first episode before I was born), I have to say I was looking forward to Ncuti and Ruby taking the next step in the series but you absolutely ruined it for me, The stories (not the 3 pre Xmas ones) of the first 2 episodes with them were not up to par. I hope for the sake of the series it gets a whole lot better or I unfortunately will be sad to stop watching Doctor Who for the first time in over 50 years. Please dont continue with the poor story lines.😥

Performance of the main villain is unforgetable, mainly because I will not get it out of my head how terrible it was - just yelling, screaming and making weird facial expressions. Not just the villain, but everyone, including the Doctor and Ruby, is acting poorly - they are either screaming like teenage girls, yelling or crying with a lot of tears.

Dialogues are rudely primitive, lacking that kind of intelligent and witty humour that was so characteristic for Doctor Who in the first Russel T Davies era.

Story and the plot is very non-sensical, it lacks any real meaning and the resolution very illogical.

It had its moments, but a bit disappointing overall. Problems: Beatles, especially Paul really didn't look much like the people they were playing. The plot seemed a bit disjointed. There really wasn't enough research into the era, which led to some anachronisms; the big one was the women's clothing - this was supposed to be set in 1963, but the miniskirt didn't surface until 1966. (X-men and the Man From Uncle film made the same mistake!). The men's clothes were better. I can't say I'm a big fan of turning it into a musical. Overall, it could have been better than it was without a lot of extra work.

The Doctor and Ruby travel back to the 1960's, and meet The Beatles.

Definitely an improvement over Space Babies, a very creative and imaginative storyline, well executed, with some exuberant performances.

Some exquisite imagery, scenes of a future, devastated Earth looked terrific. Ncuti and Millie looked fabulous in their sixties outfits.

Very Disney at times, but you can definitely see that there's some money being spent on this show.

I wish they'd gotten together a quartet that resembled The Beatles a little bit more, they just weren't right somehow.

Jinkx Monsoon, as camp and over the top as you'd expect, and as we all know The BBC loves A drag Queen, but Jinx did a good job, I'm sure there'll be more to come, I enjoyed the character.

Was that a Susan Foreman reference?

7/10.