Doctor Who: The Devil's Chord

 "I thought that was non-diegetic".

The above quote says it all, and the song at the end even more so: this episode has a delightful relationship with the fourth wall. Some will hate this. Personally I love it.This episode is wonderful, witty, crammed with ideas, far more than a mere "celebrity historical" about the Beatles would have been.

The pre-titles is wonderful, establishing the Maestro as a terrible, Godlike figure who emerges out of piano lids and seems beyong the laws of reality. This is a nicely written scene, establishing the awful alternate history that we see.And the Devil's Chord... ah, Black Sabbath.

Ruby is excited to see the Beatles recording Please Please Me in her first tripminto human history... and it's hugely amusing, as well as cleverly avoiding copyright issues, to see the Beatles performing songs that are... rubbish. As has been all music since 1925, causing all sorts of consequences, hence Khruschev threatening Finland, which didn't happen in our timeline. A world without music, the highest art form, inevitably ends in the coldness of nuclear winter.

One may quibble over the mechanics of alternate history. If all good music ended in 1925, that creates many ripples. 1962 is decades later. The world should, perhaps, be different. The Beatles may never have met, or theor parents never met, meaning they would not be born. But... let us not quibble, for alternate histories traditionally fail to consider such things, and the scene where Ruby sees a devastated London in 2023, redolent of Pyramids of Mars, is chillingly effective.

But there's also time to reflect on the fact that the Doctor, in an earlier incarnation, is also here. We get a mention of Susan, the Doctor's grandaugher, to Ruby's amazement... and, heartbreakingly, we learn that she may have died in the "genocide". This is how to use continuity: this is a powerful character moment, not a random bit of fanwank.

And new mythology is being created. Maestro is the Toymaker's child and, like their father, one of the "Pantheon", a series of capricious beings, reminding me of the old Indo-European gods of Olympus or Asgard. I suspect more is to be revealed, but there is an "Oldest One" present at Ruby's birth, and "The One Who Waits" is coming. This, I suspect, is a season arc.

Overall, this episode is a joy. Playful, creative, respectful of the programme's past while looking ahead to its future. And that future appears to be in safe hands.