‘Doctor Who’ Did What ‘Yesterday’ Thinks It Did | The Mary Sue

In all of time and space, the Doctor has never met the Beatles. Until now. Doctor Who took the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) to EMI Recording Studios to see the Beatles record their first album but Maestro (Jinx Monsoon) has other plans for the band.

Maestro, who longs for a world without music, sets the seeds in the 20s to ruin what music means to everyone and so when the Doctor and Ruby get to EMI Recording Studios, the Beatles are singing songs that are decidedly not the ones we know from Please Please Me. It then becomes a quest to find the being who took music away from the world and stop them before the song of nuclear winter is all that exists.

Throughout the episode, the Doctor and Ruby are trying to push back against Maestro’s determination to take music from humanity but Ruby is the only one left with a “song in her heart” and it forces Maestro to focus on Ruby and the Doctor first and foremost. But they forget that the Beatles are there and, because Ruby and the Doctor reminded the fab four what music does really mean to them, the Beatles step up when we need them most.

There are moments in “The Devil’s Chord” that reminded us, as the audience, how important the Beatles are to people. Which is, honestly, what the movie Yesterday thought it was doing but got so convoluted that it became a mess instead. And so to see Doctor Who take on the power of the Beatles and nail it, I just felt that much angrier about Yesterday.

Doctor Who did in one episode what Yesterday failed to do in an entire movie

The movie Yesterday poised the question: What would happen to the world if there were no songs by the Beatles? Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is the only man who remembers them (well, seemingly the only man) and he has to share those songs with the world because we are a better place when we have them to listen to.

It is a wonderful concept but the plot of Yesterday gets so murky and then tries to sell John Lennon as a great man who gets to lives a happy little life and it just made me mad. Mainly because I do think that we are a better society when we turn to the messaging in songs by the Beatles and share our love for them and Yesterday did not really sell that idea to me.

Doctor Who poised the question of the Beatles not making those songs and then, in the end, they saved the world themselves. Maestro was up against the wall with the Doctor trying to find the hidden chord to banish them. But when the Doctor gets it wrong, Maestro believes they’ve won and traps Ruby and the Doctor in instruments.

It takes John Lennon finding the chord and joining together with Paul McCartney to finish it, ending Maestro and effectively saving the world from the nuclear winter that Maestro promised. Watching the Beatles come together and save us, in the same way that Jack’s performance of the songs were doing, made me overly emotional about my love for the band.

And that’s what I wanted Yesterday to do for me but it got so lost in its own lore that it just made Jack the most important man on the planet and it was less about the power of these songs. (Himesh Patel is innocent, you were perfect babe.)

So thank you, Doctor Who. I wish my dad was still alive to see a Scottish Doctor joining forces with the Beatles to save us all.