Doctor Who May Have Accidentally Revealed Its Next Big Villain Twist
A character's name could have spoiled a massive villain reveal in the second episode of the new season.
Doctor Who is back and bigger than ever. The next season of the 60-year-old British series will be the most global ever thanks to a plum deal with Disney+, which will premiere as “Season 1” on the streamer, even though it’s technically Season 14. With this new platform comes bigger, more ambitious episode ideas, and they don’t get more ambitious — and quintessentially British — than the second episode, “The Devil’s Chord.”
The episode follows The Doctor, now played by Ncuti Gatwa, as he helps The Beatles deal with a music-based threat in 1960s London. But according to a new quote from the showrunner, there may be more to this episode than meets the eye.
Jinkx Monsoon will play Maestro in “The Devil’s Chord.”
Showrunner Russell T. Davies told Empire Magazine (via RadioTimes) about the process of casting drag queen Jinkx Monsoon to play a new character in the series. “As for Jinkx, she actually stepped off the stage after a Broadway run of Chicago to get straight on a plane to be the character of Maestro in Doctor Who, and I think we can say she enjoyed that part somewhat,” he said. “It’s a performance and a half!”
The reveal that Monsoon’s character name is Maestro immediately started fan speculation. Anyone who knows Doctor Who knows one of his main rivals is a fellow Time Lord called the Master, and “master” in Italian is “maestro.” The name is fitting for a music-based episode — after all, her costume is just dripping with piano imagery — but could she also be the Master in disguise?
It would be a bold move to have a one-episode iteration of the Master, but it’s not unprecedented. In the 2007 Season 3 episode “Utopia,” the character Professor Yana, played by Derek Jacobi, was revealed to be the Master after only one episode when he regenerated into the form of John Simms, who would play the Master for the next few seasons.
Professor Yana should have been a one-off character, but was revealed to be The Master.
Then again, it could always be a misdirect. Doctor Who famously titled the 2008 Christmas special “The Next Doctor,” leading fans to believe it would introduce a future iteration of the Doctor, but it turned out to be a red herring: the character was just an amnesiac man infused with an alien archive of knowledge of the Doctor.
With Doctor Who, anything is possible. But if this season really wants to go bigger and better than ever, what better way than turning who could’ve been a regular one-off episode into one of the most important of the show’s new era? It may just be Monsoon season.
