Doctor Who spoilers follow.
While we weren't too cut up about seeing the back of the Bogeyman, watching the music-snatching Maestro disappear into the nether regions of that piano felt like much of the wild, ostentatious fun had been sucked out of the Abbey Road studio. The soulless Beatles certainly weren't providing any of it.
Yet as much fun as it is to see Jinkx Monsoon's archly flamboyant god romp through the '60s, does Maestro warrant entry into the Doctor Who annals of villainy? Probably not.
What to Read Next
Maestro, while menacing enough with their smirking devilry, just isn't scary. If anything, they seems like they could make for a very fun companion to the Doctor if they would just chill out a bit and stop trying to turn the whole world into a train's quiet carriage.
It's a similar story with the Bogeyman. Let's put aside the fact that its big snot reveal isn't going to send a chill of fear down the spine, more one of revulsion. And let's discount the ending, which speedily tries to rehab the big booger's image. The issue is that when the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) says he's truly, genuinely terrified of this screaming, snotty entity, we just don't believe him. Because it isn't scary.
We're supposed to feel the Doctor's in peril. But between these two episodes and 'The Giggle', the show has fallen into the clunky habit of the Doctor having to tell us how frightened he is instead of us intrinsically feeling it.
The villainous characters are serviceable enough to pull in talent like Monsoon and Neil Patrick Harris, but the stakes are fundamentally too low. Avid fans know these are one-and-done scaries, who the Doctor will have bested by the time the credits roll.
So by the time we've finally got to grips with who this supposedly scary thing is and what it wants, there's only a little bit of time for the Doctor and Ruby to be supposedly scared and then even less time for them to dispatch of it. Or make friends, in the case of the Bogeyman. Perhaps it's the Disney effect – we can't scare off the kids, after all.
Showrunner Russell T Davies set himself this unenviable villain-of-the-week task. In deciding not to dust off the Daleks and Cybermen this season – and getting in a comment on how Chris Chibnall relied too heavily on them – he's had to conjure up a swathe of new baddies.
"There are no Daleks, there are no Cybermen," Davies said. "I didn't want to look back too much. I do think we've had a lot of Daleks lately, because Chibnall's Christmas specials have all been Daleks, so I think they've been done a lot. I think they need a good pause."
But creating a good villain is hugely difficult. We want them to be genuinely compelling but also terrifying and still capable of being undone by the Doctor without upstaging them. It's probably part of the reason Chibnall kept on wheeling out the Daleks, because even with a plunger appendage, that singleminded "Exterminate!" is scary.
If we turn our attention to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as we do most days, the show created the blueprint for how to nail a villain-of-the-week rhythm while keeping the stakes sharply chiselled. Buffy's catch-all of demons and vampire villains meant we weren't stuck in the never-ending grind of cumbersome-exposition-to-hasty-elimination which Who has found itself in.
Better yet, while Buffy had those weekly skirmishes with various ne'er-do-well demons, there was always something bigger afoot: The Master (not to be confused with The Master), Glory, Spike, Adam. A season always cohered around one Big Bad – the show created the term.
While we've had teases of The One Who Waits as a possible Big Bad for this season of Doctor Who, none of us know what that is and even the Doctor looks fairly uninterested in the specifics for now. So how are we supposed to care?
Doctor Who continues on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ elsewhere.
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
