While I liked this, it was probably the weakest of the run (4.5/5 instead of 5/5)

These are not big issues, but they're annoying, so I am going to spend a lot of time on them:

Weirdly, I think the weakest parts were the bits with the Doctor. Obviously, Tom Baker's performance was great, but it felt like whenever he's around, the story's priorities changed. The writer stops caring about telling the story he's been telling for the past 2 hours, and is just writing fun lines for the human man Tom Baker to say. There's this weird thing that expanded universe writers will do whenever they're making more than a passing reference to a tv story, where they'll have the doctor stop and reminisce and give a full summary of the story, regardless of plot relevence. The other characters don't care. Most of the audience of a Big Finish story featuring the 4th Doctor and Morbius have already seen The Brain of Morbius and know all this, and the rest don't care. It feels like the only reason it's there is because fans get a nostalgia hit hearing Tom Baker say Solon

This kind of thing does have an impact on the story itself. I'm still not totally clear on why the Horn of Rassilon summons the Doctor, rather than Rassilon, but hey, we get that awkward conversation where two people who've never met the doctor before have to try and naturalistically prompt him to explain where he is in relation to his TV timeline

Again, these are minor issues, and most of the story is great, I just can't shake the feeling that Tim Foley got a little distracted by continuity once the doctor showed up, and the story suffers slightly for it

“Favorite story across all of Doctor Who in any medium” is a difficult concept for me. My mind tends to sort things more like a tier list than an itemized ranking. If I had to pick one right now, as I write this, it would probably be the 8th Doctor book “The Blue Angel”. It’s wild and bold and experimental and weird, and it just works.

Sometimes stories are “weird” because they have weird images, like a giant owl attacking a shopping mall, or a man with a glowing green elephant for a head. Sometimes stories are “weird” because they have weird structural elements, like having fully half of a book taking place in a parallel universe where there’s no sci-fi elements and the Doctor and companions all share a house and oh no the overnight frost has just killed all their flowers. “The Blue Angel” does both of those and more. The roommate AU is effectively framed as the A-plot, and is somehow even more surreal than the stuff with the giant owls and the elephant man (you know, the stuff that’s actually happening in the canon universe), even when the B-plot decides to devote significant time to being a Star Trek parody. Anyway, “The Devil’s Chord” is this, but for TV.

To me, Doctor Who should always be experimenting, pushing boundaries, breaking rules. That’s why I love the wilderness era so much, you don’t get much weirder or more experimental than that. The thing is, once you’ve pushed a boundary, the boundary’s moved, so you have to go even farther to push it again and again. The ideal Doctor Who story doesn’t feel like a Doctor Who story. Like “The War Valeyard”, or “All of Time and Space”, or “Heaven Sent”, or “Scherzo”, it should take you on a journey from “What could that collection of words possibly mean?” through “Wait, you can do that?”, before ending on “This is one of the greatest things I’ve ever watched/listened to/read/consumed.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like “World Enough and Time” and “The Caves of Androzani” and all that, I can appreciate good writing, it’s just… It’s like the 12th Doctor book “Big Bang Generation”. I can accept that, objectively speaking, it’s not good, but it gives me a feeling that I can only describe as mixing all the flavors at a soda fountain. It’s an assault on the senses, and it gets points for that. I believe the word I’m looking for is “maximalist”.

Is “The Devil’s Chord” technically better written than any of the other stories I mentioned? No, of course not, it’s a collection of cool scenes that just kind of approximate a finished story. But for me, there’s just something special about a story whose synopsis is “Yes”.

This book is brilliant, if you can get past the way it continually sexualizes its lead female character. That's a lot easier to push past in the last act of the book, where she's over 18. This book really only has one flaw, but it's about the single most significant flaw a book can have.