DOCTOR WHO, MONTHLY ADVENTURES:

8th Doctor #6 (#29 Overall)

THE CHIMES OF MIDNIGHT

Doctor: Eighth (Paul McGann)

Companion: Charley

April 2023

Cover image for The Chimes of Midnight: the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard (India Fisher)'s faces superimposed on a faint clock face pointing to nearly midnight. Also visible is a large English manor house with light from its windows. The image is dark blue/black in tone. Text reads: Starring Paul McGann in DOCTOR WHO; The Chimes of Midnight; with India Fisher as Charley'.

The Chimes of Midnight is, for my money, one of the best Doctor Who stories ever.

I’m coming to this off the back of Storm Warning as my second audio story, as well as my second story with the Eighth Doctor and Charley. And it definitely is a story that you should listen to after having listened to Storm Warning, because it builds on some stuff in there.

I’m going to have a hard time writing this review because frankly, this is one of those stories that I think should be listened to without any prior knowledge of its plot. So uh. Go do that! It’s like $3 on Big Finish and you can listen to it while knitting or something. It’s really good. But do be warned, if you’re sensitive to topics of suicide, definitely make sure you’re in a good place to listen to it. It’s worth it. But it did make me cry.

Finished? Great! Now for the review.

Spoiler Thoughts:

The first episode actually reminds me of, more than anything else, the first episode of The Space Museum, with the First Doctor—our travelers arrive at a mysterious place where they can’t seem to make any changes, and work out that it’s due to something weird in the timeline. But where The Space Museum shifted into a more by-the-numbers (if quite excellent) First Doctor sci-fi story, The Chimes of Midnight stays weird through the end, and it pulls it off brilliantly.

The entire sense of creeping mystery throughout even the first three out of four parts is executed so well (“It was suicide, then!” “It isn’t Christmas without my plum pudding!”) and frankly I didn’t know it was possible to have such an effective horror in a purely audio format. I listened to this while alone in the back room of a library, so uh. It was effective.

The performance of Edward Grove is a little bit over-the-top for my tastes, but really it doesn’t matter that much, because of how excellently the entire mystery is unraveled by the end. I do find it...interesting? That the Doctor tries to convince a house to commit suicide. It’s sort of a weird angle for the Doctor to take — I mean, it makes sense in context, because of the fact that its “life” is based entirely upon the time-looped deaths of several people, as well as the fact that it’s only able to “live” for seconds at a time. But it is a strange note, if not a terribly immersion-breaking one.

The entire setup is brilliant, also, delightfully skewering the whole drawing-room mystery like an Agatha Christie. It also feels like a rather sharp criticism of the servant and class dynamics of Edwardian Britain in a way that I'm quite fond of. And, of course, it all comes together into a climax that really made me cry. I always feel like Doctor Who’s best message is that one life matters for all the world, and god damn but I felt that here. It’s a brilliantly done story.

Overall Thoughts:

Listen to this story! Listen to Storm Warning, then listen to this one! Maybe toss another one in the mix if you want but you don’t need to. The hype is well-deserved: this is the best Doctor Who story I have listened to/watched since...jeez, I don’t know. It’s really that good. It’s so good!!!

I’m tempted to go back now and listen to another one of the stories that has come between this and Storm Warning, just to get a better feel for these two—I like them a lot! But I also want more of them. So before we go to Seasons of Fear, I might skip back to one of the other in-between stories that’s supposed to be pretty good—maybe The Sword of Orion? Or The Stones of Venice? Or maybe Invaders from Mars, that one comes directly before this. I want to experience more of Charley going to wild new places, I think.