MR 029: The Chimes of Midnight

TW: discussion of suicide

It's a damn classic for good reason right? Rob Shearman can cook. The Holy Terror was already the best audio so far and now Rob has surpassed himself with this all time classic. This is incredibly nostalgic for me. I remember at the time, years and years ago, thinking that Shearman was my favorite Doctor Who writer... EVER, and being disappointed that he hadn't done any Doctor Who in a long time and probably won't ever again. Sad.

Anyway, this audio is well loved so everyone knows what happens. But for the sake of it:

The Doctor and Charley land downstairs in an old Victorian manor. It seems to be frozen in time and there's some excellent scenes of things unhappening after the Doctor and Charley cause them to happen. As Charley says, something seems to be preventing them from making any impression. That is, until the chime of 10 PM when they get drawn into the world. This is where things go insane.

The staff of the house are people you'd expect: the cook, the chauffer, the butler, and the lady's maid. But they're all particularly mean towards one person in particular: the scullary maid: Edith Thompson. They way they're mean to her in particular is strange. The cook disapproves of her saying something that everyone else and she herself says. The meme line! Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without my plum pudding!

The staff behave very oddly in general. They seem to be in their own little story and, without missing a beat, they adapt the Doctor and Charley into their story.
This is where Rob Shearman's interest in deconstructing tropes and narrative comes into play, as he did with The Holy Terror. The story plays out like a little murder mystery. First Edith gets murdered and then the cook. The other people see the Doctor and Charley as detectives here to solve the murders, but their answers to basic questions are bizarre. The butler continues to insist the murders are suicide as well. Their answers seem almost like talking to an AI. It's eager to get back on script and to repeat the same lines over and over again in different formats in ways that don't seem quite human. It's amazing that Shearman captures that feeling of talking to an AI decades before that technology existed. It makes everything seem bizarre and dream like. They're doing this strange story over and over again, sinking into their roles as it goes on. The chauffer and lady's maid killed the cook to get her out of the way because she plans to turn them in for their love affair. No actually they're not in love because the lady's maid is now the scullery maid since Edith doesn't exist and a chauffer can't be in love with a scullery maid. Now it's the chauffer who's been killed, and the lady's maid is crying over it but just kidding she's just a scullery maid so obviously they were never in love to begin with.

The murders are always bizzare, as the Doctor says, parodies of death. The cook is stuffed with her own plum pudding. Edith drowns in the dish water and then suffocates from a plunger on her face. The chauffer gets run over by a car in the middle of the parlor. Always something to do with their job.
Some force is running this little farce over and over and over again killing them one at a time, each time the clock resetting at the chime of midnight and starting over again at 10PM with someone being killed and then someone else being killed at 11 PM. The mysterious force works Charley into it as well, making her into a lady of the house and the Doctor into a detective. It prevents the Doctor from leaving the house, going outside or going upstairs. In a particularly funny bit, the Doctor tries to go upstairs and talks to the mysterious force, saying he's going upstairs and that it needs to stop him, waiting for someone to come along until the butler comes along with a gun on him.

In the meantime, as Charley is being integrated into the story as a member of the upstairs household, she's been getting bizarre visions from Edith talking about how she's died. The Doctor even gets scared and tries to run away, but he can't. The TARDIS interior changes dramatically back into the scullery, the force integrating the TARDIS into the story too. It all culminates when they realize the house is alive. It's been controlling everyone and killing them over and over again, becoming more alive with each death. It's going to maintain that thread of life that it has as much as it can.
It was given life by, as it turns out, Charley. Edith Thompson was cook in Charley's house when she was a little girl. Charley doesn't really remember her, but Edith remembers Charley as her best friend, which is so sad. Nobody was ever kind to Edith, not when she was a scullery maid and not when she was a cook, so when Charley apparently died in the R101 crash, she took her own life, overwhelmed with grief that the one person who had ever been nice to her died. It's so depressing that this person was never shown kindness at all except from one child who smiled at her. And that was it. When the Doctor and Charley landed in this house and saw Edith before she was a cook, they created a paradox. Charley is now in this timeline alive and dead. And so Edith is now alive and dead. She both did and didn't take her own life. This paradox gives the house life and allows it to create this little time and space loop for itself, giving itself life.

Charley can feel her death. She can feel the flames and hear the screams as the R101 crashes with no escape. But she also is still alive. Edith encourages Charley to die with her, as they should have. But Charley and Edith both choose life, which destroys the entire loop and the house's attempt at life.

That whole sequence: the Doctor appealing to Charley that he needs her and she needs him, that they're a team, literally had me in tears. It's the reason we watch Doctor Who. I live vicariously through Doctor Who and so it meant a lot to me as someone who doesn't really have any friends, this is just what I do, I listen to and watch Doctor Who. The Doctor is my friend and I go on adventures with him. It's saved me from killing myself multiple times. So hearing him appeal to that made me ugly cry.

Not to mention the very end when the loop is destroyed and they see Edith as a scullery maid. Charley tells her that she's not nobody and not no-one. She's special as she is.
This story truly is something special and it's deeply nostalgic for me. It takes me right back to that time when I was in college listening to Doctor Who for the first time and being entranced by the possibility of what these stories could be. It's crafted with care by someone who deeply understands and loves Doctor Who. It also really shows Shearman's love for exploring narrative and tropes. Like The Holy Terror, it starts out comic in its explorations of the absurd nature of these narratives and then turns out extremely dark and tragic. Like I said, his dialogue when he's still in comic mode feels like an AI repeating the same phrases and trying to get the listener on track with the story. And then the shift into dark tragedy feels so natural and so real. The house's voice seems like it could be silly in any other story, but it actually does feel threatening here juxtaposed with Edith talking about killing herself.

And who else could have pulled off a story like this but the Eighth Doctor and Charley? Charley is intimately involved with this story in a way that most companions in classic aren't. This woman whose death sparked the story killed herself BECAUSE of Charley. It's this darkly gothic feeling, of the clock ticking over, of the death that caused all this, of the bizzare way the staff talk and act, all of it feels very Eighth Doctor in his romantic period. Like a weird dream that you can't quite escape. A dream that pulls you into it and makes you part of it.
There's so many fantastic visuals in this story. From the very beginning when time rewinds and things unhappen, Charley being pulled to talk to Edith in another weird reality, the house itself, the weird deaths, the TARDIS changing into the scullery the second hand on the clock whirring forwards, the resets. This would make a really fantastic filmed story, of all audio stories. I don't know if it would ever be as good as the version we all have in our heads, but it would be interesting to see how it would get adapted to screen.

This is the peak of what Doctor Who audio can be as far as I'm concerned. I love audio dramas quite a lot. I'm more of a Doctor Who audio fan than tv show fan. I enjoy most audio stories I've heard. But I don't think any of them have ever surpassed Chimes of Midnight, and I don't think any ever will. This is not only the greatest Doctor Who audio drama, this might be the greatest Doctor Who story ever made. All from one of the most talented writers we've ever seen.