#72 Doctor Who: The Chimes of Midnight

My Randomoid Selectortron loops around a few times then zooms away to...

The Chimes of Midnight

Starring: Paul McGann as the Doctor and India Fisher as Charley Pollard
Format: Four half-CD-length full-cast episodes
Silly? Yes
Standalone? No. Details of how Charley joined the Doctor in Storm Warning are necessary for the resolution.
Recommended? Yes. This story is not as high in my own esteem as it is in that of many Big Finish fans, but it is well worth its price point.

My reaction to this story contains spoilers for it, Storm Warning, and possibly other Charley Pollard audios.

Before listening

I've listened to this one at least three times. It's often held up as writer Rob Shearman's masterpiece, but I prefer Jubilee over it myself. It is a farcical time-loop story in which the British class system is symbolically made manifest with a sentient house as its avatar. The mechanics of the temporal paradox at the heart of the story really don't work, beyond a general idea that if you break time, literally anything can happen including things that make no sense. Some of the events do have an internal logic to them, but in a Surrealist way rather than a science-fiction way. Like Shearman's The Holy Terror, much of what happens is akin to a stage play in which the Doctor and companion are just present as observers.
Time loops are reasonably common in Doctor Who, but I wasn't expecting to hit two time loop stories in a row, and the juxtaposition of this with Gallifrey: Square One might lead to interesting observations. I'm looking forward to giving it a listen. I'll probably listen to more than one episode at a go, since it's a nice day for a walk today and it might rain tomorrow.

After listening

At the start of this story, I was surprised by the eighth Doctor's characterization: he is happy to be in a situation where he doesn't have all the answers and gets to exercise curiosity. The enthusiasm of the Doctor at the start of this episode is greatly in contrast to later Paul McGann audios, and this story is itself maybe a turning point in his character arc. As he realizes the potential stakes of what's happening, he concludes it's not a mystery worth solving and decides simply escaping is preferable. However, while many forms of logic are awry in this story, some of the logic of Doctor Who plotting remains intact, and there's no escaping without solving the mystery first. The Doctor who eventually emerges from this story is a bit wearier than the one that went into it, and further events in his life increase that weariness bit by bit.
The early TV adventure The Space Museum has some relevance here: the Doctor and Charley arrive outside of the normal timestream, observing but not interacting, until timelines line up such that they arrive properly. However, where The Space Museum had a simple TARDIS malfunction to blame, the temporal anomalies of The Chimes of Midnight are causally more complex.
Time, as a concept, is famously loose in Doctor Who. For example, even though a clock operates on the same physical principles as any other device, a time anomaly is likely to affect a clock differently from anything else simply because a clock is a device for measuring time. This is a story in which that sort of thing is common.
The causality of the story does not entirely work from a mechanistic cause-and-effect perspective, but the essence of it is that the Doctor rescuing Charley in Storm Warning altered the timeline in a way that is causing various problems, and somehow these problems are backdating to well before the actual point of timeline change. This is part of an arc that comes to a head a few eighth Doctor audios later and then continues to echo slightly throughout Charley Pollard's continuity.
I still think Jubilee is the better Rob Shearman audio, but the first three episodes of The Chimes of Midnight are excellent and the lack of a mechanically satisfying conclusion in the fourth episode does not invalidate them. This is worth listening to.