Written by Nev Fountain and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: Juggling a perhaps too-complex plot, true-crime pastiche, and surprising emotional depth, The Broken Clock is a ballsy script that has no right pulling it all off as well as it does. Mad and exceptional.

Recommended pre-listening: A Spoonful of Mayhem; Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated

***

The old cliche is, of course, that a broken clock is right twice a day. So what does that say about the character of Missy? Is she irreversibly wrong? Or is there a possibility for right in her?

Such a question has made her by far the most compelling take on the Master on TV, reaching a remarkable climax in The Doctor Falls. And here, Nev Fountain examines it from a different angle, with similarly compelling results. As she confesses to fellow ex-soldier Joe Lynwood, she once knew what side of good and evil she existed on, but now, it’s not so clear.

To hit this home, Missy is put in a tentative position of narratory power over a story haunted by iconography from her past lives, namely a mysterious grandfather clock and a man with a pointed beard. While, quite cheekily, neither of these are what they seem to be (no multi-Master shenanigans here), they nonetheless are loaded choices in terms of her emotional development. This post-War Master is haunted by the person she has been, to the point where even just trying to reclaim an old ship is a struggle against the people she has wronged, in this case the ship itself, a humanoid TARDIS named Mark. Sure enough, she does some horrible things here, most exquisitely taunting a security guard over his impending death, and shooting a few actors that may or may not be real. But it’s noteworthy that she also fails to kill Joe in the end. She says to the listener that she’ll let him off the once, but maybe, just maybe, this broken clock is showing right. Or maybe she isn’t quite broken after all.

Adding on the framing device of a cheesy True Crime documentary very nearly destabilizes this mix, one incongrous, bizarre ingredient that threatens to take up all the oxygen. There are, perhaps, a few too many scenes of characters pondering whether they are actors in a recreation or real people, and the story never quites go as far as it could to justify this on a plot level. But on a thematic level, it’s fitting. The questions of subjectivity and narrator control echo across this fractured identity for the woman who was once the Master, and by foregrounding how she gets portrayed as determining who she might be, most deliciously of all in a comedically weak performance by a reenactment actor, Nev Fountain creates the richest portrayal of the Master on audio perhaps ever. As Joe highlights at the end, the murders of this story were, from another angle, no murders at all; subjectivity is king, and no single storyteller shows the whole picture, so instead, let’s embrace the fractal pattern as the truest whole of all.

But beyond that, the narrative device adds something vital to this story: fun. For a rich character study examining trauma and morality, this is gleefully bonkers, with comedic record-scratches, bad accents, arch narration, and catchy diegetic music. As many laughs are to be had here as in the previous episode’s face-off with the Monk, a remarkable achievement in the absence of star quality like Rufus Hound. In short, The Broken Clock is a magnificent achievement, a juggling act of absurdity and depth that perhaps shouldn’t work, but like its star, manages to use both to create something wholly remarkable and memorable.

A hightlight of the year.

10/10