MR 014: The Holy Terror

For real, this is a f**king masterpiece from beginning to end. What the hell. Robert Shearman does a masterful job going between comedy and tragedy and wrotes both expertly. This is simultaneously one of the funniest audios so far and one of the most horrifying audios so far. The previous audio, Shadow of the Scourge, was horrifying in a much more direct way. This is horrifying in a more psychological way, although there certainly is a fair bit of gore.

This one, definitely, requires a spoiler tag. Please don't read if you haven't listened to it, thank you.

The TARDIS lands in a castle where a highly ritualised society is appointing its next god emperor. Every time the god emperor dies, they start a new religion with the new god emperor and the scribe has to write down everything the new god emperor does in the holy bible of the new religion. A lot of the humor comes from the idea that the rituals are all completely ridiculous and tropey. The previous empresses gets executed as a heretic. The emperor to be is always unsure of himself and thinks he's not a god. The emperor to be's wife is always bitter and angry that he isn't sure of himself. The younger bastard son always plots against him with the high priest and emperor to be's wife. There's always a ritualistic assassination attempt directly after the coronation. These characters are tropey and silly BECAUSE THEY'RE MEANT TO BE THAT WAY.

Compounded to this silliness is that the Doctor's companion is a talking penguin. Or, more accurately, a shapeshifter who likes to look like a penguin. Frobisher gets named as the new god when the emperor to be gets cold feet and renounces his godship. Frobisher then tries to enact democratic reforms which don't go super well (the people would like to know which candidate you'd like them to pick).
Things start to go off script when the younger bastard son has his own son locked in the deepest depths of the dungeons. This five year old child is all powerful and proceeds to start murdering everyone in the castle in pretty horrific ways. It murders and destroys everything as the Doctor realizes what it is. What it's been all along. The child is a device meant to torture the scribe. The scribe built this place and created these characters and this society to torture himself for pointlessly murdering his own son. The child appears when the society no longer makes sense, he kills it, and then the whole thing gets reset. Only this time he's going to break the cycle, destroy the world forever.

This horrific twist is what gives such pathos to the story. The rituals were silly BECAUSE THEY WERE WRITTEN THAT WAY so that the scribe, Tacitus, could get lost in the fantasy and forget his horrific crime. The one dimensional characters get such fantastic emotional dialogue with each other. The empress who is supposed to always hate her son finally figures out that maybe she doesn't hate him after all. The evil high priest tries to not be evil for once. The guards figure out that Frobisher is not really a god when he can't help them survive. It's all fantastic stuff and very well played by everyone involved, ESPECIALLY the person playing Tacitus who plays the child and himself as the child kills him instead of him killing the child, ending the cycle and destroying the prison forever.
The final emotional stinger comes when Frobisher, who had created a digital fish at the beginning of the story, relates the suffering of the fish being hunted to the suffering of the people in the castle. They weren't real. They were holograms created to help Tacitus escape what he'd done. But they felt real. They had lives and emotions of their own. The fact that they weren't real didn't matter to them.

This story is a masterpiece, as you should expect from Robert Shearman. It's a masterclass in comedy and a masterclass in tragedy and a masterclass in how to flip that comedy into a tragedy in a believable and impactful way. All of the actors, too, were fantastic. This is the first Main Range I actually fully remember from when I heard it over a decade ago and there's a very good reason for that. Easily the best story so far and I can't wait to hear the other Robert Shearman stories in the main range again.