Sins of the Father

Sins of the Father was a pretty excellent way to cap off The Master of Callous audio set.

This is a nice culmination of everything that had come up until now, and a wonderful take on the Master. I was recommended to start with this series for the War Master and am very glad I did on the whole. The soft, slow, plodding, and often lightly featured presence of the Master across these four stories makes him this wonderfully mysterious figure. We don't get much of an inkling into his plans until the very end and never really get a good sense of his thought process during these stories. Instead, we are consistently shown the effects of his actions. Callous was already a pretty desperate place in a desperate situation with the pretty delightfully villainous benefactor of the colony. The Master just manages to consistently twist things in his favour.

Though, it is hardly easy for him as we see here. It is, in my opinion, the sole but annoyingly persistent flaw to Sins of the Father. It's very heavy on content with the Master being tortured. Now, after a full decade of post-911 American obsession with torture as a topic in fiction, leading to plenty of franchises I would argue rightfully derogated as "torture porn" - I am very sensitive to this type of content. Watching or listening somebody suffer like that is by no definition fun. It is uncomfortable and miserable, and rarely progresses the story or character development in a way that's super meaningful.

Sins of the Father manages to avoid some of these tropes. The fact that the Master enjoys a lot of his torture, and the sinister nature he approaches that, blunts the weight of such a thing. It makes the content far more tolerable than something like how Lost or 24 approached torture, and everything else in the audio set is very, very good. I found the ending stuck with me and it's full of some great moments on the whole. One part that bothered me slightly doesn't invalidate that and I would absolutely recommend this whole audio set - though Master of Callous is flawed in weird little ways, in my opinion, it has so much to offer. It was a very satisfying conclusion, even if I found across all of Master of Callous the audio suite was a little limited in its music selection, though the effects were done quite well.