The Holy Terror

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: The Maltese Penguin

I find it really surprising that this is one of only two audio stories to feature Frobisher in them. This story starts off quite funny, much like The Maltese Penguin it's very self-aware and I really love the idea of a civilisation that have such rigid traditions that they even perform assassination attempts ritually. It's quite an interesting commentary on religion in general. The first half does start to drag a bit with mostly the same jokes about how odd the society is, but it really picks up with the introduction of the evil baby God (one of the strangest sentences I've typed doing these reviews). The way all the characters begin to challenge their traditions towards the end was quite impactful. The twist that the castle was actually a self-made torture chamber that was endlessly looping was fantastic and quite dark. It reminded me a lot of Heaven Sent and I wouldn't be surprised if this is where some of the inspiration for that came from.

Next Story: Real Time

08.05.2022

A must-listen. I enjoyed it immensely. A wonderfully creative premise and a conclusion worth the setup. I am also a sucker for a meta-narrative.

Frobisher is a refreshing companion. Yes, the penguin. He brings a dynamic that is missing (almost) from the main show - the selfish coward companion. Him and Six are great together. This also works perfectly fine as an introduction to both Six and Frobisher, making it a perfect entry point for BF.

Probably a safe 5/5

This is a solid comedy story with some great moments and a good plot. The idea is interesting.

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.

The Monthly Adventures #014 - "The Holy Terror" by Robert Shearman

Doctor Who is my favourite show for a very good reason. It is, in my opinion, the greatest sandbox for creative minds ever conceived, a concept so good you could write any story inside of it, set in any time with any genre, and it could feasibly work given it was penned by a decent writer. Any story could come out of Doctor Who and sometimes, once in a blue moon, you get a masterpiece. “Masterpiece” can be used to describe the entire body of work by Robert Shearman. My favourite writer of all time, author of some of my favourite stories of all time and seemingly and all around great guy, this will not be the last you hear of Robert Shearman during this marathon and it will certainly not be the most gushing (I think this is the worst of his works in The Monthly Adventures). A surreal psychological horror that boasts one of Big Finish’s funniest scripts and a weird f**king story to boot, this is The Holy Terror.

In an empire where God has died, leaving his son to be crowned his successor, the Doctor and his Whifferdill-companion Frobisher have arrived and are hailed as messengers from heaven. But a plot to usurp the throne and a great evil in the castle’s crypts threaten to end the very world itself.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The Holy Terror is a very unique story, even amongst Shearman’s own body of work. His stories always have a very dry, black-as-night comedy underlying them but here, the comedy is front and centre, and it really works. This audio is absolutely hilarious, there were some very full on laugh out loud moments for me, especially early on. I mean, the whole story begins when the TARDIS goes on strike because Frobisher had been abusing its power too much, which is a funny concept by itself but every single character here has one or two quirks that makes them comedic gold. In fact the whole sidecast is on top form; a side cast can often make or break a story with me (even if the story’s good, I don’t want to be stuck with dull characters) but every single cast member of The Holy Terror is their own brand of bizarre and it really works, the story takes itself seriously enough for these very out there personalities to not become caricatures, and this helps when the audio shifts in tone towards the end. Added to our roster of characters is Frobisher, a companion from the comics as this is our second “side-step” following The Shadow of the Scourge, and I’ll say it outright, Frobisher might be the best part of this audio with a brilliant vocal performance lending itself to the character - a large amount of the laughs came from him. And whilst The Holy Terror is a comedy at heart, it’s no surprise that Shearman twists this quirky misadventure into something that’ll scar you for life. The third act change in tone is something that really shouldn’t work, the rest of the story is so light and now you have people being literally ripped apart and aged backwards into an infant before being violently murdered, and yet it works. Probably because the humour was already a little bleak but it still is quite astounding how Shearman manages to not alienate the listener. It’s basically revealed that the brother to the emperor - Childeric - has been raising a child god in the depths of the castle, though this child breaks free from his “father” and begins to slaughter everybody in the building. It’s then revealed that the Child is in fact the son of the court scribe, and the entire castle is a fiction created by him to punish himself for murdering said child in the real world. Utterly bizarre twist but it really works in the context of the story, much like everything else this audio tries to do. This final part is so oddly sad, you have Sejanus’ outburst at Frobisher and Eugene finally confronting his son, choosing to kill himself rather than his child, ending the prison’s cycle and leaving Six and Frobisher to have no choice but to quietly depart. It’s incredibly bleak but, once again, it just works. Like, incredibly well, this final part is genuine perfection, I love every single bit of it.

Which is why it also damages the story a little. I said before this is my least favourite of Shearman’s works and I stand by that, mostly because I think the end eclipses the rest of the story. I like the first half but it doesn’t hold a candle to the third act and a lot of the narrative feels like it builds up to this moment rather than a story unto itself. However, I will mention that I didn’t love the Child because you could tell it was an adult voicing him, just with the pitch heightened and that got very annoying very quickly.

The Holy Terror is utter brilliance, a surreal horror story that can make you laugh out loud and then leave you shaking. I think that one part outweighs the rest in terms of quality, and that causes the first half to become a little meandering in my opinion, but it’s Robert Shearman, he’s a hard man to criticise. The best is still very much yet to come, and I can’t wait to talk about it.

9/10

Pros:

+ Frobisher is an incredibly fun character backed by a great performance

+ Genuinely really funny, Shearman gets flex his comedy muscles a lot here

+ The macabre, bizarre tone is very unique and makes this audio stand out

+ Has an incredibly memorable and colourful cast of characters

+ Great third act shake-up that redirects the tone

+ Sombre and surprisingly moving ending

+ The medieval castle turned torture chamber is a brilliant setting

+ Shockingly harrowing and bleak, especially when the first half was so funny

Cons:

- The final act is significantly better than the first two

- The Child’s voice got really grating really quickly

❤️100% = Masterpiece! = Essential!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

THE ONE WITH THE TALKING PENGUIN!

Robert Shearman’s Big Finish debut immediately leaves a strong impression: this is an imaginative, bizarre, scary (and eventually heartbreaking) tale of religion, political intrigues, emotional turmoil, and the intricacies of human minds. By the end of the story, Shearman unveils the full extent of his clever plotting and the different layers of his narrative, revealing how Eugene, in an attempt to cope with his terrible crime of murdering his son, has trapped the castle and all its imagined inhabitants in a loop of repeated events.

Part 1 is very focused on the guest cast and the political and religious intrigues of this strange and eerie kingdom. Shearman brilliantly combines dark humour with a constant air of unease, and the mediaeval-style music helps to maintain the atmosphere while the actors go all in on their performances. At the end of Part 1, the Doctor and Frobisher arrive on the scene, and everyone believes Frobisher to be a god.

Part 2 continues to develop the political scheming, while the Doctor slowly begins to realise how certain things don’t make sense, which adds to the sense of foreboding. The story suddenly becomes more sinister and intense in Part 3, as we discover the disfigured child locked deep below the castle, destined to become a new messiah.

In the second half of this story, chaos reigns. The scary child teleports around the castle, murdering every single character, and its sheer presence turns this story into an unnerving horror tale before we learn the heartbreaking and emotionally devastating reason behind everything.

The child remains one of the scariest, saddest, and most effective villains Big Finish has ever created. Its voice is chillingly scary, and its cold, murderous ways are horrifying to follow, but the dark and depressing truths behind its existence make it a character you feel bad for.

Frobisher is a fun character. There’s something bizarre about him being a penguin (or a mesomorph), but he’s such a colourful and funny character that fits the Sixth Doctor perfectly. Robert Jezek goes a long way toward infusing him with a genuine personality.

There are many voices here, and the story surprisingly finds plenty of room for every character to stand out. Of particular note are Sam Kelly's court scribe, Stefan Atkinson’s gutless emperor Pepin, and the Peter Miles-soundalike Peter Soerbutts as the scheming high priest Clovis.

Despite the slow pace of the first half, Shearman writes his characters and dialogue in such a way that he maintains a good air of mystery to keep the listener engaged. What I love about The Holy Terror is that it steadily grows more tense, scary, and emotionally brutal.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

The talking penguin Frobisher, who joins Six on this adventure, was first introduced in a 1984 Doctor Who Magazine comic strip.

In a similar vein to The Shadow of the Scourge, this release is part of Big Finish’s Side Steps arc, which takes place in an alternative continuity developed elsewhere in Doctor Who's extended media.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Utterly atmospheric, creepy, and devastating, The Holy Terror remains one of the finest pieces of performed Doctor Who ever released.