O que dizer do gênio Robert Shearman, o escritor simplesmente estreou de forma magistral na BIG FINISH apresentando o que é dito por muitos uma das melhores histórias de Doctor Who de todos os tempos. Seu roteiro brilhante alterna entre vários gêneros, começando com uma comédia ousada e hilária que depois sofre uma transição para um terror dramático chegando a um certo nível de brutalidade chocante - Sheaman é um exímio criador de mundos surrealistas tão malucos e as vezes bizarros que são logicamente ilógicos também visto em suas outras obras primas (“Scherzo”, “The Chimes Of Midnight”, “Jubilee”...) podendo considerar isso como sua marca registrada. É impressionante o cuidado preciso existente que por sinal é muito nítido em suas escritas que geralmente traz mensagens em subtexto – No caso de The Holy Terror temos fortes críticas e discussões sobre livre arbítrio, dogmas, tortura, relação entre pai e filho, ciclos abusivos, tradições e principalmente o que as crenças religiosas fanáticas podem causar, rescritas e reinterpretações as vezes atendem a diferentes propósitos e agendas conforme os interesses. “DOCTOR: É inevitável, não importa o quão fundamentalista uma religião possa ser em sua essência, mais cedo ou mais tarde ela será comprometida”. Sua história é ambientada em um mundo pseudo-medieval onde seu povo é liderado por imperadores considerados Deuses eternos assim que provada a divindade do escolhido para cargo, isso é inteligentemente usado como um meio de mostrar ao seu ouvinte o como as pessoas podem vir a ser malucas quando são alimentadas por suas próprias obsessões. O mais genial disso é quando o fator cômico entra nesse cenário, Frobisher - Uma escolha mais que precisa por se tratar de um companion que é um Pinguim 🐧, sim, esse Pinguim 🐧 que pode visualizar na capa do áudio viaja com o Doctor em inúmeras histórias encontradas nas HQs da Doctor Who Magazine. Você deve estar se perguntando, “mas por que um Pinguim 🐧 em especial??” Na verdade, Frobisher é um Whifferdill uma raça extraterrestre que muda de forma física da forma como preferir, por um motivo escolheu de um Pinguim 🐧 “MULTIDÃO: Salve Frobisher! Todos saúdam o grande pássaro gigante!!”
Em resumo, The Holy Terror é um daqueles áudios que entra para o time de obra primas da BIG FINISH, sombrio, brutal, reflexivo e muito instigante. Não é à toa que os fãs discutem esse áudio até hoje que é ESSENCIAL para todo fã de Doctor Who.

Delighted as always to see how popular this one is but unfortunately I have to add myself to the opposing voices on this one. I did not find the comedy all that funny and I simply couldn’t believe or invest in any of the characters.

OF COURSE THIS SLAPS

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

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

“The Holy Terror: A Dark, Disturbing, and Brilliantly Layered Tale”

Robert Shearman’s Big Finish debut The Holy Terror is an unforgettable masterpiece that blends dark humour, horror, and heart-wrenching tragedy into one of the most original and emotionally powerful stories in Big Finish's catalogue. This Sixth Doctor and Frobisher adventure is as bizarre as it is profound, a tale that probes the darkest recesses of human guilt, faith, and the cyclical nature of trauma.

At its core, the story revolves around Eugene’s guilt over murdering his son and his subconscious creation of a castle and its inhabitants, locked in a repetitive cycle of imagined events. This revelation, saved for the climactic moments, recontextualises the entire story, delivering a heartbreaking conclusion that lingers long after the final scenes.

The setting—a surreal mediaeval kingdom defined by its rigid political and religious rituals—is richly atmospheric. Part 1 primarily introduces this world, focusing on courtly machinations and the absurdity of its god-emperor system. Shearman's knack for dark humour shines, keeping the tone light yet unsettling. The Doctor and Frobisher’s late arrival in the episode immediately upends the established dynamic, as Frobisher, a shape-shifting penguin, is mistaken for a god.

The narrative's darker undertones creep in during Part 2 as the Doctor begins to notice inconsistencies in this world. By Part 3, the story takes a chilling turn with the introduction of the disfigured child locked beneath the castle, destined to be the next messiah. From here, the story descends into chaos and horror. The child’s teleportation and ruthless murders turn this into a full-fledged nightmare, and the emotional stakes rise as the truth behind its existence is revealed.

The child is among Big Finish’s most effective antagonists. Its chilling voice, relentless violence, and the tragic nature of its creation make it simultaneously horrifying and pitiable. The sheer emotional weight of the child’s existence elevates the story into a harrowing exploration of guilt and trauma.

Frobisher, a comic-book companion brought to life by Robert Jezek, provides a stark contrast to the story's grim themes. His comedic moments and quirky personality offer a much-needed balance, and his dynamic with Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor is a highlight. Frobisher’s unique nature—a talking penguin—is odd, but Shearman writes him with such charm and depth that he feels like a natural fit in the Doctor Who universe.

The supporting cast is equally strong, with standout performances from Sam Kelly as the beleaguered scribe, Stefan Atkinson as the spineless emperor Pepin, and Peter Soerbutts as the manipulative high priest Clovis. Each character is distinct and vital to the story, even as the narrative grows increasingly chaotic.

Despite the slower pace of the first half, the story’s dialogue and characterisation maintain a compelling sense of mystery. As the narrative unfolds, the escalating tension, horror, and emotional devastation culminate in one of the most haunting finales in Big Finish history.

The sound design and music deserve special mention, with mediaeval motifs adding to the oppressive atmosphere and the chilling sound effects of the child’s murders heightening the horror.

📝Verdict: 10/10

Utterly atmospheric, deeply unsettling, and emotionally shattering, The Holy Terror is an extraordinary achievement. Robert Shearman crafts a Doctor Who story that is as disturbing as it is profound, cementing its place as one of Big Finish’s finest productions. For fans of complex, dark, and emotionally driven storytelling, this is essential listening.