When the TARDIS lands in a forbidding castle, the Sixth Doctor and his penguin shaped companion, Frobisher, find themseleves hailed as gods!
When the TARDIS lands in a forbidding castle, the Sixth Doctor and his penguin shaped companion, Frobisher, find themseleves hailed as gods!
THE HOLY TERROR
Having tested the waters of the so-called “side step” with The Shadow of the Scourge’s foray into the NA universe, Big Finish next turned its attention to the DWM comic strips, bringing the sixth Doctor’s shapeshifting companion, Frobisher, into the audio realm. Unfortunately, the mere concept of this combination drove potential customers away in droves, as they presumably expected a mindless throwaway comedy story — but nothing could be further from the truth.
Award-winning playwright Robert Shearman’s first offering for the range offers an intelligent, darkly-humorous take on the nature of religion, yet retains a classical Doctor Who sense throughout. The opening scenes send the listener into quasi-Python territory, with Spanish Inquisition-esque gags about torture and repentance. As the play progresses, however, these scenes are revealed to be much more serious than first perceived; this darkly satirical examination of the nature of religion-driven society creeps up on the listener rather than being patently obvious — despite the obvious nature of the initial jokes. Pepin’s complete hopelessness is highly amusing, while Clovis’ stereotypical nature is underscored to great effect by the script.
Yet the true excellence of The Holy Terror is its skill at managing tones. While the first two episodes are comedic — indeed, the first cliffhanger has something of a gag resolution — the final two abruptly change the tone of the play from comedy to horror. Childeric’s plan, rooted in the theory of the “divine language,” does not mesh with the tone of his environment — it quickly becomes apparent that his experiment with the child is breaking stereotype, something which feels extremely threatening in the world of the castle. The release of Tacitus’ son is terrifying, the humor rapidly departing the play as the slaughter continues. Finally, the conclusion, in which the whole of the environment is revealed to be a torture device for a mad old man who has murdered his son, is heartbreaking, Eugene turning his son’s knife on himself with the Doctor and Frobisher powerless to stop it. By the time the Doctor’s opening admonition to Frobisher has been turned back upon him and the credits have rolled, The Holy Terror has grown into one of the most intelligent scripts in Doctor Who’s long history — even with the penguin on the cover.
Colin Baker is astonishing in this story, as every positive element of his character is brought to the forefront with ease. His tendency to lecture works perfectly in this environment, while Baker allows the Doctor’s (for lack of a better term) “humanity” to shine forth even as the artificiality of the surrounding environment is revealed. He is perhaps strongest at the conclusion, where we see a powerless, defeated sixth Doctor — Baker never once loses his grip on the character, yet again forcing one to ask: what could have been?
The most controversial element of the play prior to release was the inclusion of comic strip companion Frobisher, but even for those who have never read a single Frobisher comic (myself included), Robert Jezek’s performance is natural enough to convince the listener after only a few minutes. Combined with some subtle sound design, Jezek somehow manages to sound exactly as one would expect a shapeshifting penguin to sound — but Shearman’s presentation of Frobisher focuses on more than merely his appearance. This is a very sympathetic character, one with a strong sense of morality but simultaneously one who gets in over his head far too often. Frobisher’s scenes with Pepin are funny, yes, but they’re also poignant: a “big talking bird” educates a god-emperor on the principles of free will without a hint of self-awareness.
The supporting cast, meanwhile, absolutely shines, with Stefan Atkinson turning in a performance as Pepin that is at once funny, pathetic, and noble. Roberta Taylor is wonderfully evil as Berengaria — it is difficult to believe that, as claimed in The Inside Story, she had little to no understanding of the script. Peter Guinness is appropriately menacing for the stereotypical villain of the piece. The true star of the play, though, is Sam Kelly, whose dual role as Eugene and his son stands as one of the great acting performances in series history. That he can go from an absentminded old man to a terrifying sociopathic five year old in the same scene, much less in the same sentence, is an achievement, and his performance at the conclusion is astonishing.
The Holy Terror is, additionally, flawless on the production front. Gareth Jenkins’ sound design is excellent, an achievement which takes on greater meaning when one considers the nature of Shearman’s script: possibly for the first time in BF Doctor Who history, this is a script completely bereft of awkward visual exposition, and thus it requires talented sound design to realize its images in the ear. Russell Stone’s score is yet another masterpiece, possibly the best of his work on the range. Nicholas Pegg’s direction is equally strong, not only by assembling a stellar cast but drawing out superior performances from all involved — even Shearman himself in a bit part as a sculptor.
That The Holy Terror has sold so poorly is a tragedy; that people will write off a story because of unfamiliar characters is depressing. This is a story that deserves to be heard by every fan. As a production it is flawless, as a BF audio it is one of, if not the best, and as a Doctor Who story it deserves to stand alongside the great classics of every medium.
Stunningly good.
10/10
“It doesn’t matter to whom the cruelty is inflicted. The cruelty itself is wrong!”
Castrovalva is a heavy inspiration on this story, which is fitting since Castrovalva was something of a landmark story. For some, Castrovalva was a bad omen of things to come, since it was the point where Doctor Who was moved in the schedules from its traditional place in the Saturday night slot, to weekday evenings instead. This in itself seemed like a sign that maybe the BBC didn’t really care about the show anymore and no longer saw it as special. We all know that from then on, BBC apathy and neglect would play a big part in the show’s decline with the show being increasingly underfunded, the Head of Serials no longer micro-managing the show like they used to, and the inexperienced John Nathan Turner being kept on in the job too long because no-one could be found to replace him, when really there should have been a production team changeover right after The Five Doctors.
But then again some fans would argue that Castrovalva is where the show lost it soul, and maybe even where the show should have been ended. The argument is simple enough. Doctor Who was a show that in many ways made us smarter. The show encouraged us to learn, to be open-minded and to be shrewd, and to always look beyond the superficial surface and see the very heart of things. And so Doctor Who taught us to see beyond the highly stylized surface of the JNT era and to realise that there was no substance behind the glitter, and it taught us to feel severely cheated and conned. For some fans they would say they spotted it early on from the beginning, and for them it was only the presence of Tom Baker in Season 18 that made this new superficial, hollow, sensationalist, brand-based, po-faced era still feel like ‘real’ Doctor Who, and so when Castrovalva severed those last ties, Doctor Who was dead to them.
But not to writer, Robert Shearman. To him, Castrovalva was the beginning of a new era. The point where the Doctor became the kind of fallible, modest, almost reclusive and out of his depth figure that an awkward, confused teenage boy could really relate to. It was apparently the story that made Robert a fully fledged fan, and to him it was the point where the series changed, and because the BBC management and head of serials clearly no longer cared enough to supervise and micro-manage the show like they used to anymore, it became ungoverned and unpredictable, and from that point on, for better or worse, you never knew what you were going to get next, and that’s certainly the kind of unpredictability that Robert has always aimed to recreate in his work.
Robert Shearman saw a lot of inspirational material in the era we’ve written off, so perhaps art or substance really is in the eye of the beholder. Robert seemed to see not so much a vacuous show populated by ciphers, but one with an ambiguous, uncertain blank slate that the viewer was invited and challenged to fill in for themselves, which made it rather refreshing during such a bland and ruthlessly conformist decade of entertainment.
Castrovalva of course represents that dichotomy of ciphers and stereotypes suddenly developing a real consciousness, and it’s principally what this homage to Castrovalva is about too. It shares Castrovalva’s existentialist themes about free will and identity, in which the Doctor concludes that even these figments of someone’s imagination constitute life-forms capable of independent thought and deserving of the same respect and preservation as any other humans, and it even manages to hint at the Tardis having sentience, just to complete the homage. It’s a common theme in Robert Shearman’s stories of how the imagined can become real by willpower alone, and that given an extended life in isolation and captivity, an ‘irredemable’ psychopath with no conscience might eventually develop a soul.
We’re introduced to this environment and its characters by a wonderful process of osmosis in a world where news travels. Firstly we’re introduced to Eugene, which is appropriate because this story will start with him and it will end with him. It’s also appropriate we begin with him because he’s the town scribe so he will be our eyes in this world, relaying the visual details with poetic accuracy. We get a very quick and comical sense of how this fanatically evangelical society works, and how Eugene has been here so long that nothing surprises him anymore and he’s learned nonchalant passivity and to not have strong feelings or opinions about anything either way and to just go along with the tide. It’s a wonderfully tense and yet amusing set-up where we learn that each time a living God dies, he is replaced by his son and the previous believers are charged with blasphemy and threatened with execution, but all they have to do is to recount and change their faith to the new incumbent and fill in a few forms. It not only highlights the absurd lunacy of religious dogma, but it establishes from the get go that this society has everything ritualised, ordered and performed as an act, even it’s drama and threats of death. In some ways it’s not far off our own culture that’s driven by high drama and trivial showmanship in that regard. But it immediately sets us up for a scenario where the mere arrival of the Doctor and Frobisher as random elements will completely overturn this society.
We are then introduced to Lavilla, servant and future daughter in law to the now widowed Lady Berengaria. Very quickly and economically we get a full blooded characterisation of them both, from the vacuous Lavilla’s half-hearted scrubbing of Berengaria’s toenails to the way Berengaria delights in making Lavilla sore from work, demanding to be able to see her own reflection in her toenails, despite being too fat and bloated to be able to, immediately conveying Berengaria’s sadism, vanity, greed, stubbornness, demanding nature and indulgence.
We are then given a scene in the Tardis, with Frobisher the talking penguin fishing for a hologramatic gumblejack in the Tardis swimming pool before the Doctor admonishes him for his cruelty. The curious thing is, the transition from the castle to the Tardis doesn’t feel like such a leap. They both somehow feel like part of the same surreal space. It might be down to the frequent references to King Peppin’s untimely death in the bathtub, but it establishes in some unspoken way that the Castle and the Tardis environments have similar otherworldly properties, and are both characterised by the larger than life. From here we get a sense of the Tardis being a sentient being, and more importantly of it being the conscience of the travellers, as it takes objection to Frobisher’s sadistic indulgence and goes on strike, and then takes them both to an environment where Frobisher might learn his lesson – which he eventually does.
Then we meet Berengaria’s two chalk and cheese sons, the naively good natured, well meaning Peppin, apprehensively destined for Godhood and his power-hungry scheming, despicable illegitimate brother Childerick. They are both on opposite sides of the fence and equally inept at their respective roles. But when we met them the dialogue takes a turn further into the kind of verbose, far fetched articulated introspection and metaphysical and metatextual dialogue that defines the works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and even Dawson’s Creek, and it pulls off the same trick of going with the almost parodic caricaturish self-referential dialogue in a way that’s done with such conviction that no matter how absurd the articulation, the emotions, thoughts and characterisations behind it, and the past experiences that shaped this character feel utterly real and raw and seem to somehow define the human condition with pinpoint accuracy. It’s hard not to be won over by Peppin’s naivety. Like Eugene, he strives to be as agreeable a soft touch as possible to the point of aloofness, but he also has strong philanthropic hopes to always do the right and honest thing and to make this a better, more benevolent society, free from the moral tyranny of before, but as with the Governor of Varos he finds the burden of leadership and the legacy of the political infrastructure doesn’t allow him to be as noble as he’d hoped.
As with the era it homages, The Holy Terror revels in the fallible and dysfunctional, and in many ways, like The Church and the Crown and Jubilee, it gleefully harks back to the liberated carefree days of countercultural thinking when family and the institution of marriage were being seen in a more cynical and disparaging light as something to avoid and get away from, as was the ethos expressed in classic TV and cinema like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Abigail’s Party and Til Death Us Do Part. There’s something amusingly affirming about Peppin’s family and how it’s populated by the stubbornly unsentimental.
The Holy Terror goes seamlessly from comedy of manners to period drama to fringe theatre to all out horror. Robert Shearman somehow keeps the story full of twists and turns that hold the listener’s interest and keeps up a firm pace and yet still maintains a solid sense of structure, theme and soul, because in a way he’s capturing the unpredictable essence of life itself. It starts as a typical sci-fi story about our futuristic heroes being revered as a God by a primitive alien people, though with an appropriate Monty Python-esque absurdity and biting satire. But when Frobisher suddenly begins to demonstrate God-like invincibility he didn’t even know he was capable of, suddenly all bets are off, and anything can happen now and the listener has to listen on to really find out the ever-changing mystery at the heart of this world.
This is also an important development because it subverts a story that previously seemed very secular and completely outside the fantasy genre and it sets us up nicely for the supernatural twist to come. It’s the same way that if Fight Club had been a straightforward martial arts buddy film, then its metaphysical/supernatural twist in the final act wouldn’t have worked because it would be too out of the blue to belong to the same film. But in the screened version the surreal tone and the early meditation scenes in which the main character discovers his power animal actually sets up an early hallucinatory precedent for this unlikely turn of genre. But it’s also important on a character level, driving Frobisher towards an evangelical sense of divine purpose, and wrongly believing he can bear and solve all this world’s problems.
This is the perfect environment for Frobisher to be brought to life in all three dimensions, and infact he perfectly suits this story as a wise cracking urbane character that laps up the fame and the limelight but also has a naïve whimsy, humour and inate goodness but doesn’t quite get how the harsh realities of the world work, which is both touching and appropriate for what’s essentially a cartoon character. In a manner not dissimilar to the film La Femme Nikita, it’s actually about how etiquette and sophistication are irrelevant and valueless to a good moral sense, and how you don’t have to be the smartest or classiest person to understand decency, compassion and the value of life far better than some of the higher ups and church goers ever could.
From stories like this, Big Finish have lately developed the wrongheaded idea that filling a story with funny bits is worthy in and of itself- which was to miss the point entirely. The humour here is genuinely life affirming and makes the characters alive and makes their ultimate tragedy all the more poignant and hard hitting. The comedy actually works by having something to rail against and attack and point out the absurdity of. This is a very delicately crafted audio story, using the traditional events of describing rituals and having characters present symbols and tools, and making its main guest character Eugene the people’s scribe as a way of keeping the dialogue natural whilst vividly describing surrounding events without sounding expositional, patronising or breaking the spell. In every faucet of this story, it demonstrates what a wonderful, underrated medium audio drama is and how inventive and creative a writer can be when they face adverse challenges of the medium and can’t simply rely on superficial spectacle anymore.
Speaking of which, it is perhaps time to discuss Big Finish’s rehabilitation of the Sixth Doctor. As an actor Colin Baker had certainly shown the same fresh aptitude as ever in Sirens of Time and The Apocalypse Element but they both felt simply like they were picking up where Slipback had left off. Here of course is where the mellowed and softened Big Finish version of the Sixth Doctor really gets to make his stamp. Actually we saw the Sixth Doctor’s nicer side in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, but there more by accident than design, given that it was originally written for Tom Baker. But Tom Baker is notorious for his refusal to be involved with Big Finish, which was probably his big mistake because now that he finally has returned to the role in audio, he seems ten years too late. The Hornet’s Nest has been rather a non-event and nowhere near as exciting or special as it might have been ten years ago, before Doctor Who returned to our screens, back when in the public eye Tom Baker was still the definitive Doctor and to all intents and purposes the show might as well have ended with Logopolis. But now with New Who back on our screens and Big Finish having given us many brand new audio classics like Davros and Chimes of Midnight, a story like The Hornets Nest had to do something pretty remarkable to get any more than the lukewarm reception it’s gotten. Doctor Who now simply doesn’t need Tom Baker anymore.
But in the 80’s things were different, as the departure of Tom Baker left the show seeming very directionless, soulless and desperate, and the series was producing so much dreck that it was accumulating into a critical mass that was destructive even to any good will there’d been towards the show’s golden age. And really Colin’s Doctor suffered from the show’s failure to find a proper identity, so he never developed a consistent character beyond ‘angry’, ‘arrogant’, ‘tasteless’ and ‘homicidal’, and a lack of good scripts denied him the chance to make his mark properly. Even Colin’s very first bullish lines at the end of Caves of Androzani somehow manage to instantly kill the mood and cheapen the Fifth Doctor’s poignant demise, and make the Sixth Doctor impossible to like from the beginning.
The Sixth Doctor era still remains a troubling era for many fans today, particularly in regards to Twin Dilemma, and even today it’s hard to understand how the show could have been heading for such an inevitable fall that not even something of the calibre and quality of Caves of Androzani could turn things around.
To be honest I believe enough accumulation of bad, trashy television or entertainment made without humility can have a very negative and destructive effect on culture, when there’s a severe dearth of the kind of quality narrative entertainment that exhibits decent problem solving and resolution, reinforces hope and our connection to our fellow man and humanity as a whole, or reinforces our intelligence and resourceful potential. And I don’t doubt that mid-80’s Doctor Who was very destructive to fan culture.
The Sixth Doctor era was marked by fan-pleasing continuity excesses, superficial attempts at grittiness, and a cheaply sensationalist attempt to return the Doctor to his morally ambiguous purist roots, so it’s become something of a grim ritual to blame the fans for steering the show into this direction with their petulant demands, and to see the vulgar, maladjusted, petty-minded, mean-spirited, borderline misogynistic and adolescently stunted results on screen as a sad and shameful reflection of what some fans are like. And it’s this kind of fannish self-hatred that’s been continually forced down our throats ever since the show’s revival, as if we fans still represent a threat to the show’s quality, accessibility and hysteria-inducing ratings, and I think this self-hatred and shame amongst fans wasn’t helped by an era where the Doctor stopped being the endearing, good-natured, empowering role-model of self-respect and proud individuality that he once was.
Is there a kernel of truth to this snobbery? Well unfortunately some fans who are particularly arrogant, simple minded and contemptuous and who have a warped sense of entitlement realy can contaminate everything they touch. There’s plenty of Sixth Doctor fans who’d defend the Twin Dilemma. But some of them are incapable of seeing things from anyone else’s point of view and would spitefully lambast all the critics of Colin’s era as ‘disloyal fans’, ‘PC-er crybabies’ or ‘Tom Baker fanboys who couldn’t let go’ (as if we’re somehow supposed to be sad that Tom Baker smelled where the wind was blowing under JNT and left quickly enough to save his character’s dignity), such fans tend to have a pitifully limited tunnel vision, and an impenetrable persecution complex leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of antagonism and unrelenting belligerence and can be obnoxiously provocative and obtuse and have a knee-jerk complex about people thinking they’re better than them, making it clear that the shoe fits. They’re fans with a siege mentality within a siege mentality, and everything with them is a performance, hence their incapability of seeing things from anyone else’s point of view. They’re the kind of people who’ve completely given up on society and good-will, which in this day and age is sadly understandable.
The fact is that the 80’s was a time when ‘society’ was an outdated concept and everything was about demographics and harsh lines. In almost every area of 80’s culture everything was very politicised and polarised, and a mentality of ‘you’re either with us or against us’ and an absence of any middle ground seemed to rule in all situations, including the show and its fanbase. Indeed the show seemed to only be getting by on tapping into some horrendous fannish tribalism, and unfortunately the nasty underworld factionalism bred by the mid-80’s still exists today. It’s disheartening that a show all about intelligence, tolerance, imagination, empathy, perspective and good-naturedness can produce so many fans that share none of these qualities.
If these were the kind of fans with such a warped sense of entitlement that had the ear of the 80’s production team and were able to put pressure and demands on the show, then it’s no wonder the show went to pot so quickly because they’re the kind of fans that contaminate everything they touch. It’d be hard for any producer to please such a demanding and increasingly vocal fanbase, particularly in a decade defined by demographics and overwhelming market forces, but it didn’t help that John Nathan Turner was the kind of producer who would adamantly follow fan suggestion and his own unfathomable and wrongheaded instincts about what would boost the ratings or publicity, to the point where it didn’t matter how many of his staff told him it was a bad idea, nothing deterred him from seeing his decisions through.
Though this should tell you why some fans prefer 80’s Doctor Who to the current New Series, because at least back then the producer wasn’t surrounded by so many yes-men, and so at least the bad ideas and worst directions were being somewhat resisted by people on the production team like Eric Saward and Robert Holmes, who were fighting to inject some quality and substance into the show even if it was a leaking vessel, whereas nowadays everything in Russell T. Davies’ version of the show seems so approved, so complacent, so self-congratulatory and ultimately uninteresting. But in any case JNT’s instincts were depressingly in synch with what was contemporary.
In the 80’s, style, shock, and pretension over substance, as well as sensationalism and mean spiritedness were all the rage in TV and cinema. Style over substance and mean spiritedness are symbiotic since to forge drama and conflict out of nothing substantial generally means having to portray your characters as neurotically petty and belligerent as possible. Some of this was down to 80’s consumerism, since most areas of the media had learned that the best way to sell their products, films and shows was to make people more insecure, which somewhat explains the JNT production team’s decision to go for a more unreliable or unwelcoming Doctor, the fixation with controversy and tabloid headlines and threats to destroy the iconic Tardis (see Frontios and Attack of the Cybermen), the furious backlash against the Williams era’s ‘comfort viewing’, and why several 80’s stories feel like some tasteless practical joke on the viewer. Maybe, just maybe the McCoy era renaissance was where JNT stopped pandering to the fashions of a demographic, in favour of a more let loose style that weeded out the previous stiffness, uncertainty, soullessness and pretension, and replaced it with something more refreshing, more sure and which seemed in many ways more reflective of John’s own flamboyance, campness and pensive sharpness.
It’s a cliché to say the Sixth Doctor was the yuppie Doctor complete with narcissistic personality disorder and an absence of any moral scruples. But more than that, the Sixth Doctor, like the Fifth Doctor before him, was the Doctor as a reductio ad absurdum parody of himself. This was the characterisation that defined most 80’s entertainment, from the Nightmare on Elm Street films to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which particularly stands out when contrasted with the more organic, spontaneous and human Star Trek films of the time), with their cast of very simplified and hysterically exaggerated reactionary stereotypes. So basically there was a stranglehold on the Sixth Doctor’s character, so Colin’s best moments were when he was playing against type, such as his atypical moments of compassion in Revelation of the Daleks, or when Robert Holmes was writing for him and really nailed the character as a God-like purveyor of the big picture who couldn’t afford to be sentimental over a single life lost, as in the existential moments of The Two Doctors and Trial of a Time Lord. But then if you wanted a more dangerous, unpredictable and untrustworthy Doctor then one look at the jaw dropping first cliffhanger to The Deadly Assassin confirms that Robert Holmes is your man for the job. Sadly Robert Holmes seemed the only writer with the right idea and he was the one JNT didn’t want on the show (JNT just didn’t want anyone on the show he couldn’t control), and Holmes’ cold grander perspective approach for the Sixth Doctor was overwritten by dozens of scenes where the Sixth Doctor is being characterised as indescribably petty and immature. The best, most realistic thing to say on the Sixth Doctor is that beneath all the nastiness, vulgarity and schizophrenia, there was a good Doctor somewhere in Colin Baker that was waiting to come out, and here it finally happens.
There are many idealised fan notions of what the Sixth Doctor was supposed to be or should have been. Most are too sophisticated to suit the childish, amateurish, contrived and nasty TV era at hand, but then all the best examples of Big Finish hang on the writer’s faith and ability to see inspiration and the potential for polarised, primal art in an idea or character. One view is that the Sixth Doctor was naturally conceived as a bodily defence mechanism after the demise of his passive predecessor; that the Sixth Doctor was a pragmatic reaction to a nasty universe and he was ruthless and calloused as a necessary compensation for his nicer predecessor’s failures and squeamishness. The more popular view which is adopted here is that the Sixth Doctor’s pomposity and sharp tongue for tasteless remarks was all insecure bluster hiding a vulnerable compassion underneath it all, and the audios are about bringing out that vulnerability.
Robert Shearman can write very affirming, positive and optimistic stories that highlight all the shades of humanity and finer details. Of course a cynic would say that enjoying the Sixth Doctor era very much requires a glass-half-full view. The Sixth Doctor era was a botched, but possibly right minded attempt to tell a tale of fall and redemption, with the Sixth Doctor starting life as a reprehensible figure and from there growing into something better. Several stories in the era compliment this theme, like Vengeance on Varos’ redemption of the Governor of Varos and Attack of the Cybermen’s rather more clumsy and pretentious attempt to sell Lytton’s redemption out of the blue. But this was somewhat undone by the nasty, unforgiving fascism of The Two Doctors, and the bottom line was that the sensationalist show was simply yet again presenting us with utterly unsympathetic hate figures and trying to force us to like and care about them anyway.
But here the Sixth Doctor, the anti-hero and black sheep of Doctors on a mission of redemption finally has something worthy and appropriate to rail against- the evils of moral dogma. Perhaps this is what the moral ambiguity of the Sixth Doctor era was always meant to be championing. Modern TV and Cinema has long tended to chastise and patronise and to sermonise and dictate conformist morality to its audiences, telling us what’s right and wrong. This was particularly true in the reactionary and conformist 80’s. Sure the 80’s was a boom time for the excesses of smutty and violent cinema like Porkys, Scarface, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hitcher, Robocop, Rita Sue and Bob Too etc but mostly these melodramatic films tended to still treat the audience like moral children, as if demanding at gunpoint that the audience be shocked and disapproving of what they were seeing (or approving when the bad guys or sinful teenagers get their come-uppance). The same applies with the Davison era’s chaste companions and pointless high body count massacres mixed with ghastly hypocritical moralising speeches. Ideally the morally ambiguous Colin Baker era was perhaps an attempted antidote to all that.
The Holy Terror, like Robert Shearman’s later story Jubilee, is a bold statement that moral dogma is nothing but a hindrance on society and its people. Not only is it a tyranny that gives authority to the worst, most pious bullies (just look at sinister, borderline unhinged media figures like Bill O’Reilly or Jeremy Kyle – actually I take that back, they are in a way essential to our society because they are both such prominent and blatant figures of moral dogma that they are easy to spot for what they are and recognise as a problem, unlike some of the more insidious moral tyrants and accusatory figures. A shout is always easier to deal with than a whisper) but it also leaves ordinary people ultimately weak of will because they’ve never had their morality properly explored or challenged before, and because morality has become something abstract that they’ve never learned to develop for themselves and take responsibility for. And we see this when the snivelling, cowardly Clovis proves incapable of being noble or dignified even in his moments of death, even though he’s trying really hard to break form. At first it seems to be attacking religious dogma, and then seems to be attacking bureaucracy in general, and then in a manner suited to its fringe theatre ethos it actually becomes about how fictional narrative conventions have an oppressive moral dogma of their own in the way they build up heroes to unreachable standards of virtue and surety and easily demonises the misfits and outsiders and boxes them into a stereotype. So much so that when it’s finally revealed that this environment was a prison after all, a place of judgement and reinforced rehabilitation, it makes perfect sense.
It even draws something workable and strong out of The Twin Dilemma’s undercurrent phobia of precocious children, and it takes from Twin Dilemma’s (marginally better) novelisation the notion of parental fears of losing control and committing infanticide. And this really works wonderfully on such a primal level. This murderous boy with God-like powers is frightening because he’s unpredictable, uncontrollable and insatiable, just like any spontaneous tantrumous four year old is. He’s also out of place in this environment of ritualisation and moral certainty and the threat comes from how easily he tears that all down, and even the eccentricity of how he is voiced is wholly appropriate to this horror mood. Horror is always more frightening and effective at making the threat seem more volatile and believable when the writing genuinely is spontaneous and unpredictable, rather than just contrived and superficial. Infact the murderous boy is a perfect pair of eyes through which to see just how meaningless and petty these adult social conventions and traditions, obsessions with status and tyranny of etiquette really are. Children always see through how absurd the adult world really is. This is what made The Simpsons such a warm hearted show in its prime before it jumped the shark. And there’s almost something gratifying about seeing a child with the power to do so, tearing down this shallow world and reducing the self-important to nothing.
The carnage and bloodshed is beautifully described with such savage poetry. We’re presented with many character points where hope was built up and salvation was within their reach only for them to be slaughtered without dignity. Even a little example like the mute man who is ecstatically elated when the little boy heals and restores his voice, only for the boy to reveal he did it just to hear the mute man’s dying words, is hard hitting and that bit more uncomfortable because of the way the rug is laid out at our feet only to be pulled from us. The accumulation of deaths of people we have grown to know and love and hope for is so hard hitting.
So the punishment is kept fresh and anew by teasing Eugene with hope and the presence of things that matter to him before sticking in the knife and tearing it all down, so that the pain always feels raw and never leaves him numb. Indeed it makes perfect sense that this society of religious bureaucracy, blind faith, self-deception, and gratuitously cryptic obfuscation of out-dated values, all along had its foundations in one man’s wish to forget the terrible sins of his past. But it’s so fitting and emotionally satisfying when Eugene, having shied away from any displays of passion or individuality, is suddenly overwhelmed by emotion, and has to overcome his parental fears and learns to recognise and love his son after all in his defining last moments. It’s a moment that has a lovely precedent in the dying moments of reconciliation between Peppin and his mother.
As with Robert Shearman’s later Dalek TV episode, this story embraces the post-80’s idea that everything is shades of grey, and that the most monstrous people can still be redeemed. And it shows the Doctor lavishing sympathy and compassion on a child murderer as a beautiful demonstration of the Doctor’s alien morality allowing him to do something that no human could.
It felt nauseatingly wrong when the 80’s Doctors praised the nobility of supposedly ‘misunderstood’ cold blooded killers in Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen. Mainly because in both cases the Doctor was showing actual favouritism to the murderer, and unconditionally forgiving someone who’s unrepentant whilst twisting everyone else’s arms into turning the other cheek. And also because neither 80’s story possessed the sophisticated humanism or emotional dimension they needed to earn our empathy with the two-dimensional ‘misunderstood’ villains. But here we get a story with genuine heart, where the murderer is a multifaceted person who has relived a life so many times and shown the potential to change and redeem himself, has played the role of hero’s helper, victim, underdog and ultimately the man who nobly gave his life. Our sympathy and admiration is earned by his final act of courage. By the end Eugene has clearly suffered more than enough and learned his lesson long ago- actually no, he’s learned only self-loathing and the belief that he deserves to die, so this hardly represents humane justice or rehabilitation.
The Doctor demonstrates his alienness by forgiving the unforgivable in a way few humans could be capable of, and thus he represents a light of hope in a world of dogma, a world eternally without forgiveness. The veneer of pomposity is broken through and the Doctor’s inner compassion, for so long hidden, is allowed to shine beautifully. There may be no greater poignant words of regret in Doctor Who than “He didn’t have to do that!” and Colin delivers it beautifully.
The Holy Terror is about the dichotomy between the roles we play in society, and the individual soul within us, just like in Father’s Day. It’s about what happens when people can’t perform the roles they’re given in society and fall to impossible standards. From Peppin feeling unable to be a perfect God, to how Eugene’s story is about what happens when a father can’t find it within themselves to be a good, loving parent and finds themselves mentally broken by the demands of the role. So it’s the perfect place for Colin’s Doctor to discover his own soul and recognise the value of life, and the ending gets back to that Holmesian notion of the Sixth Doctor’s detached God-complex, except that just this once, a little microcosm of the universe’s cycle of death and tragedy, rise and fall of civilisations and hope met by cruel disillusionment has really gotten to him this time.
This is a story very much about the inner child and about the preciousness of innocence. It’s solid, powerful and deeply ingrained with heart and purpose and like The Fearmonger, it is light years ahead of its contemporaries. The closest thing there is to a fault is that the music is a little dated and doesn’t quite find its groove with the story, but even that somehow suits the tacky musical backdrop of many a modern American church. But that aside this is probably the most seminal and inspirational Big Finish story of them all in terms of how it presents a world view imbued with rich history that makes its landscape all feel so much more real and inhabited. Add to that a disciplined story and such warmth and thematic power and punch that would make any fan feel proud to love a show like Doctor Who, for its ability to get to the heart of what’s important, expand a world view and rail against all that is petty, insular, vindictive and shallow about our modern world. We have ourselves a writer to watch out for, and a beautiful story to treasure forever.