The Holy Terror

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Frobisher to a forboding castle during a time of religious upheaval. The living god, the king, has commited the ultimate heracy and has died. His wife is deposed as a false goddess, and his first son put on the throne much to the distaste of his bastard half brother. The ligitimate heir does not want the throne, he knows he is no god, and is prepared to die when he cannot produce a miracle to satisfy his people, but what could be more miraclulous than the sudden arrival of a large blue box and a big talking bird? Now embroiled in the ascention rituals, the Doctor and Frobisher are not only at the mercy of scheming would-be royals, but of an evil force growing deep beneath the castle itself.

HYSTERICAL. It is rare that Doctor Who is played strictly for laughs, and maybe The Holy Terror is not exclusively a comedy, but here is a script that made me laugh out loud while listening to it. The first time I ever heard it was in 2002 on board a plane coming home from California; I was tired and giddy and sniggering to myself the whole way back to Toronto - attracting nervous looks from fellow passengers who may have suspected I was going to blow up my shoes. When I listened to it again recently, same result. Without the plane. I was on a subway and people ignore each other on there.

Anyways. The resignation to their fate shown by the royal family actually borders on boredom; the queen languishes in the dungeon at the mercy of the new queen who is entitled to beat her predecessor to a bloody pulp, and the new king just wants to be loved. The bastard son proudly admits to having an evil agenda, more or less because he has nothing else to do with his time but be evil. Frobisher laps up the attention of the adoring public, assuming the mantle of a god and attempting to stop the killings of the previous royals despite the scribe's warning that tradition is to be observed, and what has happened before will certainly happen again. The Doctor suspects that this may not be exclusively about the regular purging of the royals but of the deeper menace growing beyond sight - a child kept in the dark for years with no knowledge of speech or love, yet immensely powerful and dangerous.

Side by side with The Maltese Penguin this episode starts to feel as if it were one of the comic strips from the late 80's where Frobisher and the Doctor made their monthly appearances, as if the audio series is taking a side route somewhere just to experiment with the wackiness of the dynamic between a Time Lord and his Whifferdill buddy. Big Finish have to date not brought Frobisher back to the range, but he did go on for some time in the comic strip being there with the sixth Doctor and Peri, and eventually parting ways with the seventh Doctor after foiling a plot by rogue Ice Warriors to freeze a tropical paradise planet solid. The comic strips had their own wicked way with continuity from time to time, as one can see.

But for the sake of the audios, let's assume that the Doctor and Frobisher did part ways eventually, leaving the Doctor on his own again for a time; on his own in the face of a deadly new threat...

NEXT EPISODE : I.D.