The Doctor and Lucie battle a rockstar environ-mentalist intent on turning the Earth into a Brussels sprout.
It’s ‘Allo ‘Allo! meets that creepy theatre in Interview with a Vampire. But with goat dudes.
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The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller are separated in this oddly time-and-space-UNspecific story set, specifically, in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Doc spends most of the episode being pursued by alleged Nazi officers straight out of ‘Allo ‘Allo!, and Lucie awakes to find herself an actress on stage in an anonymous, nondescript, Parisian theatre – which is bizarre, because they’d originally aimed the TARDIS at the Moulin Rouge and are thus clearly missing out on an obvious location to cement the Parisian element of this audiobook.
And meanwhile, the blanks are filled in by bleating goat people. Oh, hang on. And it’s called Scapegoat! I get it now…
In debating the merit of this audiobook, we did ask ourselves – and answer – a number of Whovian question, though, such as:
- Is the chameleon circuit of the TARDIS actually broken, and if not, when was it fixed?
- What’ll happen with all of the alien tech left behind in Nazi-occupied France?(erm, spoilers)
- What was really so French and/or German about this story?
- And more!
Some of the stars of The Scapegoat have appeared in the Whoniverse before. Behold Samantha Bond as Mrs Wormwood in The Sarah Jane Adventures…
…Clifford Rose as Rorvik in the Tom Baker serial Warrior’s Gate…
…and Christopher Fairbanks as Fenton in the Capaldi episode Flatline!
Listen to our synopsis/review now, and don’t forget to rate us on iTunes!
I was toughly entertained. I was both repulsed and entertained by the fact that the only thing Lucie knows about Paris is from the movie Moulin Rouge. The German accents are pretty consistent, but somewhat annoying. Despite it being set in Paris, no one has a French accent. I also liked the Goat-ish accents that were fairly constant. The first episode was fairly suspenseful and kept me guessing on where they were going and the second episode was basically a reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” In case it is unclear, from this review. I liked it.
The effects and descriptive language was worlds apart from Wirrn Dawn and it is very difficult not to give this a 5 for not being Wirrn Dawn. I just have to remember not to bypass the scores of the truly great audios that we’ve already heard. I know that you’re going to read this without pause, but it’s been about ten minutes since the last sentence was written. I’m finding it hard to give a score. Is it upper 3s or lower 4s. 3.99. I’ll remember it as 3.9, but you might round it to a 4.0. I’ve convinced myself, Lucie’s corset humor brings it up. 4.0!
I wrote this review a long long long long time ago. On relisten after relisten my score went down and down and down. I think I was really just happy that this was not Wirrn Dawn. In the time since I wrote this and it was posted I have listened ahead there are far better ones to come. Revised Score: 1.6