• The Scapegoat. The titular character is very well-realized. The chosen representative of an alien clan, Max Paul is a star - "The Man Who Died 1000 Times" - who has been picked to suffer and die time and time again... and help pay the bills in the process. Every night he performs in a play, and at the end of each play he is killed brutally, with the audience horrified but thrilled by the brutality. None of them know the truth though, that he is actually dying, that everything that happens to him is actually happening, and their screams help sate the bloodlust of his humanoid-goat clan. They have adapted their biological imperatives to fit their sentience and "civilization", now rather than killing for the thrill of the hunt they get their "fix" from the genuine emotional horror and fear of their audience: an audience that keeps coming back because they thrill to the sense of being scared, while thinking it's perfectly "safe". It also serves as an outlet for their own fear/unease for their current lot as an occupied country - it's basically a perfect situation for everybody.... except for the scapegoat. Max Paul's resignation to his fate, his earnest efforts to help out Lucie, and his eventual realization of the redundancy of his role are all well realized.
  
  
• Lucie's "acting". Lucie finds herself teleported to the Theatre des Baroque where her "captors" just seem to naturally assume she's going to take part in the play. They don't ask her, or explain things to her, they just shove her out onto stage and tell her to act, and boy does she. Sheridan Smith does a great acting job portraying Lucie as a TERRIBLE actress. She awkwardly booms through her lines, questions everything, talks to the audience, breaks character constantly... it's fantastically bad.
  
  
• "Yes mother". Part and parcel of the previous two points is the notion that the Clan Baroque just seem to assume people will do what they want, when they want. This falls into the notion that their race has a firm concept of the world being divided into predators and victims. They assume that victims are always victims, that predators are always predators, and that this is just the way things always were, are and will be. They brook no disagreement, don't even acknowledge the possibility of a different way, and this is perfectly encapsulated in "Yes Mother". The Matriarch of the Clan, played by Samantha Bond, has a device implanted in her head that literally just drowns out anything that anybody says that she doesn't want to hear. It's not that she ignores what others have to say, but that she literally doesn't hear anything that doesn't fit in with her worldview or immediately agree with her. Mother Baroque represents the dead-end that their clan has reached, so completely unaccepting of any alternate view or argument that they engineer their own destruction. Mother Baroque's ending is stupid, short-sighted and inevitable.... and absolutely perfect.
  
  

• The setting. The Theatre des Baroque operates within Nazi-Occupied Paris..... and this has almost zero bearing on anything. Though lip-service is paid to Doctor Baroque having provided some service to the Nazis in the past, and the Gestapo frequently shows up... it might as well be set in 1900 which is where they were originally headed (Lucie wanted to go to the Moulin Rouge and meet Ewan McGregor!). The audience members and other citizens of Paris are just going about their business as they please like it is any other day, and even when the Nazis show up they mostly seem irritated or openly contemptuous of them. The Gestapo are there to keep the Doctor away from Lucie for half the run-time, and though attempts are made to make at least one of them seem fairly competent (Clifford Rose from Warrior's Gate) in the end the revelation that he's been made to look like a fool has no catharsis because neither he nor any of the others have done anything to make the listener pull for their comeuppance.
  
  
• Inconsistent competence. Outside of the previously mentioned Gestapo, the Clan Baroque also suffer from inconsistency. Apparently technologically advanced enough to gain access to the Time Vortex, able to constantly resurrect a dead man and heal any wound he suffers, and create hard-light holograms.... they're also idiots who don't apparently know how to build anything, and are only slightly more advanced than 1940s-era humans. Part of that may have been deliberate in that the Clan has been shown to have hit an evolutionary dead-end, requiring a kick up the rear end from the Doctor to show them a better way.... but inconsistency is inconsistency. They can't both be capable of playing on a technological level with the Time Lords AND be utterly ignorant of how any of it works AND be capable of producing advanced engineering for the Nazis.
  
  
• The resolution. The end just kind of.... happens. The Doctor shows up and tells everybody that he's found a peaceful solution, Mother doesn't (and can't) listen, the Nazis show up and there's a big slaughter.... then the Clan just goes and retires peacefully to their old home planet and become vegetarians and the Doctor laughs off the notion that the Nazis now have their hands on incredibly advanced technology by saying,"Oh yeah but probably nobody will believe the Major vv and.... that's it. It's an incredibly unsatisfying ending to a story that never really came together in the first place.
  

Dr. Gene Dango MD fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Feb 18, 2016