Not by design, I went into The Scapegoat literally knowing nothing about it. You can do this with a download if you want. Obviously I'd seen the cover at some point, but I didn’t remember it, and I didn't look at it, nor did I check up on cast, writer, or premise, and there had been no trailer at the end of my download of Wirrn Dawn. I started totally blind. Who knows when the last time I experienced a story that way was.

When I was done, I checked to see who had written it-- Pat Mills. Pat Mills? Of Dead London fame? Or rather, lack thereof? Apparently so. A surprise to me, given my lukewarm reaction to that play. But from the very beginning, there’s a lot to love in The Scapegoat (or The Spacegoat, as you might say if you were Sheridan Smith). The Doctor and Lucie are heading for the Moulin Rouge so that Lucie can meet Ewan McGregor, but of course the TARDIS goes off course and lands during the Nazi Occupation. A recipe for hilarity, right? Apparently yes.

Too often the New Eighth Doctor Adventures aim for "light-hearted" and hit "light-weight", but The Scapegoat is a good mixture of fun and fantasy. My favorite Doctor Who moments are those that mix the mundane with the fantastic (a hospital teleported to the moon, the TARDIS stolen by an ice cream van, the Master on the Barnet By-Pass), and The Scapegoat does that very well. There’s a nice little commentary here, too, about people's tendencies to blame their problems on other people-- appropriate, given the setting. But most of all this is a cracking good adventure: nothing stupendous or amazing, but certainly the best of this season so far by a wide margin.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

This is occupied Paris, but not as we know it; I kept on thinking of the line from Douglas Adams about the enormous mutant star goat, whose smaller cousins are running a theatre near the Moulin Rouge where the Doctor and Lucie find themselves performing. I listened to it twice and am not sure I quite understood it but I enjoyed it. ( )