We were enjoying a cruise to Iceland, when a well dressed group onboard revealed themselves to be spies! Not only that, but they were on a mission to thwart Professor Doom. The Professor, Public Enemy Number 15, was travelling on the ship and had to be caught.
In their attempts to find Doom, a number of witnesses had apprehended. These appeared to be assassins hired to kill at least one of the spies! Our help was needed to uncover the identity of Professor Doom and to stop anyone being assassinated.
This was to be a James-Bond-Themed Murder Mystery at sea. We couldn’t wait!
Beware of the mock whodunit
Unfortunately, this was not really a murder mystery show. And not just because there was no murder. This was more of a game show, although, it failed on that level too!
We were very disappointed.
Professor Doom – The Suspects
The Theatre@Sea cast had selected 5 possible suspects prior to the show. Any one of them could be Professor Doom. Would it be “Sue from Northampton”? Or one of the other candidates? A fun task for 5 lucky passengers who were lead out wearing name badges.
It was our job in the audience to eliminate the innocent from the guilty. To do this we were given electronic voting pads. However, we soon became clear we would not be investigating the suspects………
Instead we would be voting on their answers to questions about other people.
The Game
The spies introduced us to our first witness. This was the first of Professor Doom’s assassins and was well acted by a Theatre@Sea performer. They could not identify the Professor as they had been hired via email.
After hearing their long testimony, the spies turned to the suspects to ask them a series of questions on what they’d heard. This was the game show element of the show. Each suspect tried their best to answer the questions and the audience had to judge from their performances which was most likely to be Professor Doom.
At the end of the round, all suspects got to vote on who they thought was Professor Doom. Whoever was Doom also got to eliminate one of the suspects.
Round two and three followed similar lines, with a witness/assassin giving their testimony and the suspects answering questions based on it. Again the witness/assassin had not met Professor Doom face-to-face but had answered an advert or been contacted by phone.
Success
The pool of potential suspects reduced each round until we were left with two possible suspects. They went head to head in a fierce battle before we voted for the final time.
Professor Doom was successfully unmasked!…..although their identity had been pretty obvious from the start.
Devaluing the genre
We were very disappointed this wasn’t really a murder mystery (or really a game show).
For a murder mystery there has to be something to investigate. If not a murder, then a potential murder. After all, not all Escape Rooms require you to “escape”. In this case we were investigating who had hired the assassins, ie who was Professor Doom. The assassins had never met Professor Doom, so could not identify them. All good so far.
The audience were not able to investigate the suspects. Probably to be expected, as the suspects were passengers not actors. Although we have run murder mystery events where the audience are given small scripts to read out, so its not impossible to stage (just saying).
Instead we were given electronic voting pads to vote on their answers to questions on the testimonies.
And this is where it fell apart. We were supposed to use the suspects answers to work out who knew most about the hit squad and was therefore, Professor Doom.
As the Professor hired the hit team, they must have known all about them. Asking the suspects to answer questions on the testimonies, therefore served no purpose.
- If they were Professor Doom, they could have given the correct answers to every question, as they were the person who hired them.
- If they were Professor Doom, they could have given the incorrect answers to every question on purpose to throw the audience off their trail.
- If they were NOT Professor Doom, they could give any answer to each question, it made no difference to their staying in the game.
- Seeing all the suspects struggle to answer the questions did nothing to shed light on who was the real Professor Doom. They could have answered “I am a fish” to every question, for the audience vote was meaningless.
- It didn’t matter who the audience suspected as elimination from the game depended on Professor Doom’s vote, not the audience.
In the end it came down to two players – Professor Doom and one other. The audience ended up voting for their favorite based on personality not on any logical conclusions. An unsatisfying conclusion to what should have been an investigation.
Conclusion
The acting by the Theatre@Sea cast as the Spies Like Us was good, but in the end, who cares who Professor Doom is? Just pick a random passenger and you have the answer.