Dock X

If you’re expecting a sober history lesson from a show called Vikings: The Immersive Experience, then you have not been paying attention to the current trend for large-scale, teched-up, AI-slop-kissed international touring ‘experiences’ that take an unashamedly fast-and-loose attitude towards historical fact. Even by the standards of the form, Vikings feels unusually batshit. There’s a reasonable amount of sensible historical stuff around the fringes, meaning you probably will learn something if you want to. But there’s no denying that the core of it lies in a couple of grandiose filmed works of incoherent CGI pro-Viking slopaganda (with a girlboss edge). Let’s take the sensible stuff first. For starters, some lovely interactive maps provide a clear overview of the Viking Age, which is here defined as running from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 until its end, 300-ish years later. Every visitor is issued with headphones that play a sober initial commentary; although the exhibition isn’t exactly heaving with facts, figures or period artefacts, when you get to certain symbols in it, you can press a corresponding button on the handset to conjure sensible, detailed historical exposition. commentary.  But this is not what you’d call the meat of the exhibition. Using animation, VR and a big sloppity slop immersive film that you watch from a recreation of a longboat (obviously that’s cool), the show nominally tells the story of Kraka, a young woman descended from the gods...