Agreed. I like the idea An evil boss being a master manipulator is interesting. And makes sense that the emperor has enthralled Tav with a charm person spell - the only reason I could imagine sitting side by side with someone I just stabbed - but Tav's inability to say anything critical until the last moment is frustrating. And the few lines that do suggest that Tav is feeling distrustful read more like an outline than a completed work: "I don't trust you"
Might as well be "revise this line before publishing" or "placeholder: distrust"
And so the emperor speaks and we listen. I've said this before but WotR did a better job with the queen and herald. You can respond to the queen with honor and dignity or with scorn. You can treat the herald as a trusted ally or as a burden. You can even tell him to shut up.
If they had committed to a fully evil Emperor that manipulates us into working for his plan that would have been fine. But as it stands he's really neither here nor there and for all his grandstanding about the superiority of Illithid minds he doesn't really seem to have a plan either.
Just like the companions are all player-sexual the Emperor is basically player-aligned. Some may point this out to be just another layer of clever Illithid manipulation but I don't think it's that deep, nor is the dialogue well-written enough to hint at some meta level narrative about biases turning into self-fulfilling prophecies or whatever. He's really just a void of a character that shifts and contorts based on where the player wants to take the story. Want him to be good? He's good. Want him to be evil? He's evil.
Because none of the outcomes are actually in any form related to the previous characterisation of the character and your treatment of him, any resulting story beats will fall flat and lack pay-off. Take my first playthrough for example. I avoided anything tadpole related like the plague and distrusted the Guardian/Emperor for trying to manipulate me into using them so I tried to free myself from his influence as soon as possible by stabbing him in the Prism during the Githyanki Creché quest. He then tells me that this was a test that I failed but it has absolutely no ramifications for the story. Then at the end of act 2 when you see his true form revealed, I killed him only to be greeted by a game over screen so I had to load a save game and undo my decision. Then at the very end when the game finally decides that I no longer need the Emperor I don't even get the choice to kill him and instead he makes that choice for me.
If you're going to put a character in the game that only exists to undermine the main character's agency then at least turn them into a proper villain instead of denying us any sort of satisfaction. It's especially funny since Raphael effectively functions in the exact same way and the culmination of his storyline is one of the best moments in the entire game.
