(803) Robot of Sherwood

I have just realised that this season has followed previous seasons by the first three episodes featuring a modern day story, a futuristic story and a historical story. The Doctor decides to let Clara decide where they go next and that is never a good idea really because its never really interesting. Clara wants to meet Robin Hood despite the Doctor pointing out he doesn’t exist. This is addressed during the course of the episode where he is real but ends up as fiction. This is a nice twist and Mark Gatiss manages to weave enough interesting things into the story to make it watchable. There is a good bit where a bow hits the TARDIS with the Doctor standing right next to it.

It’s quite funny how the Doctor seems to be jealous of Robin Hood. This shows a different side to Capaldi’s Doctor and a more comedic side which wasn’t going to show itself in the previous story. This being a Mark Gatiss story, there are going to be some moments that you wouldn’t get with any other writer and most notably comes when The Doctor is having a sword/spoon fight with Robin Hood.

Ben Miller is the big name star and plays the Sheriff of Nottingham. To be honest I think that Miller is wasted in this role because it doesn’t come across as a convincing villain. It’s like he is trying to channel Alan Rickman’s version of the Sheriff in Prince of Thieves.

The story takes quite a long time to get interesting. It takes about a quarter of an hour before the episode settles down and that’s a strange thing for a Mark Gatiss script because his stories normally get going from the very beginning. It doesn’t get interesting until the Sheriff’s army are revealed to be robots and when their helmets are pulled back their faces are quite good.

There was supposed to be a beheading scene where Robin beheads the Sheriff revealing that he is a robot but due to real life events where people had been beheaded by ISIS meant that the BBC decided to cut this scene which I sort of agree with because it shows good judgement from the BBC and that was one less thing for the Daily Mail to have a go at the BBC. The death of the Sheriff happens when he falls into the vat of gold and all is left is a shot of his gold coloured hand.

There is a picture of Patrick Troughton when he played Robin Hood back in 1953. It was a nice blink and you’ll miss moment.

I cant quite put my finger on the reason why this story didn’t work but it is definelty the weakest story so far. What makes the situation slightly worrying is that Listen is coming up next and that is a story that I haven’t rated too highly on previous watches. Maybe things might change but I doubt it. The end is starting to get closer and closer and part of me feels like the remaining 10 episodes/days will feel like 10 months.