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Plot:
Despite the Doctor's protestations that it is impossible for Clara to meet Robin Hood as he doesn't exist, the TARDIS takes them to late 12th-century Sherwood Forest, and there he is, large as life. The Doctor is suspicious that this can't be real, but Robin has the full contingent of Merry Men: Little John, Alan a' Dale, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck. He's only missing Marian, whose whereabouts is unknown. This has made Robin a little sad, but he disguises it with lots of theatrical laughing and banter. The Doctor takes exception to this. Clara and the Doctor accompany the Merry Men to the legendary archery tournament - and obvious trap - set up by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The prize is a golden arrow. As is customary in tales such as these, Robin Hood fires an arrow into the bullseye that splits the Sheriff 's arrow to claim the prize, but then the Doctor splits Robin's arrow, and it escalates with everyone showing off. The Sheriff's knights turn out to be robots; the Merry Men make off with the golden arrow, but Robin, Clara and the Doctor are captured. The Sheriff locks up the three of them, and keeps them observed to see who is the ringleader; as Robin and the Doctor spend all their time bickering, he assumes it is Clara. Out of the cell to have dinner with him, she cleverly gets the Sheriff to explain his plan to her: the Robots crashed down from space, and promised him power and glory and all the usual. He's helping them rebuild their spaceship using plundered gold and captured peasant labour.
The Doctor and Robin have meanwhile escaped, and found the spaceship. The Doctor examines it, and discovers that it has insufficient gold plating to survive take off, and will blow up, destroying the surrounding area. He also conjures up an unlikely theory that Robin Hood is a robot too, designed by the Sheriff to give false hope to the masses. Robin resents the suggestion that he and the Sheriff are in cahoots. The Sheriff enters with Clara, and some swordplay ensues. Robin and Clara get away, but the Doctor is knocked out and wakes up in the dungeons to find he's with the other prisoners working on the spaceship. He befriends a woman, escapes his bonds, and with her help foments a rebellion, with the prisoners using polished surfaces to reflect the robot knights' blasters back at them. The Doctor catches up with the Sheriff as the countdown to take off has been instigated. Robin and Clara arrive, and more swordplay ensues. The Sheriff is killed, and Robin injured. They all rush out into Sherwood Forest, as the unstable spaceship starts to rise. The golden arrow will be the last crucial part of gold to seal up the ship and stop the explosion, but it needs to be fired at a precise point on the ship. Robin can't fire an arrow with his injury, and the Doctor reveals he was cheating during the tournament, using tech to improve his aim. So, Robin, the Doctor and Clara have to work together and between them manage to fire the arrow, hitting the target and saving the day. Saying goodbye to Robin, the Doctor has to concede he's been wrong all along, and Robin Hood is real: an ordinary man pretending to be a legend. The TARDIS leaves, and Robin is reunited with the woman from the dungeons, Her name? Marian.
Context:
All the family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) watched this with me one Sunday afternoon, all sat in the living room watching the TV as the story played from the Blu-ray (as part of the series 8 box set). Everyone was silent throughout, which is always a good sign, and afterwards all said they enjoyed it.
First time round:
Watched with the Better Half time-shifted on the Saturday evening of its first UK broadcast on BBC1 in the autumn of 2014, then again on the following Sunday morning with the children. I was enjoying the series very much at this point having been somewhat underwhelmed by most of the stories shown the previous year. I very much liked the first five or six Capaldi stories, coincidentally the same episodes whose early edited assemblies were leaked on the web a few weeks before the series started. I had resisted any temptation to view those versions, so this was my first appreciation of this story.
Reaction:
Some people don't get on well with the more light-hearted Doctor Who stories commonly known as romps. Robot of Sherwood might just be the rompiest of romps, and is authored by Mark Gatiss, who since writing for the new series from its return in 2005 had carved out the role of the Rompmaster General. We the audience are left under no illusions as to the tone and shape of the story from the off: the Doctor himself tells us it's all not to be taken seriously, undermining the very possibility of the story's concept within the first minute; and, Robin when he first appears gives a bloody great wink to camera. Subtle this ain't. It is genuinely funny, though, and earns its comic status. The swashbuckling is satisfying too, being shot and performed with efficiency and a light touch. Within the early sequences, we've had the Doctor best Robin in a swordfight armed only with a spoon, and seen both the Doctor and Robin end up bumped into the stream. This, plus a very rude joke bout Errol Flynn for good measure. It's sunny and charming, and it really works.
A lot of this is to do with casting. Tom Riley plays the ostensibly panto version of Hood with gusto, but the script allows him some quieter moments where he reveals to Clara that it's all a facade, and that actually it's the true character underneath the banter and bravado that is the one who is performing. It's deceptively nuanced. Ben Miller as the Sheriff has more latitude to perform without subtlety at all - that's the joy of playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As with Riley, he grabs the opportunity (with both black leather gloved hands) and blazes through every moment he's on screen. The regular cast match them, and are not overpowered. Jenna Coleman as Clara is really giving her best here, being clever and perceptive, and getting to shake her head witheringly at the bickering boys around her, outwit the Sheriff, and be direct and no-nonsense and Blackpool at various points. Plus, she gets a stunning outfit too, one of the most striking of her time on the show. Peter Capaldi is adept at comedy, and works up a double-act with Riley instantaneously; it feels like they are old muckers, who've been bantering with each other for years. This may sound grating to some people - as the Doctor himself says, pretend grumpy about banter: "Do people ever punch you in the face when you do that?" - but I have a high tolerance for this kind of stuff if done well, and I enjoyed it enormously.
The four star turns, all of them coming close to chewing the scenery in their own way, don't leave much of a look in for any of the other cast. It's a shame as it is a strong set of Merry Men; Trevor Cooper, for example, seems born to play Friar Tuck, and Rusty Goffe is a nice subversion of the usual Little John casting. One's left wanting more - I'd love to see these particular Merry Men have more adventures (perhaps Big Finish will get round to doing a series one day). Other positives: great music, good dialogue ("Shut it, Hoodie"), a cameo by Patrick Troughton (he's one of the images of Robin Hood the legend pulled from the spaceship's databanks - Troughton played Robin of Loxley in a 1950s BBC series). The only minor niggle is the reference to the series plot arc, that the Robot's spaceship is on its way to 'The Promised Land' (which was also the destination of the Half-Faced Man from Deep Breath two stories earlier). I don't think it was ever explained what this had to do with Missy's plot housing people's dead brains in a cyberspace reality, as revealed in the series finale - it's almost as if they were making it up as they were going along!
Enjoyable as it all is apart from that tiny flaw, it doesn't matter a great deal - the whole thing is essentially just misdirection. Gatiss uses the shape of a standard hackneyed device that Doctor Who had deployed before - explaining real world legends with sci-fi phenomena - then pulls the rug, revealing that the twist is that there's no twist. Hood is just the ordinary man from whose tale the legends grew. This allows the story to address the overall theme of that year's series, the heroism or otherwise of the Doctor as he struggles with his new identity, but in a clever and surprising way. In a - probably inadvertent - foreshadowing of that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, a bit of 'meta' positioning allows the characters to interrogate the Doctor's fictional status. The dialogue from Robin at the end gets to restate the Doctor and Doctor Who's credo in bold terms, and draw parallels with the older legend: "A man born into wealth and privilege" who finds "the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear" until... "one night he is moved to steal a TARDIS" and "fly among the stars, fighting the good fight".
Connectivity:
You can't get better than this: The Crusade and Robot of Sherwood take place at exactly the same time: 1190 AD. Ish. Richard's away fighting the crusade, and John is on the throne, with tyranny - in the form of the Sheriff - abounding. As such, there is lots of swordplay, knights and horses in both stories.
Deeper Thoughts:
As originally broadcast? The concept of the special edition or 'director's cut' of a movie emerged in Hollywood in the 1970s, and gained ground in the 1980s and 1990s in sell-through formats like VHS, Laserdisc and DVD. By the turn of the century, it was an established practice to the extent that the idea of a definitive version of a film had become a point of contention. To pick a prominent example, whether your favourite version of Star Wars was the original, the special edition from 1997 or the DVD version (which George Lucas tweaked even more) was a matter of individual taste. Whether you could have a copy of your favourite version at home and watch it regularly, though, was less up to you. The initial theatrical versions of the original trilogy were for a long while unavailable on home video formats, which made some fans unhappy. Special Editions were usually of films, though. It was neither an opportunity nor an issue for TV shows as generally they are made with lower budgets than feature films, and that doesn't leave much scope for having unused footage for reinsertion into a new edit, nor of obtaining budgets for reshoots or new effects. One would be forgiven for thinking that Doctor Who, whose budget was even more constrained than other programmes of its type, would be even less likely to have this capability. Interestingly enough, despite this, it did prove to be something of a trailblazer in this regard.
As early as 1990, only a few years into the video range, the BBC started to work on releases for VHS that went beyond just repackaging stories exactly as broadcast; The Curse of Fenric tape, released in February 1991, was a new extended version with many minutes of newly inserted material. It wasn't quite as big and bold a presentation as those involved in it wanted, but it was a start. Such a thing was possible because the latter years of Who's production in the 1980s had a contingent of stories that ran overlong and needed to be viciously trimmed for broadcast slots, and also had a producer savvy enough to have realised that keeping all this additional material would come in handy one day. A number of other stories from the period got a similar treatment during the 1990s, and even some earlier stories had additional scenes or alternate versions of episodes released on tape, such as Inferno and Carnival of Monsters (they may have been presented that way accidentally, but it's definitely in the spirit of Doctor Who to innovate inadvertently as well as on purpose!). In the mid-1990s, the first VHS release to have a version with improved visual effects applied was The Five Doctors Special Edition (see here for more details).
That Five Doctors release was made by a loose group of individuals, known as the Doctor Who Restoration team, who came to have a bigger and bigger role as time went on in improving the pictures and sound of what went onto the Doctor Who VHS tapes. They were technical experts, but they were also enthusiasts, and their extra efforts elevated (and still elevate in the case of the Blu-rays which they are also involved with) Doctor Who for home purchase high above almost all other shows on disc or streaming service. As DVD became mainstream, they were allowed even more scope for presenting alternate versions. In general, these did not prove contentious, as - unlike in George Lucas's fiefdom - the originals were always on the discs alongside the altered versions. Instead, the arguments that there were centred more on the restoration work. This is also not an area for discussion unique to Doctor Who by any means - the line between what is acceptable and what is not is a blurry one. There can be no hard and fast rules, even when trying to stick to keeping things as broadcast: picture noise and video wobbles for example may have been there on transmission, but they don't have any aesthetic or dramatic value, so most people would have no problem with them being fixed (it wouldn't be much of a restoration with them left in, after all).
When does improvement turn into tinkering? The end credits on the 1960s stories were caption slides on a roller, which was manually turned, I believe. As such, on the original unrestored episodes they wobble drunkenly. For the DVDs, they were replaced with electronic lettering made to match as closely as possible, but running smooth. Much better, but for some watching they stick out as being a bit too good compared to what was achievable when the stories were first made. There was a medium-sized controversy, 'Spannergate', around changes made to the story The Pirate Planet in the default version, where an effect of a spanner flying out of an explosion was recreated and looked a bit different to, but a lot better than, the original effect. It crossed the line for some, but a few seconds of a superimposed spanner don't have a huge amount of aesthetic or dramatic value, really. So, does it just come down to trying to match what the nostalgic viewer first experienced at home? If one is strict about that, most of the Jon Pertwee stories would be in black and white, as colour televisions weren't owned by the majority of households. There has to be some thought given to the intent of the programme makers, I think. They didn't intend to have their captions wobble or their spanner effect misfire.
Robot of Sherwood is another story where an alternate version exists, and where the intent of the programme makers is interesting to consider. Originally, it would have been made much more clear in the finished programme that the Sheriff of Nottingham has been robotised. During the final swordfight, Robin would have sliced the Sheriff's head clean off, only for it to keep talking, and for its headless robot body to walk over, pick it up and reattach it. The programme, though, was scheduled for broadcast soon after the Islamic State murders of hostages, including James Foley, by beheading. The scene was therefore felt to be insensitive, and was edited out. In this case, the version broadcast did not match the intent of the programme makers, but the change had been made at their instigation for a reason external to concerns of narrative. Had it not been for the leak of the episode's early rough cuts (as mentioned above), they may not have even felt the need to advertise the fact and nobody would have been the wiser. The Blu-ray release went with the shortened version, but then it was only released a few months later, so it was probably still too soon. Thus far, though, the full original version has never been released. Surprisingly, none of the stories from 2005 onwards, where the material and the budget probably could have been found, has ever had a special edition release. This seems odd, in stark contrast to the classic series whose stories are still getting upgrades (the latest being the enhanced CGI, including scarier rat, of The Talons of Weng-Chiang). Give it a few years, though, time enough for the Beeb to wonder about a revenue stream so far untapped, and we may yet see Rose: Special Edition, or Dalek: The Director's Cut, or even Robot of Sherwood Including Previously Censored Material...
In Summary:
It's the epitome of the Doctor Who romp, but it's also a bit of a conjuring trick, an illusion, disguising it's underlying theme about heroism. So, a romp l'oeil? Anyone? Romp l'oeil? No? Please yourselves.
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