Story 245 - Robot of Sherwood

 

In which the Doctor invites Clara to visit any historical figue whom she chooses - and she elects to meet Robin Hood. The Doctor finds this laughable, as Robin Hood was just a myth and never existed, but agrees to take her to Sherwood Forest in 1190. An arrow strikes the TARDIS just as the Doctor exits it - fired by a man dressed in Lincoln Green. He announces himself as Robin Hood...

The Doctor ad Robin fight a duel on a narrow bridge over a stream, the former armed only with a dessert spoon. Robin casts the Doctor into the water, but is then pulled in himself.

Some time later, at Robin's camp, the Doctor and Clara meet the "Merry Men", including Alan-a-Dale, Little John and Friar Tuck. The Doctor still refuses to believe that they are real people, suspecting them to be androids or disguised aliens.

Robin decides to enter a contest which is due to take place at Nottingham Castle. This is an archery competition, the prize for which is an arrow cast in solid gold.

The Sheriff of Nottingham has been scouring the region for gold and for slaves, seizing them from the local villages. A nobleman named Quayle stands up to him, but the Sheriff has his knights cut the man down. He then abducts Quayle's ward - the Lady Marian.

The day of the contest dawns and Robin and his men arrive at the castle in disguise. The Doctor and Clara have accompanied them, and the former decides to challenge Robin for the golden arrow. The Time Lord cheats however, by using rocket-propelled guided arrows. The Sheriff employs his knights to capture the Doctor, Clara and Robin. They prove to be disguised robots, armed with powerful energy weapons. The rest of the Merry men escape back into the forest with the golden arrow.

Locked in the castle dungeons, the Doctor and Robin argue with each other, and Clara can see that each is jealous of the other. Their rivalry actually hampers there efforts to escape. The dungeon keeper enters and takes away the trio's leader - whom he assumes to be Clara judging from what he has overheard of their conversations. She finds herself being wined and dined by the Sheriff, who reveals his plans to dominate the whole of England.

The Doctor and Robin finally manage to escape. In one of the towers of the castle they come upon a futuristic control room. The Doctor tells Robin that he believes him to be a robot - one which is unaware of its true nature. This control room seems to fit his theory.

The Sheriff and Clara arrive in the chamber with some of the robotic Knights. Robin manages to free Clara and together they leap from a window into the moat to make their escape. Back at his camp, Robin demands to know who she and the Doctor really are.

The Doctor has been locked up in the cellars of the castle with a number of other prisoners, one of whom is Marian. The Knights are overseeing the slaves melting down the gold they have seized, which is to be poured into special moulds which the Doctor identifies as circuit boards and other technological components.

The castle is built around a spaceship which crashed here some time ago. The ship needs repairs, and key components are made from gold. It belongs to the Knights, who claim to have been on their way to a promised land when they crashed. The Sheriff came upon them after they arrived and allied himself with them in order to fulfil his own schemes.

The Doctor organises a revolt, using polished metal to deflect the Knights' energy weapons. Robin breaks into the castle and fights a duel with the Sheriff. Robin proves the victor, with the Sheriff perishing after falling into a vat of molten gold. The Knights are about to launch their spacecraft, but the Doctor realises that it does not have sufficient thrust to get into space. It could explode and devastate the region. He and Robin get everyone outside. The ship takes off, destroying the castle, and they see it struggle to gain height. The Doctor advises that it requires just a small amount of additional gold - and the golden arrow would be sufficient. Robin had injured his arm in the fight with the Sheriff, so he must co-operate with the Doctor to launch it at the craft. It manages to get into space - only to explode due to its unstable engines. 

back in Sherwood Forest, the Doctor realises that Robin Hood was just a man around whom a myth was built. Robin suggests that this is also true of the Doctor himself. The Doctor reunites him with Marian as a parting gift when the TARDIS dematerialises.

Robot of Sherwood was written by Mark Gatiss, and was first broadcast on Saturday 6th September 2014.

The title derived from the 1984 HTV series Robin of Sherwood - one of the few attempts by ITV to beat Doctor Who which actually succeeded.

The earliest written mentions of Robin Hood go back to 1370 and the Piers Plowman poems. the story as we know it today first came into being around the end of the 15th Century, when certain key elements were attached to him - his skill as an archer, his animosity towards the Sheriff of Nottingham and the gathering of a group of Merry men, including Little John, Will Scarlett and Much the Miller's son. Friar Tuck and Maid Marian came later. Initially Robin was very much anti-clerical, and his devotion to the Virgin Mary probably led to the creation of Maid Marian.

Over time the various elements of his story came together, and Gatiss made sure to include these in his episode - the first meeting with Little John being a due with staves on a log or narrow bridge over a river, which Gatiss uses as the meeting between the Doctor and Robin, and an archery contest which Robin enters in disguise (winning by splitting his opponent's arrow down the middle with his own). Other parts of the tale not used by Gatiss revolved around Prince John and attempts to replace King Richard on the throne with his younger brother.

The idea of Robin being the son of nobility also came later. Early poems and ballads had him a yeoman.

Just before this episode was broadcast there was a news story about a pair of American citizens who had been killed by ISIS supporters after being held hostage for a time. The method of killing was decapitation. BBC chiefs were afraid of offending the family and friends of these victims and so it was decided to heavily re-edit this episode. This wasn't simply to excise the Sheriff's decapitation, but to pretty much eliminate the fact that he was himself as robotic as his Knights. The reveal that he was a robot would have come when his head was lopped off. The only hints of this which remain are a reference from the Sheriff about being "half-man, half-engine", which was hard to hear, and when we see the Sheriff's hand emerge from the vat of gold.

Leading the guest cast as Robin Hood is Tom Riley. He was starring in his own series at the time - Da Vinci's Demons - a co-production with BBC Worldwide and filmed mainly at the same locations as Doctor Who in Wales.

The Sheriff is portrayed by Ben Miller, who had just come to the end of a run on the Caribbean-set murder mystery series Death in Paradise. he had also been a regular in another ITV attempt to beat Doctor Who - the dinosaurs-in-modern-England series Primeval. He first came to fame as part of the Armstrong & Miller comedy duo, with Alexander Armstrong (Mr Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures and Reg Arwell in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe).

Quayle is Roger Ashton-Griffiths, who had featured in the Random Shoes episode of Torchwood. His ward Marian is Sabrina Bartlett. 

Of the Merry Men, one had appeared in the series before. Trevor Cooper (Tuck) played Takis in Revelation of the Daleks back in 1985. Ian Hallard (Alan-A-Dale) is Mark Gatiss' husband. He played director Richard Martin in Gatiss'  An Adventure in Space and Time.

Little John is Rusty Goffe, and Will Scarlett is Joseph Kennedy. David Benson, who plays the herald at the archery contest, is well known for his Kenneth Williams impersonations, leading him to play the Carry On... star several times.

Overall, an enjoyable enough romp. Hardly original, but then it was always intended to be a pastiche of the Robin Hood legend. The two main guest stars do well with what they have to work with - which is all a little caricatured. The scenes with the Doctor and Robin in the dungeon do go on far too long.

Things you might like to know:

• Robin Hood almost appeared in the series back in Tom Baker's time. In 1977 writer Ted Lewis was asked to contribute a story to the Key to Time season. The starting point was that the Doctor would meet Robin Hood, and discover that he was not the heroic figure which the legends claimed. Rather, he was an outright villain. Lewis had a chaotic lifestyle at the time, including a drinking problem, and the story wasn't pursued.
• There are definite parallels with the Season 11 story The Time Warrior. Hal the archer is reminiscent of Robin, with his mode of dress and kill with a bow. We have robot knights in both stories and a villainous noble allying himself with aliens. The castle is destroyed at the end by a spaceship blasting off.
• Before taking Clara to medieval England he suggests a visit to the Ice Warrior hives on Mars. Gatiss will take the Doctor to these in his next but one story for the series, but with Bill Potts instead of Clara.
• As the Doctor tries to come up with explanations as to why Robin Hood might exist he contemplates them being stuck inside a Miniscope, as seen in Carnival of Monsters.
• An arrow is embedded in the TARDIS for the third time. One of Lady Peinforte's arrows hit it in Silver Nemesis, as did one of Queen Elizabeth's bodyguards in The Shakespeare Code. On those occasions the arrow remained embedded, even after flight.
• Medieval references from the Sheriff include "Who will rid me of this turbulent Doctor" - a play on Henry II's wish to be rid of Thomas Beckett, his Archbishop of Canterbury. He also refers to England as "this sceptred isle" - a quote from Shakespeare's Richard II.
• At one point the Doctor accesses computer records about the future legendary version of Robin Hood. We see lots of pictures of him - including some photographs from film and TV representations of his story. These include Errol Flynn, probably the most famous cinematic Robin, but also Second Doctor actor Patrick Troughton. He was television's first Robin Hood, appearing in six half hour episodes in 1953. He also guested in an episode of the later Robin Hood series starring Richard Greene. A short section of one of his episodes features as an extra on The Power of the Daleks Special Edition Blu-ray. When Doctor Who was off the air in between series 2,3 and 4 it was replaced by a new version of Robin Hood, starring Jonas Armstrong. many of the Doctor Who crew worked on this.