In the first week we saw the Doctor flirting with a T-rex.
In the second he turned a Dalek good. Unfortunately, Peter Capaldi’s third
outing as the time-hopping hero held nothing particularly memorable, and will
likely come to be known as “that one with Ben Miller in it”.
At Clara’s request, the TARDIS lands in Nottingham, and much
to the Doctor’s confusion, Robin Hood appears. It isn’t long until the Doctor
finds himself embroiled in a plot by the Sheriff of Nottingham to kill King
John and take over England with the help of robots that fell from the sky. It sounds
like a fun plot, putting a distinctly Doctor Who twist on the classic legend of
Robin Hood, but the execution doesn’t deliver.
Instead we get a drab tale in which nobody really does
anything. The Doctor, Clara and Robin get captured, Clara gets taken to the Sheriff who
explains where the robots came from, Robin and the Doctor escape themselves and
find their way to the control room where they realize that the castle is a ship
powered by gold, that the Sheriff plans on flying to London to kill King John.
Insert two boring action scenes and a painfully predictable ending, and roll
credits! It’s the first time in my memory during an episode of Doctor Who that
I’ve been bored, and at the end I felt like the episode was remarkably short,
due to the lack of anything happening.
The episode’s true highlights came in the arguments between
Robin and the Doctor. Each competing to be the alpha male, arguing about who is
the “ringleader” and fighting for control of the situation. Some of their
banter is genuinely funny, and watching Clara explode at them as a mother would
with fighting children provides the episode with some much needed humour.
However even this relationship brings faults to the episode,
such as the lack of development between them. Clara remarks at the end that the
Doctor secretly has come to like Robin, although he wouldn’t admit it, but
there are no significant events that would cause the relationship between them
to shift. They become friends for the sake of basic plot resolution, with no
real reason for them to be friends all of a sudden.
One thing in particular that I picked up on – whether it was
done intentionally or not, I don’t know – is how the Doctor’s screwdriver was
taken away from him near the beginning, forcing him to resolve the problem
without it. I hope this marks the start of some screwdriver-free episodes. The
reason I have hope for this is because Clara herself may have acknowledged
Moffat’s Screwdriver-ex-machina attitude to solving problems in a sentence that pretty much sums up my feelings towards the entirety of Moffat's span on the show so far – “Can you explain
your plan without the words ‘Sonic’ or ‘Screwdriver’?”.
The Doctor’s trip to Sherwood is undoubtedly the least eventful
and least entertaining in a long time. With no particularly stand out moments,
and a distinct lack of humour or thrills that the series usually nails, Robots
of Sherwood will soon be forgotten amongst the heaps of far better episodes
out there. But hey, next week looks good!
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