Robot Of Sherwood
(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 6/9/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Paul Murphy)
Rank: 247
''He doth his green way beguile,
To fair hostess merriment
Before a blue box came from the sky
That was Heaven sent
They came from they came from space
This Earthchild and the man who had just changed his face
Honour to bold Robin Hood
Sleeping in the underwood!
And honour to Maid Marian
And all the Sherwood clan!
And honour to the Doctor and Clara
For defeating the Robot Sheriff just like they did the Mara!
Though their days have hurried by
They're still out there somewhere in the sky'
Robin Ood Robin Ood riding through the glen, Robin Ood Robin Ood enslaved yet again, feared by the bad, loved by the good, looks good in a snood, Robin Ood...No wait, sorry, that's not a critique of this story, it's my submission to RTD2 for the Dr Who spin-offs he's promised us for when the show moves to Disney this year. Can you imagine it though now they actually have some budget: a Dr Who version of the merry men full of aliens riding horses on modern-day Earth and re-distributing our unequal economy. We could have Rutans in Russia, Krotons in Korea, Argolins in America, the Bane of Britain. There’s Little John played by a p’ting, a Zygon Will Scarlet ‘n’ Blobby, an Androgum Friar Tuck and a singing Allan-A-Dale from Akhaten. All living in the ‘Forest of the Night’ type woods that appear like Brigadoon! Hang on a mo while I send this off…
Huh, no reply, that’s
strange. Oh well, back to the reviewing then. This episode ‘Robot Of Sherwood’?
If you can believe it, that's even sillier You see, despite all historical
evidence to the contrary, all the myths and legends turn out to be true except
for the small detail that the Sheriff of Nottingham is aided by a crashed
spaceship full of robots. A colourful cartoon that teases you throughout that
we’re in some parallel universe/future reconstruction/alien theme park/the Land
of Fiction (‘The Mind Robber’) it turns out that (spoilers) a good 95% of the
old myth and legend is true, however unlikely, to the Doctor’s shock as much as
ours. The thing is, though, it still can’t be: I’m happy to believe that there
really was a Robin of Loxley (indeed I’m glad that Dr Who took it as fact that
he’s ‘real’) but it couldn’t have happened like this: the setting is off, the
details wrong and the acting so hammed up I thought Porky Pig was going to turn
up at one point. There’s no sense either of why Robin Hood is doing what he
does, of the poverty and misery that came from an over-taxed population in the
time of the Crusades when Richard the Lionheart was facing a losing battle and
his bro King John was keeping all the money for himself. There’s no sense of
anything wider beyond the forest and the castle to make us believe that this is
a real world. The whole tone feels off: ‘Sherwood’ is made like one of those
weird early 7th Doctor stories with monsters that have bright green
babies in 1950s holiday camps or are made out of liquorice all-sorts. It all
feels oddly disrespectful, like somebody taking the global dramas of 2023 and
having them be the work of an alien clown who wanted a giggle (although
actually thinking about it maybe that all fits…) It’s almost wilfully
anachronistic, in keeping with the period craze for historical romps that were
almost proud of the fact they didn’t do their homework and just reflected
modern life in fancy dress (this episode is just the ‘A Knight’s Tale’ film,
with the very metal coming not from the soundtrack but the sheriff robots). Of
all the Dr Who stories broadcast after his death I suspect this is the one that
would make Who creator, education promoter and history lover Sydney Newman spin
in his grave the most despite the lack of bug-eyed monsters. It could all have
been so different: this adventure is set in 1190, a fascinating period full of
real changes for England and a real sense of us versus them, poverty and
outrage, caught halfway between peace and war with our neighbours and conflicts
that could spring up at any time. We are in fact just a year before the setting
of one of the maturest most adult and rounded Dr Who stories of them all. If you
want the back story of what was really going on, with King John stealing people’s
money while Richard the Lionheart tried to fight costly war and England’s
enemies were queuing up to invade, watch/read ‘The
Crusade’ from 1965 (as sadly half of it is missing) and weep for how needed
Robnin Hood was as a legend back then and weep for what a better story this one
might have been.
Instead we’re in the
part-fact, part-fiction fantasy world that was all the rage at the time (the
great ‘Merlin’ which ran between 2008-2012 and the ghastly ‘Game Of Thrones’
which ran from 2011-2019, both of which are sort of loosely based on updateable
legends). Usually the first thing the Doctor does on landing in the past is
give us a date and maybe a short lecture on where we are and why it’s important
but notably that doesn’t happen here: we walk straight into Robin Hood’s path
as if this is a story already unfolding. It’s not unlike the later period Hartnell/early
Troughton stories where Dr Who was a form of channel hopping, putting the
timelord down in another TV series the audience would have known well (‘The Gunfighters’ is every 1960s
Western going for instance while ‘The
Highlanders’ followed a rather more, erm, serious dramatised version
‘Culloden’). For a while you wonder if we really have wandered into another TV
series and the show is being ‘meta’ (it all has the look not of real history
but the various Robin Hood series, although the one it resembles most is ‘The
Adventures Of Sir Lancelot’, the first British series shot in colour and
starring William ‘Ian Chesterton’ Russell in the title role and indeed in
tights). We don’t quite get the talking dragons or troubled ogres, but it’s very
much that sort of a romanticised past rather than an accurate one. They even shoot
it in Cosemston, a medieval village near Penarth, whose woods turned up in ‘Merlin’
so often it felt as we got to know every last inch. All of which meant this
episode made a lot more sense at the time, but now seems out of kilter with
everything else and not a little old-fashioned. Maybe even a little bit silly.
After all, Dr Who isn’t fantasy, it’s science fiction: the difference between
the two is that people read fantasy to see worlds that they know aren’t real
but feel as if they ought to have been, while science fiction is meant to be,
at least potentially, ‘real’. It didn’t work when Dr Who tried mocking the past
in 1966 either, so why should it work now?
All that said, Dr Who
isn’t just for old fuddy-duddies like me and has an elastic enough a format to
include a place for silliness. This is a story in the grand tradition of ‘The
Chase’ and ‘Androids Of Tara’, colourful unlikely stories closer to pantomime
than grand theatre and every era has at least one (the problem with the
mid-1980s is they had far more than one, that’s all). Coming after a run of
fairly dark stories about face stealers and poorly Daleks ‘Robots Of Sherwood’
makes more sense than you watch it as a standalone, the starter before the
series goes back to being about being scared out of your wits and the fact that
your great-grandparents are burning in a Missy-created Hell. The surprise is
that the silliest story of the year, maybe the whole Peter Capaldi era, is by
Mark Gatiss who nearly always writes the creepy ‘horror’ Phillip
Hinchcliffe-style Dr Who story. There are none of his usual signatures here:
nothing lurking in the vault, no gaseous monster eating everyone’s soul, no
scary thing to send you scuttling behind the sofa. It’s good to see Gatiss
stretching himself with a more generic family-friendly story so far out of his
comfort zone (if closer inside the audience’s ironically) to the point where
this story looks, in retrospect, like an audition to be the next showrunner now
an increasingly weary Steven Moffat is beginning to talk about giving up after
another year (though events will eventually push him into a third half year and
fourth full year). The trouble is that makes this feel more like a debut script
as Gatiss learns how to do comedy and silly family friendly fare and while he
shows promise it lacks the deft touches of his other scripts, full of things he
knows how to do. The second half is a particular struggle and feels cobbled
together from other Dr Who stories: we get the ‘bickering while locked in a
prison cell’ sequence from ‘Day Of The Doctor’
(with Robin portrayed as being so close to the Doctor he might as well be a
former regeneration) and an ending that copies both ‘Rose’ by having the baddy fall into a
collection of his own villainous goo and ‘The
State Of Decay’ by having the spaceship apparently escaping the planet only
to be shot down with a perfectly timed arrow.
The best parts of the
story all come at the start, when we’re being teased with red herrings of what
this story might be based on what we’re used to. It turns out that the myths
and legends of Robin Hood are real (spoilers) – for all that the Doctor assumes
that Robin Hood is a hologram, or an alien, or teases us with the eternals
playing a game with his rather odd request for ‘Enlightenment’ designed to get fans
of a certain age leaning forward, or a robot (this story is so like ‘The King’s Demons’ I half expected
Kamelion to turn up) after he discovers the crashes spaceship it turns out that
Robin is as real as he is. It’s a really clever way of subverting audience
expectations by making the twist this time be that there isn’t one and feels
like an affectionate dig at Moffat (Gatiss’ good friend) after a run of series
arcs that were all about discovering people’s ‘mysteries’ (especially now Clara
is a ‘real, if impossible, girl’). We’re so used to myths and legends being
something that came from space it’s rather refreshing to have one that’s just
mis-recorded fact (though whoever wrote it all down for the first time four
centuries later seems to have missed that part about the Sherriff of Nottingham
being in league with the robots).
For the first quarter
hour, too, it’s fun to see The Doctor looking uncomfortable: his first two
series have been about asking if he’s a good man or not, so to be in front of a
man who’s clearly all good with no iota of the pain and responsibility and
tough decisions the Doctor carries around brings out the worst in him. It ‘fits’
this series arc, as the new Doctor contrasts himself with everyone he meets
(before deciding that he’s better than Missy anyway). Unfortunately he’s not
good enough in many ways: over time all that squabbling just makes him
mean-tempered in a way we’ve never really seen before. He’s so used to being
the heroic one in the room that even Clara and her sacrifice for him in ‘Name Of The Doctor’ makes him a bit twitchy;
if other people can be heroic too then what does that make him? At first,
though the early Doctor-Robin banter is fun because it’s surprising and - along
with the very Dr Who scene of a fight on a log with only a spoon – is the
highlight of the episode as they both naturally try to take command of a
situation and get in each other’s way. Heroes and legends squared ought to make
this the greatest team-up in Who ever, so seeing them reduce each other’s
effectiveness to roughly half is another neat twist. Clara’s comparisons of the
two, too, are a nice bit of character: she can see what they can’t, that
they’re both fighting the same good fight against evil and injustice and doing
impossible things. Sadly one of the best lines in the original script got cut,
about how Clara sees the sadness behind the laughter in both men’s eyes and
that the merry men’s merriment is a cover up for the horrors they’ve seen, because
if they didn’t laugh they’d cry.
The problem is Gatiss
doesn’t know where to go with this storyline and – ironically right at the
point when the Doctor and Robin get captured and the former says ‘Now we’re
getting somewhere!’ – the story all but ends. The Doctor-Robin banter tips over
the edge from being fun to being annoying, the difference between visiting
friends with siblings who’s bickering is imaginative and eventful but being
able to go home and having to put up with it all for a long car ride. Robin’s
habit of laughing at everything and everyone even when in mortal danger is
never explained on screen (the draft script has it as a false front, the way
the 4th Doctor used to quip) and becomes as irritating for us as it
is for the Doctor. The plot becomes another boring one of robots who aren’t
actually out to do anything but have just crash-landed on Earth and just happen
to have been found by the evil man from the history books. It isn’t actually
doing much, just helping the Sherriff gather the gold needed to pay for repairs
to the ship’s circuitry. We know how stories like this end both because we know
the legends and where the Doctory parts are likely to fit (the draft script had
the arrow at the archery contest being fitted with a tractor beam though,
rather than the Doctor just being an unlikely good shot) because we’ve got
years of experience watching typical Dr Who stories under our belt. That part
offers no surprises at all, but we’ve never seen the Doctor come face to face
with another hero before – it’s that aspect of this script which is interesting
and we don’t really see it again. Gatiss has no conclusions on what would
happen if two of the most beloved fictional characters ever met, except that to
say that they probably wouldn’t act very well at all. It’s interesting too to
see this Doctor in particular up against Robin Hood, who’s very like the 4th
Doctor (carefree, anti-authoritarian and more likely to make a joke than look
scared – Robin’s just missing the scarf) making this the closest we’ll sadly
get to that sort of a multi-Doctor mash-up (indeed, one abandoned script for
season sixteen – replaced by the similar ‘Androids
Of Tara’ – would have seen the 4th Doctor and Romana encounter
Robin Hood in ‘The Shield Of Zarak’. Only it turns out he’s the black-hearted
villain who just had a good p.r. agent. Much what you’re teased into thinking
might be happening here for the opening few minutes). It all shows how
different the 12th Doctor has become to his younger self, more
likely to glower and rant than breeze through life and perhaps the most
naturally suspicious of all Doctors, give or take the 7th (all part
of how the time war has changed him). Written at a time when the new Doctor
hadn’t been cast, I do wonder if ‘Sherwood’ was originally written for Matt
Smith’s Doctor instead as that would have changed the story completely: I
suspect they’d have been best buddies but it would have been the Doctor winding
Robin up by accidentally doing everything perfectly earlier (much the way he
does to Craig in ‘The Lodger’).
I’m almost convinced,
too, that this script started out being written for Amy than Clara. It’s such a
better fit for her character playing two men in her life off each other, with
shades of what she used to do to the Doctor and Rory (sometimes unknowingly).
We’re back in ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ territory again as the companion becomes
involved through flirting that the supporting cast maybe take more seriously
than she does. As much as they’ll try to do this with Danny Pink the following
year that’s never been part of Clara’s nature until now: The Doctor is her best
friend. It’s also deeply out of character for her to request a visit to Robin
Hood: she’s not the romantic sort and has never shown the slightest interest in
history (the only stories where she’s been back in time so far have sent her to
the Victorian age in ‘The Crimson Horror’
and 1982 with ‘Cold War’, just about
within her lifetime), while she tends to be more moved by seeing people in
front of her upset than being morally outraged.
You also get the impression that, by Dr Who standards, Clara’s
background is quite posh so a do-gooder redistributing wealth in a communist
type way doesn’t seem a natural hero to her the way it would be for, say, the
deeply romantic Vicki, the flirty moralistic Jo or the outraged system fighter
Ace. Amy seems unlikely to have had much time for Robin Hood either, but her
younger fairytale loving self could have been caught up in it all. Either way,
Clara just doesn’t seem quite ‘right’ all story and the only thing in keeping
with past moments is the moment she turns up with Robin to save the day,
‘Doctor’ style’ at the end. She’s also more the Doctor’s protector than anything
in these early episode after seeing his regeneration, honouring the request the
11th Doctor gave him to look after the ‘new boy’. While she’s never
stopped teasing him, she’s equally never goaded him like this before or pushed
him into being reckless or prove himself. She’s a governess, used to how easily
people get hurt, she’s above all that normally and most of what happens with
the Danny Pink triangle later is more by accident than on purpose (yeah, this
was definitely meant for Amy).
Oddly the real-lest
person all episode is the one who was always written into being such a boo-hiss
pantomime villain he’s never really been a full character before: The sheriff
of Nottingham. Most of that comes from actor Ben Miller, who as a fully paid up
Whovian treats the whole thing with a care and seriousness that seems at odds
with everyone else taking this seriously, even if he comes off as also being
quite stiff and wooden (and would make a believable robot). He was rather
alarmed to be asked if he could ride a horse (he could) but otherwise really
wanted this part: he’s loved the series for decades and having recently moved
back to Britain after the Caribbean filming for crime series ‘Death In Paradise’
was looking to pick his career back up (he’s just had a baby and wanted him to
grow up back home. The sheriff is notably the only person in this story telling
things straight while The Doctor and Robin are hiding their inner grief and
Clara is playing a part to save the day (there’s a brief moment when it looks
as if the Sheriff is going to come on to her the way villains always used to do
to poor Barbara, but she turns him down after a line and it’s never mentioned
again). Once again you assume he must be lying because that’s how Dr Who
usually works, but he isn’t – he gives up his strange story to Clara
surprisingly readily, as if he doesn’t have the imagination to make up a lie,
while the Sheriff is very open about his love of power. It turns out he isn’t
an alien or android the way we expect either, though he is, naturally, in
league with an army of robots from outer space (there was originally a scene
where he turns out to be one too, but they cut it at the last minute as it
showed him being beheaded and on the day of broadcast Islamic State were on the
news for doing that for real. In case you were wondering Clara does the old ‘trip
the baddy over with the end of the rug he’s standing on while he’s not looking’
trick and his head comes off! This is before he gets it back again and ends up
in a vat of golden goo). As for the merry men they’re a sadly non-descript
bunch, here mostly for a number of Gatiss in-jokes (that’s his good friend Tom
Riley cast as a rather wet Robin Hood, as Gatiss thought he looked like the
legend – which he doesn’t, well not much – while making good use of the bow and
arrow training he got at scouts as a child while Gatiss was indoors watching
late night horror films; Allan-A-Dale, meanwhile, is played by Ian Hallard who
happens to be Mark’s husband in real life. Sadly I don’t know whether the
scenes of him being interrupted every time he starts to sing come from real
life! Friar Tuck meanwhile is played by Trevor Cooper, known to Dr Who fans
after playing Takis in ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’ a full forty-one years
earlier!)
The end result is a bit
weird more than anything else. I don’t hate it – indeed I quite like the
opening ten minutes of The Doctor out of his depth for once and not coping well
with having a rival - but equally I don’t quite know what the point of it all
was. Not funny enough to be a comedy, not deep enough to be a tragedy, with
robots too feeble and sketched over to be science-fiction, ‘Robot Of Sherwood’
seems to exist purely to give us the twist that there isn’t a twist, that
everything we see should be taken at more or less face value after decades of
being primed to think about this story in a ‘Dr Who’ way. But what then? The
Doctor doesn’t come away with a new understanding of what it means to be good
or how grumpy he’s become. Clara doesn’t seem at all surprised or even pleased
to be back in a time she’s always wanted to visit and makes no comment that it
turns out to be yet another robot attack (and the references to the ‘promised
land’, teased as if it’s going to be this year’s series arc, turn out to be
more a defensive gesture from Moffat who realised how close this story was to his
own ‘Deep Breath’ from two weeks
earlier than anything else. If you’re one of those people who insist on wrongly
seeing Daleks as robots then that’s three stories in a row that feature
androids of some sort. Four if you do the same for the Cybermen). Robin and his
merry men never learn the power of grief and feeling your emotions instead of
covering them up (there’s no sacrifice the way you expect there to be in
scripts like these – another twist perhaps?) This historical doesn’t work in
either the way they used to be when David Whittaker was in charge (largely
respectful and realistic, in a story that saw multiple points of view at once)
or in the jokey way that’s happened most time since Dennis Spooner took over,
including most 21st century historicals (presenting our great heroes
as flawed in some way; admittedly I’ve seen tougher bands of rogues but there’s
nothing here meant to make us laugh at Robin and co either). There’s no great
comment on anything we were going through for real in 2014 when a trip to
history might have helped us shed light on something. If this is meant as pure
escapism this isn’t a particularly good re-creation of Sherwood Forest and the
myths and legends (it’s done better in the book – see below). They don’t even
get in the obvious ‘joke’ of giving Robin a ‘made’ Marian who turns out to be a
robot (instead, in the draft script at least, Marian was a bloke and Robin
turned out to be gay; as an aside Ben Miller’s mum in real life had the unlikely
name ‘Marian’ so he’d grown up fond of the robin hood tales too). Instead this
is a one-joke idea, a ‘wouldn’t it be great if Dr Who met Robin Hood?’ gag,
only Gatiss couldn’t work out what he wanted the punchline to be and kept
changing his mind. Worst of all, perhaps, is that we get the colour of the
legends without any real sense of what they stood for. After all, this story
went out in 2014, a time of austerity and credit crunch and even ‘hugging
hoodies’, David Cameron’s patronising take on how the youth, who couldn’t
afford houses and were facing record unemployment, just needed a hug which
would solve everything (this is also the era of an ‘illegal’ war being fought
in the name of religion but which was really about control of money and
resources, another thing that would have struck a chord in 2016 had Dr Who been
brave enough to go there). This should have been the perfect time to re-tell
the Robin Hood tale, to make it all how ordinary people can fight back against
cruel systems and how communities should come together to look after each other
when our government won’t. Robin Hood could and should have been the go-to hero
for an entirely new generation. But we don’t get that story. We get one where
people just laugh merrily and pretend it’s not happening, but in tights. What a
wasted opportunity that is.
‘Robots Of Sherwood’ is
not without merit. It’s arguably no sillier than ‘Androids
Of Tara’, the swashbuckling ‘classic’ story with which it has much in
common (and is slightly higher on my rankings purely because Tom Baker is
visibly having so much fun while Peter Capaldi visibly isn’t; he’s not good at
these ‘comedy’ type stories). The opening
quarter hour, when we think we’re getting
an entirely different story we have to puzzle out, are intriguing – making it a
shame when we don’t get the ‘Land Of Fiction’ (but see below…)/Black and White
Guardian/full on robot story we’re expecting (also once again modern Who teases
us with a story that sounds so much better, when a reluctant Doctor tries to
persuade Clara against her wish by offering her a trip to see the Ice Warrior
hives. Why on Mars wouldn’t you choose to go there? Even though it’s all
another injoke – the Ice Warriors were Gatiss’ favourite monsters and Moffat’s
least, so every Gatiss submission since 2011 had been an ice warriors story
until the showrunner finally gave in and allowed him ‘Cold War’). The filming – not just the ‘Merlin’
wood but the two castles – is tremendous. You only need to compare this story
to the last time we were in either of them to see how much better this looks:
the establishing shot is of Bodlam Castle in, Sussex (where we were for ‘The
King’s Demons’ in 1983) and Caerphilly Castle (briefly in ‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’
but more substantially in ‘Vampires Of Venice’)
to see how much better this looks: they actually have extras galore who want to
be there and CGI work to ‘rebuild’ missing walls to make this castle look real
and lived in. Odd as much of the script is there are some great lines in here
that get a bit lost (The Sheriff’s quote ‘Who will rob me of this turbulent Doctor?’
is a misquote from Henry II – and is really about murdering Thomas Beckett, while
Clara’s cynical rebuff to the Doctor ‘When did you stop believing in
everything?’ to which retorts ‘When did you start believing in impossible
heroes?’ to which she smiles sweetly and looks at him and just says ‘Don’t you
know?...’ A line that says so subtly what the rest of the episode rather
bludgeons to death. People don’t remember that scene though, they remember the
Doctor referring to Errol Flynn ‘having a most enormous…’before being
interrupted, a very Gatiss joke that falls flat. Not least because of how child-orientated
the rest of the episode is).
Unfortunately the good
bits are just outweighed by the bad and they’re not enough to make ‘Robots of
Sherwood’ rise above the forgettable. Giving us red herrings is all very well
(there’s one in the title for a start) but you have to have a replacement story
that’s better for this to work: most of us would rather have had a robot Robin
Hood or one that’s ‘bad’. Indeed the original draft script was better all
round: the merry men were holograms and the ‘real’ baddy was a monster known as
‘The Hunter’ luring people into its lair before the ‘Sheriff’ controlling it is
tripped into his ship by Clara just before it takes off and explodes. It’s much
creepier and more like a traditional Gatiss script, albeit with a surprising
amount of football references (to make it even more like ‘A Knight’s Tale’) but
was presumably changed due to the old budgetary problems. Even in the final
draft they cut many of the best jokes that should have stayed, such as The
Doctor listing all the different things he’d been tied to down the years (‘Ogrons,
Z-bombs, radiators…’) and Allan-A Dale making up the ‘Robin Hood’ Dick Clark
sung TV theme song and Robin getting annoyed with it (‘Riding through the glen?
Do we look like we’re in Scotland’?!) ‘Sherwood’ is certainly no match for the ‘other’
Who storey it most resembles, ‘The Time Warrior’ with which it mirrors heavily
(the medieval setting, the crashed spaceship, the robotic knights, the
character who wants power over other kingdoms, even the scene where The Doctor
gets locals to flee because he knows the castle’s about to explode. The
difference is ‘The Time Warrior’
had better jokes and more to say about then-modern society as well as the endless
cycles of power and conquest we keep repeating across history. This one’s just
a bit of fun). As seen on screen it’s all just a bit too silly to be believable
and the end doesn’t matter enough to care about. That also means that,
unforgivably the ‘other’ Disney version of the Robin Hood story (now that this
episode has found a new home there) remains a far more accurate and funnier
portrayal of the legend, despite the fact that version features talking animals
(the Sheriff of Nottingham is, of course a wolf while it’s clearly the best Maid
Marian by the way – what a total fox!)
POSITIVES + There's a sweet fan-pleasing moment near the end of
the story when the Doctor shows Robin that his legend will live on forever,
even if most of the facts are wrong. In and of itself this scene is just a
carbon copy of the better one in 'Vincent and
the Doctor', but then Peter Capaldi uses the robots’ own databank to show
Mr Hood photographs of some of the TV and movie adaptations of his story...One
of which features a young Patrick Troughton long before he got to play the 2nd
Doctor (it’s from 1953 and as it went out live sadly it wasn’t recorded; however
against all odds a clip of around thirty seconds survives and is on youtube –
don’t ask me how or why given the state of home recording at the time and the
fact that, as a live transmission of a very English tale, I doubt any other countries
would have bought it to show somehow). One of my favourite Dr Who fan Easter
Eggs as if you don't know it doesn't spoil the story and even if you do know no
one makes a big song and dance about it, it’s just there to make you go 'oh
look!' This also means, of course, that Patrick Troughton the actor exists as
canon in the Dr Who universe. I'm rather pleased about that. I wonder if anyone
watching this series on Green-Ray in the DW universe in the future ever goes
'hang on a minute - didn't he save us from the Cybermen? And isn't he a dead
ringer for that evil bloke Salamander too?!
NEGATIVES – It’s a
rubbish robot. Admittedly the Al Qaida beheadings meant a quick re-edit that
cut a full minute from the story so we don’t see it at its best - the most exciting thing that happens is a robot
losing an arm (if you’re wondering how they did it actor Dean Goulden lost a
limb in a motorbike accident but managed to carry on with his acting even so;
as a former archery specialist he also helped coach the cast in the shooting
scenes). They look rubbish though, like the woeful angels from ‘Village Of The Damned’ but in a suit of
armour. Though I’ve never read this anymore they look to me as if they were
based on the sort of brass rubbings they used to make you do on school trips,
as if that memory was the only connection Gatiss had to this time period
firsthand. Even that sounds like a more exciting story than the one we got too:
imagine if brass had been accidentally created from some alien organism and
that rubbing them triggered them to rise up as robots? Well, I’d watch it
anyway. I’ll send that off as my other suggestion for the spin-offs, after ‘Robin
Ood’…
Previous ‘Into
The Dalek’ next ‘Listen’
No comments:
Post a Comment