![\"clara-and-robin\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/clara-and-robin.jpg?resize=500%2C257\")
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I\u2019m currently listening to a podcast about TV<\/a>, wherein two (slightly clueless) American chaps discuss the series they are watching at the moment, both recent and current, and offer their views. These young guys have grown up with The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and so it\u2019s fascinating to hear them discuss Doctor Who. They\u2019ve been going season-by-season, starting with Eccleston and they\u2019re pretty down on some of the early RTD stuff, although \u2013 while they can\u2019t stand Catherine Tate as Donna \u2013 they like it more and more as the David Tennant years conclude.<\/p>\n What they don\u2019t seem to get \u2013 having never watched the \u201cClassic\u201d Series \u2013 is that unlike the heavily-serialised epics of modern US television, Doctor Who has always been designed as an anthology series. So when they complain (and they do) that one episode just seems to completely disregard a previous one, or that no-one has sat down and worked out a consistent chronology of the Whoniverse (no-one who works on the show at any rate), I just want to shout \u201cthat\u2019s a plus, not a minus!\u201d<\/p>\n Designing the show as an anthology is what has given it the flexibility to continually reinvent itself, not just Doctor after Doctor, or year after year, but episode after episode. Grim horror follows whimsical fairy tale, follows ripsnorting adventure, follows conceptual sci-fi. By avoiding serialised storytelling, the show constantly opens itself up to new avenues, and by not setting the characters out on a clearly-defined journey, it never needs to end. My big problem with the Matt Smith years was the show was trying to do far more serialised storytelling than was really good for it, and then not really committing to that either.<\/p>\n So, I don\u2019t mind the fact that the supposed \u201cdarker Doctor\u201d is taking a week off this week and I don\u2019t mind the fact that this episode is explicitly designed as a \u201cromp\u201d. Both the classic and new series have provided some excellent \u201cromps\u201d including some of my favourite episodes. But this one didn\u2019t really work for me. Unfocused, smug, and seemingly determined to undermine the Doctor at every step. Let’s look at how and why.<\/p>\n Clara\u2019s desire to meet Robin Hood to begin with is utterly arbitrary, further underlining just what a perfect vacuum of a companion she is \u2013 by modern standards anyway. Having told her such a thing is impossible, the Doctor manages to land almost on top of the smarmy icon \u2013 so clearly something much more is going on here. No, it\u2019s just a coincidence.<\/p>\n As we meet the Merry Men as well as the Outlaw himself, I am ready for one of two different outcomes. Either the promise of the title will be fulfilled and the Doctor proved to be correct \u2013 of course this person isn\u2019t the real Robin Hood, that would be absurd \u2013 or we will discover that this is the real Robin Hood but that the reality is very different from the myth.<\/p>\n The story at first feints with the first of these \u2013 the sheriff\u2019s ship is leaking Robinhoodmium into the area making everything all storybooky \u2013 but then parries with the contradictory revelation that, no, this actually is the real Robin Hood. But in that case, you have to give us the truth behind the myth. Simply reproducing the myth and having Peter Capaldi scoff at it is pretty much the Dame Sally Markham<\/a> school of copy-and-paste scriptwriting.<\/p>\n And while Ben Miller\u2019s performance was perfectly judged, I don\u2019t quite understand what happened to the real sheriff or if there was a real sheriff or really what the hell is going on. I imagine we were meant to find the Doctor\u2019s bantering with Robin amusing \u2013 why else have them both chained up for static minute after static minute in the middle of the story? If you did, I\u2019m happy for you. I found Robin profoundly annoying and the Doctor petty and childish in completely the wrong way.<\/p>\n Towards the end, we get a nice shot of them using molten gold to create an intricate circuit to help the ship take off again \u2013 heading for the planet Seasonarcphrase. Obviously this requires the gold to be precisely arranged to create the right effect. Except when it doesn\u2019t and the mass of gold aboard the ship is the only important thing, thus allowing Our Heroes to save the day by firing an arrow after it. None of this is properly thought through, none of it makes any real sense, none of it feels grounded or authentic and all of it is irritating, including the Doctor\u2019s spoon-fight with Robin.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t completely awful. It looks good \u2013 as usual \u2013 Ben Miller is absolutely excellent and I did like the Doctor\u2019s remote controlled arrow gag, but on the whole and especially after the first two parts, this is limp, throw-away stuff, and labelling it a \u201cromp\u201d can\u2019t begin to redeem it. Better I suppose than Journey to the Centre of My Rectum<\/em><\/a> or The Soggy Pirate Rubbish<\/em><\/a> but that ain\u2019t saying much. Two and a half stars<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m currently listening to a podcast about TV, wherein two (slightly clueless) American chaps discuss the series they are watching at the moment, both recent and current, and offer their views. These young guys have grown up with The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and so it\u2019s fascinating to hear them discuss Doctor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-1548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-oY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1550,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions\/1550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}