Villordsutch reviews Doctor Who series 8 episode 3 – ‘Robot of Sherwood’.
The Doctor: Ahh. All these diseases. If you were real, you’d be dead in six months.
Allen of Dale: I am real.
The Doctor: Bye.
We may have hit our first blip here with the lastest episode Who series 8, ‘Robot of Sherwood’. True it’s not a total stinker and it is nowhere near as bad as what series 7 was delivering, but after our initial two openers this merry jaunt in the woods of Sherwood wasn’t overly great.
In charge of the writing duties for this episode is Mark Gatiss, who already has few a Who tales under his belt including, ‘The Unquiet Dead’ and ‘The Crimson Horror’ and it’s clear that he was having fun with a grumpy Doctor stuck within a gang of Merry Men. The problem is that other than the addition of the grumpy Doctor this felt very much like a Matt Smith – series 7 – farcical episode with arrows zipping all over the place, spoon fights and lasers being bounced off shiny plates at malevolent robots. With our two initial openers being more serious and darker in tone, this jump to slapstick humour is rather jarring and off-putting.
That being said I’m not made of stone and there were elements of the show that did make me smile and chuckle; the humour –on occasion- was placed well and odd little things too I did appreciate like the Doctor pulling a ice-cream coated spoon from nowhere and depositing it in his pocket once he had licked it clean, and later when the Sheriff has the contents of the Doctor’s pockets emptied – upon the table – and there are sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm; it took me back to the days of Tom Baker where he kept so much useful pieces of junk in his pockets for who knew when.
All in all though the episode just managed to entertain and nothing more. It came across as messy and unneeded in this Doctor’s run. A story that has been left over from the Doctor Who days gone by and Steven Moffat and Co. had a free run of a castle so they thought, “Why not?”.
Next week our story seems to go back to a much darker place with, “Listen”. Even the trailer lowered the temperature in our front room, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing if we have a new contender for the Weeping Angels.
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
Originally published September 8, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
