The Golden Arrow

This week on Doctor Who, we get... Robin Hood with robots!

The Story

Today is Clara's turn to choose where to go, and she chooses Robin Hood, despite the Doctor's insistence that he's not real. So our intrepid heroes venture out to Sherwood Forest, where they come face to face with the Man in Tights himself, and his crew. After the Merry Men and the Time Travelers make their brief introductions, Robin goes off to an archery contest, which he wins handily before the Doctor shows up, shows him up, and then gets everyone captured, because that's the best way to find out someone's plans.

The spirit of Jesus is imparting unto the Doctor the plans of the dastardly Sheriff.

Once imprisoned, Clara, the Doctor, and Robin are tasked with finding out the Sheriff's evil plans and stopping them. By getting separated and re-united in various permutations, our heroes learn that the castle is actually a damaged ship, piloted by robots and powered by gold. The robots have disguised themselves as knights and appointed the Sheriff as their leader, so he has been gathering as much gold as he can to repair the engine in the hopes that with the ship fixed, he will be able to rule Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, and the world!

After some more running around, the Doctor joins the robots' slave labor and instigates a revolt in which the humans, armed with reflective plates, destroy all of the robots and retake the castle! All of the characters gather for an epic final duel between Robin Hood and the Sheriff, which ends with the Sheriff falling to his gold-induced death.

True story: When I was in Hawaii, a woman tried to sell me a facial lotion made of gold. The sales pitch was "have you ever rubbed gold on your face?" This is her now.

But we're not out of trouble yet! The ship's about to take off and destroy all the things! Thankfully, our heroes have a gold arrow, and if they fire it at the ship, all the things won't be destroyed! But oh no! Robin's arm is injured and the Doctor was faking his archery prowess earlier! But wait! If they all work together, they can save the day!

This is a good idea, because it exercises the exact same reflexes used by a normal archery pose.

Then everyone exchanges pleasantries for a REALLY long time, and then the Doctor and Clara leave, while leaving behind one last present.

For the whole time that the heroes were escaping from the castle, and scrambling for the arrow, and blowing up the ship, and romantically practicing archery, Marion was standing behind the TARDIS, just waiting.

The Review

Before I begin this review, I'm going to share a brief personal anecdote. Two days after Deep Breath aired, I typed out a long review of that episode. My computer overheated, preserving nothing of what I'd written, and due to a combination of demoralization and other things creeping up on me, I spent the next two weeks procrastinating on my duties as a critic. And then Robot of Sherwood aired.

This episode was beyond bad. It had character development that reduced both the Doctor and Clara, a storyline that was practically a copy of Robin Hood, Men in Tights, robots that were completely irrelevant to the story, and a resolution that made little-to-no sense. On top of all that, it didn't have any redeeming qualities - no silver lining to make up for the time I spent watching it.

Even the titular Robot wasn't pleased with it.

And worse, falling even below the dismal level of The Crimson Horror, it was boring. I wasn't expecting to pay that episode any compliments, but at least it was entertaining enough to watch twice all the way through.

We have the main conflict, which starts out with the Sheriff of Nottingham being an all-around jerk. He kidnaps young women, murders helpless old men, and refers to himself in the third person as "a brave and clever and handsome man". Why does he act this way? Maybe he's just an arse, but killing and kidnapping innocent people is a pretty surefire way to collect enemies.

The twist is that all of his evilness is caused by a really bad toothache.

Oh wait, the robots need human labor to carry the gold? Why would robots need to use human labor, when they, as robots, would almost certainly be able to to the job more efficiently themselves? Maybe the robots couldn't get too close to gold or their circuits would fry. But if that's the case, tell us!

So all of the Sheriff's carefully wrought plans have fallen to pieces. It's no wonder, given that he:

• Told his prisoner, Clara, all of his plans.
• After he discovers that Clara has lied to him, instead of having her killed, he proposes to her.
• Had no security on the Doctor and Robin when they were imprisoned.
• Once he captured the Doctor after the Time Lord's first escape, he imprisoned the Doctor with all of his slave labor, rather than killing him.
• At the end, instead of having the robots kill Robin, Clara, and the Doctor, he put his own life at risk, to his ultimate demise, by turning them off for no good reason.

"My turn-ons include sneaking into my kingdom, befriending my enemies, and lying to me to get information. Have you been reading my Tinder?"

This is not a charming tale of good triumphing over evil. It's a tale of a complete idiot making idiot plans and then deliberately foiling them himself.... like an idiot.

"Where did it all go wrong???"

I also don't understand why the Sheriff thought the robots were going to do anything for him. They just wanted to take off and leave, not conquer the Earth for the Sheriff.

Speaking of taking off, how was the ship designed so badly that it would take off automatically, even though the engines were going to explode? How did the Doctor know that?

How does adding a bit of fuel make the ship go higher, or faster? It's not like it was going to run out of fuel at the top of the atmosphere - "at capacity" means that that's the maximum amount of fuel the ship can hold, not that the ship actually gains more thrust with the extra fuel.

Figure 2 from a proposal for a robot gas station.

How did all of the Good Guys know that that one, tiny golden arrow would be exactly the difference between the ship exploding in the lower atmosphere and incinerating all life on Earth, versus the ship exploding harmlessly in the upper atmosphere?

After all but one of the considerable army of robots was picked off in exactly the same way: their own bullets bouncing off of reflective plates, why did the last robot fire several shots at people holding reflective plates?

"I'm not sure what I could have done differently"

None of this is food for thought. There's no answer to any of these questions because the writers didn't bother to ask them.

So let's move on to our heroes.

Clara, poor Clara. She's been on such an upward trajectory these last few episodes, but Robot of Sherwood reduced her to a giggling fangirl. She sees Robin Hood and spends the first half of the episode fawning over him and the rest of his mythical friends. There's the tiny part that she plays towards the middle, where she finds out the Sheriff's plans, that I think was supposed to show her strong female character side. But since that was more her batting her pretty eyes and the Sheriff being a complete fool, that ended up looking more like she got lucky that her having any actual ability.

But Clara was just sidelined and forgotten. What about the Doctor?

Deep Breath and Into the Dalek were not perfect, but he was one place where they both excelled. They developed Doctor Twelve as a pragmatic fellow who doesn't bother with petty emotions when lives are at stake. He knows what he's doing, he knows the situation, and he will always get the job done.

This was not that Doctor.

First we see him adamantly refusing to accept that the Merry Men might be real. I guess that was supposed to add some sort of drama ("Wait, is Robin Hood really a robot? Did Clara just get captured by Robot Hood?"), but since it was so obvious that Robin Hood was real, all it did was make the Doctor look like a raving imbecile.

"I am the Podiatrist, and in my diagnosis, this sandal stinks."

Once they were all locked up, we got to witness that awful spat between the Doctor and Robin. With the kids bickering, the guard just assumed that Clara is the ringleader because she was the only one not acting like a four-year-old. Then, once they knocked the guard out, instead of having just one person go for the key, both of them, again like four-year-olds, scramble for the key before knocking it down the sewer drain.

Doctor Who's primary charm is its title character. How can any Doctor Who episode succeed when it's written as "the Doctor Who acts like a whiny child"?

Overall

The one good thing I can say for Robot of Sherwood is that I only watched it once. In an effort to try to comprehend its nonsensical ending, I tried to watch it again, but I quickly got bored and found a transcript instead.

The Doctor and Clara were made to look like fools, the chief villain was a comically inept narcissist, the resolution was beyond stupid, and there was nothing to hold any interest.

Robot of Sherwood was so bad that I stopped watching for several weeks. Robot of Sherwood was so bad that I didn't bother to review Deep Breath or Into the Dalek until I'd managed to forget Robot of Sherwood. Robot of Sherwood was so bad that it got locked in a grocery store and starved. Robot of Sherwood was so bad that it made me want to push the "menopause" button on the remote.

Robot of Sherwood was so bad that even Robin Hood couldn't keep both eyes open for it.

Okay, so maybe I got carried away, but it still wasn't very good.

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